Quinte West to keep voting system the same

By Megan Pounder 

QUINTE WEST  – Municipal voting methods in Quinte West won’t be changed.

At Monday night’s meeting, council passed a bylaw to continue the use of optical scanning vote tabulators for elections. These are machines that tally up votes, saving time and staffing because ballots don’t have to be hand-counted. 

“It saves quite a bit of time on election night,” Coun. Kevin Heath explained. “At the end of election night when the polls close, our results are back very quickly.” 

Mayor Jim Harrison said it is easier and saves money to keep the tabulators and the first-past-the-post system, as opposed to switching to a ranked-ballot system in which voters indicate not just their first choice but their choices for second, third etc. The Ontario government has given municipalities the option to switch to a ranked-ballot system for the 2018 municipal elections. 

But council still needs to figure out how to increase voter turnout, Harrison said.

“The voting method we’ve been using has been working, and to change it’s going to cost us thousands of dollars. So I don’t see any reason (to change) it if we’re not going to get more people out to vote,” he said. “That’s what we need – to encourage people to be more a part of what’s happening. So that’s why we’re staying with what we’ve got.”

Only 10,148 of the city’s 30,782 eligible voters (32.97 per cent) voted in the 2014 municipal election.

Another bylaw passed at Monday’s meeting was to keep Internet voting, introduced to Quinte West during the 2014 election. 

Heath said that although Internet voting hasn’t increased the voter turnout, he thinks it’s a great way to make voting more accessible and convenient.

“I think it’s definitely the way the future is going.”