Last week's Manitoba Municipal Election saw several new and returning municipal government leaders elected into office. The Municipality of Roblin was one of the last municipalities across the Province to submit their official results - because there was a bit of confusion in the polling station when votes were being counted.
Neither Graeme Conway or Robert Misko, the Municipality of Roblin's reeve candidates, had appointed scrutineers at the polling station. After finding out, councillor-elect Verlin Wiebe asked a couple of his contacts to attend, because he had a feeling the race for reeve would be incredibly close. Turns out, he was right - to the point where alarm bells started going off in his head.
"A lot of the races were close, plus or minus five, we knew the incumbent Misko had won one, but the last voting station, which was number three, Conway, who was elected, took a strong lead of over 40 votes...so we started to raise concerns then, because if Conway had won by over 40 votes, Misko had apparently won the election by 25 votes, so that means we're talking a 65 vote swing on the one race we knew that Misko had won, and it hadn't been recalled as being that close," said Wiebe.
The alarm bells were ringing from Voting Station 3, because while Wiebe's observers had noted a more than 20 vote lead for Conway at that station, the first iteration of the Statement of Official Results from the Municipality had shown a 2 vote lead for Misko. Wiebe said the counting of votes itself wasn't the issue - it was writing down the totals on the Statement of Official Results, saying more training would have been beneficial.
"I had no question how the votes counted, there was no concern over that. This was the tallying of the totals that were being transposed into the official documents, and there was errors occurring there...and that's where even a second set of eyes, and even a little more training for scrutineers and people watching, looking to what they should be observing, is important," said Wiebe.
The biggest concern Wiebe had from the night is that original total for Voting Station 3. According to Wiebe, the first iteration of the Statement of Official Results showed Voting Station 3 as having 82 votes for Graeme Conway, and 84 votes for Robert Misko - which is the exact same vote total for both candidates as Voting Station 2. Though when looking at the councillor vote totals for both voting stations, Station 3 had a higher vote total across the board - so the votes for Reeve should have been higher as well.
"What is concerning is, so apparently on the final document, numbers were copied instead of entered. Which you would think in an election, you know every field is going to be different...Station 2 and Station 3, the numbers were just copied between the two columns, and you could think we'd have a little more checks and balances, that there would never be an identical set of results, right down to the number of votes, and votes between polling stations," said Wiebe.
Whether it was an honest mistake or made with intent, Wiebe said more safeguards should be in place to make sure the vote counting doesn't have any hiccups.
CKDM NewsNow has reached out to the Municipality of Roblin's Senior Election Official, and has not yet received a response.
