Don't expect all results on election night: Sask. chief electoral officer

Saskatchewan voters should not expect to see all the results of the provincial election reported on election night.

According to Elections Saskatchewan, the 61,225 mail ballots requested by, and sent to, voters across the province won't be counted until after election day.

While the pandemic has resulted in some changes for this year's provincial election, Chief Electoral Officer Michael Boda says some aspects of this delay are not new to 2020. 

"Saskatchewan has always had a preliminary count that's happening on election night and a final count that occurs 12 days after," he said. "What is new is the volume of ballots that will still need to be counted after election day."

The preliminary count on election night — Oct. 26 — will encompass the ballots from advance voting, day-of voting and voting in personal care facilities. That will account for most of the ballots cast in the provincial election.

However, for the first time this year, there will be an additional counting process Boda refers to as the "second preliminary count," where the mail-in ballots received by Elections Saskatchewan by Oct. 26 will be counted on Oct. 28.

"For several reasons, we decided to split the count of vote-by-mail ballots into two rounds of counting," Boda said.

One reason is that mail-in ballots may take longer to count than traditional ballots, where voters mark their preference with a simple "X."

With a mail-in ballot, "the worker might have to decipher handwriting. There is more potential for variation because the voter can write," Boda said.

"[And] we wanted to offer as much certainty as possible.… Our final count is not until almost two weeks after election day. It's a very long time to leave the potential results of the election up in the air, and there is likely a lot of work to do," he said.

"While we will not have complete results after the second preliminary count, they will be more complete than on election day." 

The remaining vote-by-mail ballots — those postmarked by Oct. 26 but arriving after that date — will be tallied in the final count beginning Nov. 7.

In close races where many voters will be casting their ballot by mail, Boda said the results will probably not be known on election night.

This includes ridings such as Regina Northeast, where the 2018 byelection winner carried the riding by 741 votes and 1,270 constituents have requested mail ballots this year.

In Regina Pasqua, the 2016 election was decided by 298 votes, and 2,674 mail ballots have been approved for 2020.

"The numbers [of vote-by-mail applications] are not uniform across the province," Boda said.

"We have a high of almost 2,700 in Regina Pasqua and a low of just 23 in Athabasca. So the impact of the post-election-day ballots will be dependent not only on the closeness of the race, but also on the total number of ballots that still need to be counted after election day."

However, Elections Saskatchewan is planning to address these close races first in their second preliminary count. 

"We are going to prioritize those constituencies which are very close and which have enough vote-by-mail ballots to potentially flip the seat from one candidate to another," he said.

"Our goal will be to provide certainty in close races, but in some cases, it may not be decided after the second set of counting."

As of Oct. 21, voters had returned approximately 21,000 completed vote-by-mail ballots to Elections Saskatchewan.