UMSU request denied

City says no to on-campus polling station

KERRI WOLOSZYN STAFF

If students at the University of Manitoba want to vote in the civic election, they will not be casting their ballots on campus. Despite a recent proposal from the University of Manitoba Students' Union (UMSU), Winnipeg’s civic election committee decided against having a polling station to be located on U of M campus for the Oct. 25 civic election.

UMSU president Garry Sran explained that UMSU made a call to the election committee to see if a polling station could be set up on campus. The station would have served students living in residence as well as other students who could not make it out to a community polling station to vote.

“We made this request and unfortunately they were not in favour of [the idea],” said Sran. He explained that the civic election committee had already chosen the locations of polling stations by the time that UMSU made the call.

Jo-Ann Park from the City of Winnipeg clerks department explained that locations for polling stations are based on established “catchment areas” and these areas are based on accessibility.

Each voting location then has the proper amount of ballots and the voters list for it’s certain area.

Mark Lamoyne, senior elections official, said that it then becomes a problem to put a voting station on campus because most of the people on campus don’t actually live on campus. He stressed that a person has to vote at the location nearest to where they live.

He explained that the City Hall advance voting system requires that station to have 57 different types of ballots and the entire voters list with all 450,000 names available. “So it’s more of a problem when you want to go out to the university because people who go to university could be from anywhere [in the city] so we’d have to do the same thing.”

Sran mentioned that some universities across the country have had polling stations on campus. He said, “Working through the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), we have received information from some schools that allow not only federal but provincial polling stations on campus.”

According to Ylife, York’s weekly newsletter, from Jan. 16, 2006, Elections Canada put polling stations at the York University Campus for the federal election. These stations were set up to help provide York’s 5,000 residents a place to vote.

When asked about providing a polling station for residents at the U of M, Lamoyne said, “We certainly could do it for resident students but right now we don’t. I think we send them off to the St. Norbert Community Centre or one of those places.”

Arts student Ryan Papuaya said he thinks a polling station on campus is a good idea. “If there are students on campus, who live on campus, and are registered to vote, it’s a closer place for them to put their vote in for the next election.”

Brett Lestition, a science student, said that polling stations “would be really convenient for students who are busy with full-time schedules to simply walk a few steps as opposed to going to some random club somewhere.”

In terms of cost, Lamoyne explained that for each area they try to work with places such as schools for locations. They then have to hire about 10 people per area and transport the necessary materials to the location.

“We don’t quantify the cost in terms of each individual voting station but there certainly are some costs,” he said.

There will be 182 polling locations around the city on election day with generally 3,000-4,000 people will visit each polling station throughout the city.

UMSU is hoping to work something out with the city for the next election.

Lamoyne said on-campus voting stations are a possibility for the future, “but it would be an expensive undertaking to do something like that.”

With files from Jenelle Petrinchuk.