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Yk1 voter denied Mayor says separate school board elections likely to remainSimon Whitehouse Northern News Services Published Wednesday, Oct 24, 2012
Blacklock went with his wife to vote at the Multiplex and like his wife, intended to vote for trustees running to represent the Yk Education District No. 1 school board. When he sought his ballot at the polling booth, however, he was told he had been registered as a Catholic schools supporter and there was no mechanism at the polling station to correct the error. That was too much of a hassle, so he left the polling station without voting for school trustees. "I didn't come prepared to vote for the Catholic system and if I had known, I would have had come prepared," he said. "Whoever the returning officer was said there were a number of people who had the same problem." He said the situation rendered him a disenfranchised voter. "There is a lot of questions that need to be answered and how this came about and what they used as the basis for their decision," he said. "All I know is that I was denied the opportunity to vote." Blacklock implored both school boards in a letter to Yellowknifer to "ensure there is a proper identification of support, or a means of changing the designated support at the polling station." Asked if there were other voters facing similar problems voting on Oct. 15, returning officer Bill Gilday said he hadn't heard of any, only that people intending to vote for the Catholic board were being defaulted to the public school board if they hadn't declared. There may be individual situations where this may have happened and should be taken up with the city, he added. The city has administered school board elections up until this fall but decided not to this year to save time and money. Yk1 and Yellowknife Catholic Schools had to hire their own returning officer and administer its own polling stations. Nalini Naidoo, the city's director of communications, called Blacklock's situation "unique" in an e-mail to Yellowknifer. "Usually the comments that we get are voters listed as 'public' but would like to vote for the (Catholic) board (due to the default)," she said. "It is the responsibility of the voter to ensure that their record is correct, thus we post the list in several places around town. " Naidoo did not answer by press deadline when asked how much money the city has saved by cutting the school boards out of its elections. Mayor Gord Van Tighem said aside from the odd hiccup, the experience was generally positive. "It worked so well that there are no thoughts at this point of putting it back together," said the outgoing mayor. Van Tighem said city administration made the "operational" decision to cut school boards out last February. Van Tighem said the decision was made in light of the 2009 municipal election when pollsters were counting ballots into the early morning and the entire process became just too big to manage. Because some of the pollster volunteers are seniors, they simply can't be expected to work such late hours, he said. "After the complexity of the last election and people working up to the wee small hours of the morning, it was pretty well determined that if you keep the two elections lumped together, it was getting too big," he said. Fact file School board elections Total voters on voters registrar (prior to election): 7,713 Designated as Yk1 voters: 5,103 Designated as Catholic schools voters: 2,017 Others with no designation default to public: 593 Voters added to the register on Election Day: 406* (add half of this to each eligible list below) Total: 8,119 Actual voters for Yk1: 1,427 Actual voters for Yellowknife Catholic Schools: 781 Total voters for both school boards: 2,208 Total school board voting as a percent of total voters: 27.2 per cent Percentage of Yk1 voters who voted: 24.2 per cent Percentage of YCS voters who voted: 35.2 per cent *These voters are permitted to choose which board they will vote for. Source: Returning officer Bill Gilday
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