Technical glitch fixed after votes rejected in advance poll
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A small number of ballots were rejected from a vote-counting machine during the first advance polls in Brandon on Wednesday.
Twenty-one of the 708 votes cast at city hall were rejected by the electronic machine before staff fixed the problem, the city’s senior election official, Heather Ewasiuk, said Thursday.
The rejected ballots will still be counted.
A voter places their ballot in the ballot box at the polling station in the East End Community Centre in Brandon during the 2022 municipal election. (Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun files)
“We had a couple of issues with the tabulator because it wasn’t balanced, it wasn’t tied down to the ballot box properly, but we got that rectified,” Ewasiuk said.
“We had our technician look at it and he got it fixed up fairly quickly, and we didn’t have any issues for the rest of the day with that. It was just right at the beginning,” she said.
The 21 ballots went into an auxiliary box and will be fed through the machine again once the respective polls are completed.
Ewasiuk said now that staff know how to properly secure tabulators to the ballot box, there shouldn’t be any issues during the rest of the election.
The Brandon Votes election office has access to two technicians from the company the machines are leased from, she said, and also has a couple of spare machines in case one crashes.
“But the worst-case scenario is that all the ballots would go in the auxiliary box and we would count them by hand at the end of the night,” Ewasiuk said.
Voters should use the black marker provided to fill in the ballot, she said. In past elections, people have marked ballots with their own pens, and the ink can clog up the feeding part of the machine, which takes staff about five minutes to clean.
Ewasiuk previously told council that results should be in at around 10 p.m. on election night. Polls close at 8 p.m.
Additional advance polls are on Saturday between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. in the Pioneer Lounge at the Keystone Centre at 1175 18th St. and next Thursday at the same times at city hall, located at 410 Ninth St.
Election day is Oct. 28, with voters able to cast ballots between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. at several voting stations around the city.
Elections are being held for the mayor’s seat and all of Brandon’s wards except Ward 6, where incumbent Coun. Bruce Luebke was acclaimed. The urban portion of the Brandon School Division will also have an election, with 10 candidates vying for eight positions.
» alambert@brandonsun.com