REGINA - The City of Regina is getting ready for Election Day, and preparing for the counting of ballots on Election Night on Nov. 13.
Members of the media got a sneak peek Thursday at the preparations under way at Regina’s elections office. At the election office, electronic tabulator machines were all packed and ready to be shipped out to the various polling stations where they will count the ballots on election night. There will be 34 polling stations across the city of Regina on Election Day.
City Clerk and returning officer Jim Nicol provided a demonstration of how the machines will tabulate the votes. The voter will fill out their ballot, and the ballot paper will slide into the machine which will automatically record their vote. The machine will then tabulate the voters automatically on all the ballot papers it received and provide the grand total on Election Night.
Nicol told reporters the tabulating machines should mean timely results, especially compared to the provincial election which used paper ballots that are counted by hand.
“First of all, old-style paper ballot counting requires a lot more people,” Nicol said. “It requires more space because, of course, you have more people in a particular polling station.
“So it would require many more stations across the city. We believe and we're quite confident that it's a very efficient and time-sensitive way to count the ballots. We've been using vote counting tabulators in Regina since 2000. We've never had a problem with them. There may have been an odd glitch in terms of the reporting, but it had nothing to do with the vote counting themselves.”
Barring a last-minute surge of voters that would require the polls to be open past 8 p.m., Nicol believes they should have initial results at least starting to come in by 8:30 p.m.
As for the actual paper ballots that are tabulated, they are retained for 90 days in case a recount is needed.
“We had a recount in 2012. And the results from the judicial recount matched what was tabulated on election night,” Nicol said. “So again, it further confirms that we are confident that these are completely accurate. There's been a ton of testing that's gone on over the last few weeks out here. And again, people should have no qualms that there's going to be anything untoward happening.”
There have also been plenty of opportunities for people to cast their votes prior to Nov. 13, and that includes applying for mail-in ballots and sending those in.
Already, those ballots are starting to arrive back at the election office, where workers were busy collecting and sorting the mail-in ballots that had been mailed in.
“They're being prepared for counting so that on the election day, that's when they will be tabulated through the machines,” Nicol said.
Nicol said they have issued approximately 3,000 or so mail-in ballots. As of Thursday there were almost 900 ballots that had come in and been processed. “So, there's a ways to go,” Nicol said, adding there is “also a few more days for people to get those mail-in ballots in to us.”
As well, advance polls were open Nov. 1-4, According to Elections Regina, a total of 15,190 votes have been cast in the four days of advance polls, up from 14,374 in 2020.
Nicol pointed to the increase in advance poll numbers. “I think that just tells us that people are taking advantage of the many options that we've given them,” he said.
Mail-in ballot applications are running at about half or so of the numbers that came in in 2020 during COVID-19, said Nicol, who believes COVID-19 may have been a reason for the spike that year
While the number of mail-in ballots in 2024 is down from 2020, Nicol notes it is way up from elections prior to that time.
“I'm going back to, say, 2012 and 2016. The number of mail-in ballot applications usually was between 125 and 150. So, there is considerable interest in using that option.“
As for how the results will come in, Nicol expects it will be in a series of batches. “Because, of course, we will start providing results based on the advance polls and the mail-in ballots as we start to process them right away on election night. So those will likely be the ones you would see first.”
He acknowledges there could be a delay in some particular wards reporting because of a surge of people coming to the poll right before they close at 8 p.m.
Nicol said that “as long as they're in line by 8 o'clock, they get to vote, and those results will not be posted until everyone is through. So results can start coming in any time after 8 o'clock, but in that particular area, those people would still be able to vote because they are in line.”
