There’s much to unpack from the UCP government’s introduction of a bill last week that further asserts its power over local governments, although one aspect of the legislation was so curious, I’m not sure if I should find it comical or concerning.
Bill 20, the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, further imposes the Province’s will on local councils, giving it, among other powers, the ability to remove an individual councillor or overturn a bylaw if it’s deemed not to be in the public interest.
These are duly elected people who are not only making decisions in the best interests of their constituents, but who can be turfed by said voters in the next election if their performance isn’t up to snuff, so it doesn’t seem necessary for the Province to intervene on that front.
It also doesn’t make sense to introduce political parties at the municipal level when every consultation on the issue has found it’s an unwelcome idea, but, thanks to Bill 20, that’s happening too, at least in Edmonton and Calgary.
But perhaps of all the changes that, according to Minister of Municipal Affairs Ric McIver, are meant to improve accountability and trust in elections, the most curious one to me is the prohibiting of vote counting machines.
McIver told a press event that the prohibition of vote tallying machines is not related to the actual integrity of the technology, but the belief among some Albertans that they are unreliable or susceptible to tampering.
"The most important point is the morning after an election, when hopefully the smoke is all cleared and all votes have been counted and the winners have been announced, that members of the public believe that those that were called the winners, were the winners legitimately," he said.
If I’m understanding this correctly, we’re prohibiting voting machines, not because there are any problems with them, but because some people don’t trust them. Are these the same people who put their cash under the mattress because they don’t have faith in the banks? Or maybe they’re the same ones who feel the 2020 United States presidential election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump.
I get that technology isn’t infallible, but voting machines are faster, and more accurate, than hand counting ballots, which is why they’ve been used by an increasing number of jurisdictions over the decades, including right here in the Highwood constituency in last spring’s provincial election.
It’s certainly ironic that a government elected with votes counted by machines now shares a distrust in them.
This move, albeit small compared to some of the other measures introduced last week, is a step backwards, and appears to be one that was undertaken to pander to the conspiracy theorists among us.
Eliminating voting machines isn’t going to improve the integrity of elections in this province; if anything, it could compromise the results as their absence will mean a little something called human error is far more likely to be in play.
You don't need a machine if you’re hell bent on corrupting an election, so eliminating them isn’t some sort of panacea. Instead, we’re simply taking an unnecessary step back in time.
