Councillor not happy with ‘slow’ vote count

WESTVILLE councillor, Warren Burn, said he had never come across such a slow vote count in all his years at the polls.

He said yesterday’s election day ran smoothly and was incident free except for the IEC presiding officer at Truro Hall in Westville and Chesterville who were not prepared for the vote count. The voting process closed just after 9pm, but the IEC presiding officer and her officials only began to separate the ballots hours later.

“The ballots were in two separate boxes, one for national and the other for provincial votes. But the presiding officer insisted that she knew what she was doing when she asked to mix the two boxes and re-separate them with the ballots face down. While I understand that it was the procedure to follow, I think it wasted precious time,” said Burn.

He added that there was other incident at one of the voting stations in Chesterville, where the presiding officer decided to stamp each ballot on the front instead of the back as per protocol. Burn conveyed his concerns to a higher authority at the IEC and after much debate the matter was resolved.

“The IEC said if the process was done consistently throughout the day, then the votes should still be counted. So they only began counting the ballots at 1am and finished at 5am,” said Burn.

He said they wasted one and a half hours and the IEC staff were tired which caused more insufficiency.

“The IEC staff were incompetent and slow. I believe the IEC could have been more prepared by hiring staff who knew more about the voting process or trained more people to carry out this job,” said Burn.

The Highway Mail is still awaiting comment from the IEC, as they were still busy tallying votes this afternoon.