Over a week of Advance Polls have been made available for voters to grab the opportunity to cast their ballot. Advance voters (but only advance voters) can vote anywhere in the province. That’s not new. After four days of advance voting over 107,000 Manitobans had voted.
New this year, on Election Day, Tuesday, Oct. 3, voters can vote at any polling station within their constituency. For example, if you live in Kenton you may vote in Kenton, Virden, Hamiota, Lenore, etc. Voters within Riding Mountain have a choice of 31 polling stations.
To make this possible, laptops are provided by Elections Manitoba with access to the voters' list. Scanners will scan voter information cards and quickly find voters on the voters' list.
Another innovation will be printers for printing ballots on demand in place of write-in ballots.
Vote counting machines, also known as tabulators, scan and record ballots and then provide a count at the end of the night. Once the voting period is over, the results ought to be quicker.
Voting Process
Voting privacy is, as ever, protected. Voters mark their paper ballot behind a privacy screen. They put their marked ballot in a secrecy sleeve and bring it to the voting officer.
The ballot is fed into the vote counting machine without the voting officer or anyone else seeing the voter’s selection. That vote counting machine scans the ballot, records the selection, and saves an image of the ballot.
Results
At the close of voting on election day, vote counting machines will produce a print-out with the results of voting. The results will show: the number of votes each candidate received, the number of rejected ballots, the number of declined ballots, and the total number of ballots cast.
Only authorized election officials can access the results and only after the polls have closed on election day.
Accuracy and Security
Vote counting machines feature many levels of security to maintain the integrity of voting. Elections Manitoba website assures that rigorous testing will ensure all machines are in proper working order and can accurately read ballots.
Authorized election officials are the only ones who can open and close the polls and produce the count. These procedures can be observed by scrutineers.
The vote counting machines are not connected to the Internet and the ballots contain security features to ensure that vote counting machines can only accept ballots issued by Elections Manitoba.
Not changing
All votes will be recorded on paper ballots and these will be retained for recount purposes.
Elections Manitoba assures that voting is still safe, secure, and secret. Nobody will know how you voted.
Advance polls
The advance poll in Virden is open for the final day on Saturday, Sept. 30 from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday afternoon advance polls are open in Brandon and in other large centres. Please check the Elections Manitoba website for times and locations. https://www.electionsmanitoba.ca/en/Voting/AdvanceLocations
The Last day to apply for absentee voting is Saturday, Sept. 30. The Last day to apply for homebound voting is Monday, Oct. 2. Please check the website: https://www.electionsmanitoba.ca/
