Election official announces wrong winner in Roblin

A senior election official says she made a mistake by verbally announcing the winner for head of council before the results were flipped by the discovery of an error.

Twyla Ludwig, the SEO who oversaw the election in the Municipality of Roblin, gave an unofficial announcement to election watchers at the Roblin Community Centre on Wednesday night, stating that incumbent Robert Misko was poised to win the election.

Following a final counting of ballots less than an hour later, the official results showed that Graeme Conway had actually won, she said.

“It’s the importance of making sure all of the paperwork is complete, making sure everything is balanced before there’s any announcement made,” Ludwig said. “And if that means staying till midnight till it balances, then that’s what we do.”

Scrutineers raised concerns with her unofficial tally, she said, leading to a review of the numbers. It showed that she had mistakenly typed the same result into place for two different voting stations, she said.

“I went specifically to that station to open the envelope that had the tally sheets, and it was an error, and it was a data entry error on my part,” she said. “As soon as they brought it to my attention, we went straight to the box to verify the information.”

Ludwig said that the mistake, with 100 per cent certainty, would have been discovered in the mandatory vote reconciliation phase that had not yet taken place. It would have been impossible to reconcile the 166 votes that had been incorrectly entered onto her laptop with the 291 votes that had been accepted at the station, she said on Friday.

Coun. Verlin Wiebe, whose election was unaffected by the error, on Thursday questioned whether the mistake would have ever been discovered without scrutineers noticing the error and raising concerns. He posted a public statement saying the circumstances should be published, along with an amendment and a clarification of what happened.

“The official results were dumped as if nothing had occurred that night,” he said. “I felt that should have been more properly disclosed.”

Wiebe said it took some “insistence” to get the unofficial numbers reviewed; Ludwig said she will look into that claim with her staff.

Conway, who was declared the winner in Roblin by 23 votes after the error was corrected, said scrutineers demonstrated the importance of their role when they brought concerns to the election official on Wednesday.

“It’s just a good sound layer of due diligence and care that can be applied,” he said. “Human error is natural. It happens to the best of us and it can happen at any point.”

Conway received 607 votes to Misko’s 584. Voter turnout was 44 per cent.

Attempts to reach Misko were unsuccessful.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com