Elgin, Manitoba, voter upset polling station closed

An Elgin, Man., man was dumbfounded when he looked at his voter card this weekend and discovered not only was his name spelled wrong, but he can't vote in his home community.

"I was mad … because my name was spelled wrong, and somebody said to me, 'We can't even vote here.' I looked at my card and we've got to go to Minto, I never even thought that they would take a polling station away from here," Bob Miller said.

People have voted at the Elgin Community Hall for as long as he can remember, he said. Now they have to go to Minto, a 22-kilometre drive from Elgin.

Miller worries what will happen on election day, Oct. 19.

"I know there's people that are not going to go, and I know there's people coming to the hall where the polling station is always at and find that it's locked up and no polling station anymore," Miller said.

Marie-France Kenny, Elections Canada regional media advisor for Saskatchewan and Manitoba, said redistribution of polls prompted the change.

Several criteria have to be met for a polling station, she said.

"One of them is the population, so we need to target a certain amount of population," Kenny said.

"We couldn't justify having two polls, one in Minto and one in Elgin," she said. "The one in Minto was larger, more accessible because it is close to [the] highway, and it required less — because we have criteria for accessibility in terms of ramps, so it met most of the criteria, required less work."

Miller said Elgin has a larger population than Minto, and he worries the change will have an impact on election day.

"It's just like they don't want you to vote," he said. "People here aren't going to go out of town, like, there's older people, you know, they're just not going to do it."

Kenny couldn't say how many other communities in rural Manitoba face similar changes.

She advised people to carefully read the information on the voter cards that arrive in the mail to ensure they know where they vote.