Internet voting in Kingsville has uncovered Canada Post’s failings as municipal staff is being inundated with calls from voters who have yet to receive their election packages in the mail.
The calls began to taper Tuesday, but in the proceeding days, there were steady complaints, said Ruth Orton, Kingsville’s clerk. Letters mailed to multiple voters in the same household have been arriving days or as long as a week apart.
“That’s generally why people are calling. They’ll say, ‘My husband got his, but I haven’t got mine,’” Orton said.
The PIN codes and instructions to vote by Internet and telephone were mailed Oct. 9 by Scytl, the company conducting Kingsville’s municipal vote. The letters – 15,131 of them, to be exact – were mailed from Halifax to nearly 7,500 Kingsville households.
A few voters got theirs in the mail as early as Oct. 14. Others were still waiting a week later.
Canada Post’s published delivery standards say any letter mailed within Canada will arrive in four business days.
“We certainly expected people would have had it by the 16th,” Orton said.
Canada Post could not explain Tuesday why the mail was so slow in some cases, or why multiple letters mailed to the same address arrived on different dates.
“We’re aware there’s an issue,” said Eugene Knapik, Canada Post spokesman. “We’re in the process of looking into it… We are taking it very seriously.”
Orton said she and her counterparts in Tecumseh and Leamington have been in constant contact as their towns made their first forays into Internet voting this election.
“Tecumseh’s having the same problems,” Orton said.
Leamington, inexplicably, is not.
Orton said any resident who has yet to receive their voting letter in the mail can visit town hall to have get a new one. Old PIN numbers are automatically disabled when new ones are generated, guarding against people voting twice.
Orton said she is thankful the vote is being conducted by Internet so people can vote as soon as their letters arrive. In the past, the town conducted its municipal votes by mail.
“I’d be doubly worried because then you’d have to mail them back,” she said. “With Internet voting, you only have half the problem.”
ssacheli@windsorstar.com or Twitter @WinStarSacheli
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