Elections Ontario Setup

This past Thursday, I decided to work for Elections Ontario as a Deputy Returning Officer instead of the usual news positions.

It was important to get a perspective on the other side of things, being actually involved in the situation. I was purely doing this out of my own curiosity, not as an undercover story.

I enjoyed the experience … if you removed the experience with my poll clerk.

Now he was a funny guy and during our breaks, it was pretty enjoyable to pass the time with him.

However when it came to working, this guy was incapable of picking out names from a list. He somehow had no clue which positon each letter was in relation to other letters in the alphabet.

For the first few hours of working with him I was tolerant and let him do his thing.

He sometimes looked for last names, sometimes first names, in a list clearly sorted by last names. It took him almost all of 10 of the 12 hours to finally settle on looking for mostly last names.

Now as he was randomly flipping back and forth hoping to land on the right page, sometimes he would land on a page with the correct name and still flip off the page.

I thought … taking a while to find might be a test of patience, but possibly never finding the page since he didn’t know when he landed on the right page is just incompetent. Especially with a long line up in front of us.

I decided to help him find the correct names on the list and leave the voter card with him to verify, cross off names, and hilight the correct numbers on the tracking sheet.

That seemed to be working well, until one voter arrived and upon finding his name, it was already crossed off! The poll clerk was crossing off incorrect names!

We had to go back through the voter cards to verify that he had indeed crossed off the wrong name.

In another incident, he had hilighted the wrong number on the tracking sheet and turned to me and asked, “what do I do?”

We had to go through the stack of voter cards again to ensure the crossed off the right person, then I suggested marking off the mis-hilighted version as an error and hilighting the correct number. He couldn’t wrap his head around that task.

I just stopped pointing out names for him. It wasn’t worth the effort if he was going to cross out the wrong ones.

We had one voter worried that someone stole his ID to vote in his name.

We had another voter say “don’t spoil my vote” because he caught the clerk cancelling out the wrong name.

Many others at my poll kept saying things like “hey, you know o comes after n why are you going backwards?”

Or after randomly flipping pages with no results, he would start from “a” and the voter would comment “my name starts with w that is probably at least 10 pages away”.

At the end of the day, I asked him to go through the voter cards to verify that each name was correct. He couldn’t even do that.

At this point, he was supposed to help me close the poll but I had zero confidence in him. The most I allowed him to do was to open the folded ballots while I sorted and counted them myself.

I got worried when I was one ballot short. Somehow even though I had meticulously counted each and every ballot, and ensured that each voter placed their ballot in the box before issuing a new one, the numbers didn’t add up.

Then after I had to recount the ballots, he spotted a ballot on the floor on his side. Apparently he had knocked it to the floor when opening them.

Finally the numbers added up and the polls balanced.

I essentially was a first time poll official doing my DRO duties while babysitting this poll clerk … for a whole 12 hours.