Almost 600 registered Calgary voters are unable to cast a ballot for a school board trustee because of where they reside, according to Elections Calgary.
FULL COVERAGE: 2017 Calgary election
“There are some slight deviations because the boundaries are not perfectly contiguous,” Calgary election and census manager Paul Denys said Friday.
“There are some areas on the city’s outskirts in the deep south and also in the far north which were added during the last round of annexations that are not actually within the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) boundary.”
Denys said the CBE was aware of the deviations and chose to not match its boundaries with the city’s electoral map.
If the board were to make a change, it would need to ask the province’s education ministry to do so.
A statement from the CBE explained when the board drew its electoral ward map in January, “the urban development on the annexed lands was not at a level that would have warranted the CBE making a request to the minister to have the annexed lands added to CBE’s boundaries.”
“We run the election based on their boundary,” Denys said.
READ MORE: Calgary election 2017 – Candidates running for mayor and council
Dara MacKay said she didn’t know any of this before stepping into the voting booth Thursday, only to find out she wasn’t eligible to cast a ballot for a trustee.
“I was shocked and then I was angry and then I was upset,” MacKay said.
“This is really important to me, so the fact that I can’t vote makes me actually really angry.”
A spokesperson with the Calgary Catholic School District said its division’s boundaries mirror the city’s map.