Voting Week Begins Tomorrow!
Voting Week
The province’s first Voting Week begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. when voting starts. This is an exciting moment, representing years of planning. I know that it is also an exciting moment for you and your campaign teams. Thank you for your cooperation to date and for working with us through the coming week and to the end of the writ period.
Revised Voters List
Voter registration in advance of in-person voting officially ended at 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, October 19. This allows my office to create the revised voters list that will be used for all in-person voting opportunities. This list is also available to you and your candidates through our FTP download site. If you have trouble accessing the files or if you cannot remember your credentials, you will need to contact Son Lu. A/Director of IT, at son.lu@elections.sk.ca.
And please remember that any voter can register in advance of voting when they attend their voting station.
Early Voting Strike Off
A key benefit of the introduction of technology to our election processes in many of our constituencies is the ability to provide political stakeholders such as yourselves access to information that is useful for your planning and campaigning.
Extracts containing information on Vote by Mail applications have been available on our Filezilla site for some time. Once early voting begins tomorrow, you will begin to receive strike off extracts every 15 minutes on our Filezilla site and this will continue through to the end of in-person voting on October 28. These extracts will only be from those constituencies that are using electronic poll books.
We also have a process to provide strike off data from early voting in non-tech constituencies, but it is a more manual process. We expect that early voting strike off information will be uploaded to the Filezilla site by mid-afternoon following each day of early voting.
If your party wishes to have access to these file extracts containing voter strike-off data, please contact Jennifer Colin, Deputy CEO and Chief Operating Officer, at jennifer.colin@election.sk.ca. These files are placed on a different sharing site than the one you use to retrieve your voters lists and your log in credentials will be different. If you have questions about your account or your log in info, please contact Jennifer.
Online Portal
Now that we are in the election period and the first day of early voting is here tomorrow, you can access our online portal. The online portal will contain strike-off data for in-person voting opportunities as well as information such as overall voter turnout. Each party can designate up to two individuals to receive access to the online portal. If you would like to have access to the online portal and have not already done so, please send the name(s) and email addresses to Jennifer Colin. She will also be able to answer any questions you have about the online portal.
Candidate Rep Instructions
Candidate representatives are an important part of the voting process. Their presence helps ensure that everyone involved in the election understands what is happening and verifies that proper procedures are followed. At the same time, of course, there are rules and restrictions around what candidate representatives can and cannot do. These rules are clearly spelling out in the E-418 Guide for Candidate Representatives which can be found here. Please ensure all of your candidates have it available to distribute to their representatives.
And as was discussed at our briefing earlier this week, I have attached a spreadsheet which shows how many voting stations will be at each voting location. The spreadsheet has two tabs, one for tech constituencies and one for non-tech.
The tech tab shows all voting week locations that have more than two voting stations. If a location is not on the list shown in this tab, it will have two voting stations.
The non tech tab shows all early voting locations that have more than one voting station. There are last day of voting locations that have more than one station, but it is because there is more than one polling division assigned so they are not on the list as the parties would already have this information.
Later this week, I will provide you an update on the estimated number of count teams that we will deploy so that you can plan your observations of those teams as well.
Dr. Michael Boda
Chief Electoral Officer
Province of Saskatchewan