Advance polls have been open for the past five days; closed yesterday. There are 232 advance polls in a province of just over a million. They’ve been set up in all but one community, a First Nations reserve where there’s a covid outbreak. Chief Electoral Officer says that special measures are being taken to ensure voting will occur there.
61,000 applications to vote by mail, instead of the 5,000 in the last election four years ago.
Masks, social distancing, and single-use pencils are being used in the polling centres.
After seeing so many instances of officials suppressing minority voting here in the US, it’s refreshing to see one where they’re going out of their way to encourage it.
While we were waiting for early returns, CBC showed clips of the current Premier and Leader of the Opposition voting. Premier voted today, OppLeader voted in the advance poll a couple of days ago.
Both were masked and so were all the poll workers.
Election is done, all votes cast, but there are about 10 seats that are not decided yet because of the high number of mail-in ballots.
There was an interesting pattern where city-dwellers were apparently more likely to use mail-in than rural-dwellers, and the competitive seats are in the cities.
However, the government has clearly been returned with a majority. Premier was re-elected in his own riding, in a rural area.
Not clear yet if the Leader of the Opposition will be returned in his own seat. He’s in a city riding and it went back and forth during the evening as polls reported. Won’t be decided until the mail-in ballots are counted.
One of the commentators on CBC last night said that of the 60,000+ mail-in ballots that had been requested and sent out, over 40,000 had already been returned. The deadline for posting was yesterday, election day, so there could still be some coming in.