Having worked 38 years in the city clerk’s office at Guelph City Hall, Monday’s municipal election will be the thirteenth and final one Marilyn Hoffmann has helped to oversee in her career.
When she began in 1980, municipal elections were held every two years and the first one she saw up close happened just a few short months after she was hired.
“I was 18, just out of school. It was quite the eye-opener,” said Hoffmann.
Due to her experience working so many municipal elections in Guelph, Hoffmann’s advice is sought after in the city clerk’s office and because she has seen just about everything over the years, she is known as a problem solver, said current city clerk Stephen O’Brien.
He is the fourth city clerk Hoffmann has worked under over the years, after Blair Labelle, Lois Giles and Gordon Hall.
Hoffmann recalls every election, including the 1980 contest, where tens of thousands of ballots were counted by a handful of people in the city’s finance department.
“They took them out of the box and counted them all by hand because it was a paper ballot — it was all done by hand,” said Hoffmann.
Nowadays, ballots are fed directly into machines set at the top of the ballot box that are called tabulators, which O’Brien liken to being giant calculators.
The city currently leases 58 tabulators, but only deploys 46 across the city’s polling stations between advance voting and election day voting. The rest are held as backup.
“In the four elections I have done, I have had one machine in my experience have an issue with a roller or paper jam or something to that effect,” said O’Brien.
Leasing of the tabulators accounts for a small portion of the approximately $500,000 current cost of holding a municipal election.
Every year, the city budget apportions about $130,000 to go into a reserve fund.
“The total of those funds after four years is what we use to deliver the election,” said O’Brien. “Some of those funds are spent after the fact, but it’s roughly half a million dollars to deliver the election in Guelph.”
Some of the smallest costs add up. O’Brien said about $80,000 is spent on postage for the 90,000 voter cards sent out prior to the election.
The voter cards are not required when a voter walks into a polling station on election day, but O’Brien said the information it contains — including the polling stations you can visit — help the process move more smoothly.
Voters in Guelph are allowed to cast their ballot at any polling station within their ward on election day and anywhere in the city on advance voting days, which were held Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
“We think that gives people a lot of flexibility — we know people are busy, they lead busy lives,” said O’Brien.
The ballots themselves are more complicated than in provincial or federal elections, if only because each ballot carries multiple contests — mayor, councillor and school board trustee.
In fact, O’Brien notes there are a total of 30 different ballot faces in use across the city — each of the six wards has its own list of candidates and ballots are offered for English public school board trustee, English separate school board trustee, French public school board trustee, French separate school board trustee and a no school support ballot.
A total of 96,000 ballots has been printed for Monday’s election.
“Those 96,000 ballots are stored behind double-locked doors and apportioned out — we count them, we make sure they are ready to go out the door on election day and that each voting location has ample ballots to supply the amount of electors that we foresee coming to those locations,” said O’Brien.
In the lead-up to the election, the tabulators have been tested with a mock election consisting of 1,200 ballots.
The mock election is just one of a number of initiatives the city clerk’s office conducts to ensure each election will go off without a hitch. O’Brien said his election team starts working on it over a year and a half before each election day.
Ballots used in recent candidate information sessions included names of Canadian Olympic athletes like Sidney Crosby and Brad Jacobs to avoid any possibility of being confused with the upcoming election.
As city clerk, O’Brien acts as chief returning officer for the municipal election.
One of the biggest differences between running a municipal election and a provincial or federal one for O’Brien is that the day-to-day business of working in the city clerk’s office doesn’t disappear while working on it.
“We are still having council meetings, we are still handling working with staff and our colleagues in the building as to handing records and records management,” said O’Brien. “We are still marrying people on Thursdays and Fridays.”
Although a previous city council allowed internet voting in the 2014 municipal election, this year that option has been removed. O’Brien said most of the decisions about how the election is run are not made by council, for obvious conflict-of-interest reasons.
Some municipalities may opt for online voting, mail-in ballots or voting by phone, for instance.
“It’s really up to the determination of each municipality and each council,” said O’Brien.
Hoffmann said computers are the way of the future and that we need to adjust our ways to grow with them.
“My goal before I retired was to have all internet voting in the city — that was my dream. It’s not going to happen, not in my day. I hope it does some day,” said Hoffmann.
She noted that the city of Markham introduced online voting 15 years ago during the advance polls of the 2003 election.
“The money savings alone would be just wonderful,” said Hoffmann. “I just paid that $80,000 bill to Canada Post.”
Hoffmann said she will miss the frenzy of working the elections, but mostly the relationships she has built over the years. Because she has been doing the training of election day staff for many years, she only sees some people every four years.
“You meet so many people along the way and it’s just been great,” said Hoffman. “I remember them and it’s pretty cool that they remember me too.”
Although she plans to retire before the next election, Hoffmann hopes she can still help out in the future.
“I’d love to do some training, things like that. Whatever they need,” said Hoffmann. “I told Stephen to call me and I will be back in a heartbeat to help. Of course I will be there.”
In brief:
- The city of Guelph hires 360 temporary staff for election day duties from more than 500 applicants
- All election day staff are paid and the city pays for the rental of buildings it uses across Guelph as polling stations
- Over 200 laptop computers are deployed across the city’s polling stations on election day
- One polling station in each of the city’s six wards includes accessible devices for people with disabilities, including pneumatic ‘sip and puff’ devices
- People who are experiencing homelessness are eligible to vote by listing a drop-in centre or shelter as their address
- Voting in the municipal election is limited to Canadian citizens 18 years of age and over
