No venue in which to watch election night results roll in
Legislative assembly stopped holding election night event after inaccurate results were posted in 2007
John McFadden
Northern News Services
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
People who want to gather to view results from the territorial election on Monday appear to have been left out in the cold.
The legislative assembly stopped holding an election night event in the Great Hall of the legislative assembly after the 2007 election and the chief elector officer for the NWT said she has no intention of throwing the doors of her office open for the evening.
Nicole Latour said elections staff will be busy putting results on their website and they do not have the time and space to deal with people dropping by. Her office received inquiries from people about holding an event at her office but she said she had to decline.
"The most real time results will be via the Elections NWT website," Latour said. "As an agency we just release the results through the website. It's like any other place - it'll be the radio or television or a candidate's place or some people have parties at home and watch the results roll in. You can go to the candidate of your choice's office. There are a lot of different avenues to get the results."
Latour said people have implied that the media should be present on election night at the Elections NWT office. She said it is not done that way here, nor in other jurisdictions she has visited such as B.C. and Alberta.
Latour said she is confident Elections NWT is doing everything it can to make sure people who want to know the results can access them on the website as soon as they come in.
Tim Mercer, clerk of the legislative assembly, said trying to co-ordinate with Elections NWT in order to post results at the legislative assembly is no longer an efficient way of doing things.
Mercer said technology is such that the website is the quickest, most accurate way to be updated. He pointed to an incident on election night in 2007 that made it appear a candidate had won before the advance polls were counted.
"We had reported all four polls from Hay River South but not the advance poll and that led to some confusion and premature celebrations. Because of that incident we all said let's let Elections NWT take responsibility for posting the results," Mercer said.
"The way it used to work was that the returning officers from all across the NWT would phone in the results to the chief electoral officer ... who would then fax them over here to the legislative assembly and the clerk's staff would then go out on chalkboards to update the numbers. That is no longer necessary. That's a way for errors to happen. The Elections NWT website is the most immediate, effective way to transmit the numbers."
Outgoing MLA Bob Bromley has often stood in the assembly and talked about how consensus government should be a shared experience of co-operation. He said he thinks it is a shame that an election night event is no longer held at the Great Hall.
"It was just a real opportunity to get together and commiserate or celebrate and start building on relationships by sharing that significant event with families and the community. I think it would be great to have something like that again," said Bromley.
"When we were at our campaign offices it was way behind on the TV - we knew a couple of hours before. The Great Hall event was a bit of a completion, an opportunity to share the ups and down of the campaign together."
