In early 2007 I was hired as the deputy electoral officer for that year’s Rideau River Residence Association election.
They knew I was a Conservative, but it was a time — now long past — when being an active partisan meant you had relevant election experience, not some perceived conflict of interest with student politics.
In fact, I was hired because I was familiar with electoral rules, constitutions, and had scrutineered elections in the past. This is the type of experience you only get in politics, and the only experience relevant to the job of an electoral officer.
This is what makes me wonder what electoral experience Sagal Osman has in her past.
If there is one basic rule of elections, it’s that the numbers must add up. In the case of this year’s Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) election, unfortunately they do not.
For one, there are missing ballots. In one case, as many as 225.
A spoiled ballot is one that is ripped, torn or otherwise marked in a way that it could be individually identified. As such, spoiled ballots are not cast; rather, they are collected and kept separate from the ballot box. That means that we shouldn’t count them when counting the votes in the election, they should be counted on top of the votes cast — and are inconsequential to our purposes.
Rejected ballots are another matter entirely. These are ballots without valid votes — meaning the person marked too many candidates, marked the ballot incorrectly, or didn’t mark anyone at all.
Let me repeat that: blank ballots should be counted as “rejected.” Therefore, every ballot placed in the box should be counted.
The poll clerks gave every voter six ballots for the executive vote and each voter should have given them six ballots back.
The voters should not have been allowed to keep their ballots — them doing so would mark a serious flaw in the process.
As a result, the race for every executive position should have had the same number of votes cast. However, when we add up the two (or three) candidate’s totals, plus the rejected ballots, we get a different number of votes cast for each position.
These totals range from as many as 4,974 vice-president (student issues) to as few as 4,749 vice-president (student services) — a difference of 225 votes.
What is the official number of students that CUSA believes voted? And where did those missing votes go?
If the number of students that voted is indeed 4,974 (the highest number of votes cast in any race), then CUSA needs to account for the difference in every race – a missing 685 votes.
If Sagal Osman wasn’t aware of any of these things, then she never should have been hired for her position.
If that’s the case, CUSA needs to rethink the criteria by which it hires its electoral officers and do a review of how exactly they hired a person who clearly was not able to do the job properly.
Regardless, a review needs to be conducted on what happened in this election — specifically, where those votes disappeared to.
— Grant Dingwall,
third-year public affairs and policy management student