As the candidates make their final push ahead of Guelph’s municipal election, the city clerk’s office is in the home stretch of roughly two years of work and preparation.
During a behind-the-scenes tour of the election command centre at city hall, city clerk Stephen O’Brien said his office started election planning midway through the current term of council.
“Way back in the early part of 2016,” he said. “A year out, we start meeting more regularly as an election team and start having more formal discussions.
“Probably for the last three to four months, we’ve been all the time, full-go on the election.”
Managing an election is not an easy task and not a cheap one, either. Over $500,000 has been budgeted, which has been allocated annually by city council for the last four years.
The work involves finding voting locations, organizing advanced voting, printing ballots, leasing tabulators to count the ballots and testing that equipment.
The clerk’s office also hired and trained 390 people out of 500 applications. Out of those, 360 will be working election night at the various voting stations around the city, while 30 will be on-call.
O’Brien said workers are paid and trained for about three weeks. The positions include managing officer, ballot officer, revision officer, tabulator officer and greeter.
“You can start to see how things snowball into a lot in terms of the hiring, the interviewing and the training, he said.
There are 30 different versions of the ballot, depending on the ward and the school board trustee.
About 96,000 ballots have been printed to cover every eligible voter in Guelph.
“Those 96,000 ballots are stored behind double-locked doors,” O’Brien said.
The city has also leased 58 tabulators for the election. The machine will count each ballot and save the data on a memory stick which will then be uploaded at city hall after the polls close.
O’Brien said his office has conducted mock elections and have come up with several contingency plans for things like a power outage or a broken tabulator.
The city also spent $80,000 on mailing voter cards to eligible voters.
O’Brien described a municipal election as being much more difficult and unique to manage, compared to elections for upper levels of government.
The city clerk’s office is responsible for the entire process and unlike Elections Ontario or Elections Canada, the office is still responsible for day-to-day city business.
“We’re still having council meetings, we’re still working with staff and our colleagues in the building on how they’re handling records and records management. We offer civil marriage ceremonies and we’re still marrying people on Thursdays and Fridays,” O’Brien explained.
Polling stations will open at 10 a.m. on Monday and close at 8 p.m. O’Brien hopes to start releasing results before 9 p.m. that night.
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