Richter lehnt Antrag des Kandidaten des Bloc Québécois auf erneute Abstimmung in Terrebonne ab
https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/national/judge-rejects-request-by-bloc-qu-b-cois-candidate-for-new-vote-in-terrebonne/article_d6cfc67b-8eaa-59de-b2fd-4d3b1d857e6c.html
8 Kommentare
„Dufour says the human administrative error was committed inadvertently and without any malicious or fraudulent intent and did not impact the integrity of the electoral system.“
Gonna be honest.. that line of reasoning doesn’t really work all that well in a 1 vote margin election. Their line of thinking is that allowing this case to set a precedent for holding a new election would cause problems down the line. But in this particular case we have a 1 vote margin that we specifically know would have resulted in a tie. This isn’t a decision that would allow a candidate who loses by 20 votes to call for a new election, unless they could identify 21 net (in their favour relative to the winner) incidences of incompetence, which simply isn’t going to happen.
This is honestly a very disappointing decision by the judge, and it honestly makes our elections under FPTP even less trustworthy.
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This is inevitably going to go all the way to the Supreme Court, especially considering the impact that a single seat can have in the current Parliament.
> In a ruling today, Justice Éric Dufour says the postal code error does not constitute an irregularity as defined under federal electoral law. Dufour says the human administrative error was committed inadvertently and without any malicious or fraudulent intent and did not impact the integrity of the electoral system.
This seems like a bad reading of the law. An irregularity does not require malicious or fraudulent intent (which is why the law mentions that separately from fraud or corrupt or illegal practices).
If we want to maintain faith in our electoral system, we can’t allow incidents like this to be ignored. If an election was won by a single vote and there’s clear proof that one person’s vote wasn’t counted properly, then the election needs to be redone.
If my memory of the events is correct, it wasn’t just the worker miswriting the address on the envelope, it was also the fact that he didn’t tell his superiors even after he realized his mistake because the number of ballots that had been returned seemed normal to him. That, to me, goes beyond the kind of ordinary human error that inevitably exists in any election and moves into the realm of grossly incompetent practices.
This whole situation has the same energy of people complaining that Hull`s foot was in the crease.
It’s not going to get overturned.
I disagree with this move. We should just have an by-election and get a much clearer result. We waste millions holding by-election so pp can gain employment after being fired by the voters of his riding
Apparently, the Supreme Court of Canada has put the standard extremely high to cancel an election in its previous rulings. It will be interesting to see if an administrative mistake makes the threshold. However, I think this case and some other examples coming from the last elections may call for revisiting some rules, especially mail-in-ballots.
Appropriately so. Hopefully, the BQ can shut up and stop whining about this now. At the end of the day, there‘ 0 proof that this single missed ballot was the only ballot that wasn’t counted due to error/voting issues. What if there were actually 3 LPC and 1 BQ ballots improperly declined/not counted? How do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that isn’t the case? The answer is you can’t, therefore there is no merit in this complaint.
And, calling a new election isn’t an equitable and justifiable solution either. Political climate now is different than it is in April – that would unfairly prejudice the results to a much greater degree than a single ballot being mis counted. The courts and EC made the right decision here – Blanchet needs to suck it up and stop embarrassing himself.