Elections Canada, Terrebonne, And Fixing Problems

How To Protect Democracy

Here’s multiple things that are all true:

• Elections Canada is a well run and efficient Elections organization that is on par with the best of the world, and significantly better than the US’ hodgepodge of state systems.

• It is not immune to failures, as the issues in Terrebonne and the very strange 800 ballots in Port Moody-Coquitlam that I never got a great handle on what actually happened there (in the post election period, my capacity for any news that didn’t rise to the level of Seat Changing got triaged or skimmed).

• Its failures are not as bad as other comparable countries, including Australia where they had to redo an entire statewide election in 2014 because of chain of custody issues, and we should be careful about how we talk about those failures.

• There should be a redo in Terrebonne, even though it will almost assuredly end with a Bloc win.

Those four points are crucial to understand in totality, because the discourse about Elections Canada has devolved into unhelpful Conservative influencers suggesting a conspiracy (if there was one, you think they’d be smart enough to hide it better) where error is the answer and Liberals feeling compelled to defend the indefensible. Elections Canada are a well run organization; they bungled this. They rely on thousands of temporary staff doing their best.

When I went to vote, the guys at the first table - my guess is students trying to make some extra cash - tried in good faith to tell me I’d need a second ID with my address on it in addition to my passport. I had my passport and my voter card, which is enough, and I pointed that out so they wouldn’t tell someone else the wrong info. It’s inevitable people make mistakes.

But to claim that Elections Canada is a perfectly run organization is as nonsensical as claiming it’s a badly run one. Elections Canada doesn’t release data of which polling places are being counted on election night, making booth matching and comparison that is standard in Australia impossible here. Take a seat like Pierre Poilievre’s Carleton - if we had known which parts of the seat had come in when, we’d have had a much easier time knowing whether he had a chance much earlier in the night.

The fact that poll by poll data is not released until some indeterminate point in time is nonsensical. The fact that we have less information nearly three weeks after the election about how Canadians specifically voted than we get night of the average municipal election in America or Australia is unacceptable. There’s a lot of information we need about which voters moved in both directions to inform the story of the campaign, the strategies both major parties need to implement next time, and more, that we’ll get … sometime?

Pretending that Elections Canada is perfect is not an acceptable answer, even though we all know those attempting to undermine it are doing so because they lost. The efforts to claim Poilievre lost Carleton because of an adverse redistribution are nonsensical, and the idea that we have American-style Gerrymandering is crap. But denying reality about Elections Canada’s mistakes and failings is equally head up our ass territory, and the kind of thing that does more to undermine our democracy than we realize.

What we need is to meet this moment with an honest and cross-partisan effort to reform these issues, and make our elections even better. A Parliamentary Committee, based on the Australian Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, should be struck immediately with a broad remit to investigate the issues with Elections Canada, hold EC accountable if needed, to hear expert testimony on both these specific issues and a broader suite of questions (how to handle increased early voting desire, how to ensure best access to the ballot box, etc) over time. The creation of a permanent mechanism for such expert testimony will help create a framework to improve democracy, but the creation of an accountability mechanism is far more important.

The problem so many pro-institutionalists have is sometimes institutions fuck up. It should not be an indictment of the idea of institutions to admit that human systems have human errors. Pretending that any criticism is tantamount to election denial is a pernicious way of making people think actual election denial isn’t that big of a deal. If pointing out that it is functionally impossible to know whether the Liberals won Terrebonne is treated as an attack on Canadian democracy, you’re flattening that term and rendering it irrelevant to actual attempts at damaging public confidence.

It’s not our job to stick out heads in the sand while giving serious allegations the equivalent of whiskey dick. We need to meet the moment, and that moment is not pretending that everything is fine. Terrebonne needs to be re-run, and we need to work to ensure none of these mistakes are able to happen again. Protecting institutions means criticizing failures, and Elections Canada fucked up. Let’s fix it so this is a paper cut and not a bullet to their credibility.