Marna Jackson said she was shocked when she turned up to her Seaforth polling station on Thursday only to be told she’d already voted.
“What if I wouldn’t have gone to vote? Who did I vote for? And if all these other people that didn’t go to vote voted, and they don’t know they voted who did they vote for? So, I just found it concerning,” said the Seaforth resident.
Earlier that day Marna’s son Keiryn Jacobs had the same problem at his polling station near Stratford.
“I went to give her [the polling station worker] my voter ID card and my ID at which point she studied both then kind of went to her computer and gave me a puzzled look back and was like, ‘oh, it seems that you’ve already voted,’” said Jacobs, who lives near Saint Paul’s just outside of Stratford.
Both Keiryn and Marna were allowed to cast their own ballots once they proved who they were - but the question of how this happened still lingers for both of them.
“I think because of our political climate right now everywhere, this just seemed to really be a concern to me. It raised a lot of red flags to me,” said Jackson.
“If I was sick or dying or whatever and I couldn’t have shown up, it would have registered that I had voted - and to me that’s very odd. And, I don’t think that should happen in a supposedly democratic society with all of these fail safes in place,” said Jacobs.
Elections Ontario had this to say about the situation:
It is a foundational principle in our democracy safeguarded under the Election Act that each elector has the right to one vote and may not vote multiple times. As such our system strikes people off the voter list in tandem with providing them with a ballot.
In some cases an elector may be informed that they have already voted because their name appears as struck off the list. When this happens there are established procedures in place to review the situation and if the elector is eligible ensure they can cast their ballot.
We want to assure Ontarians that these are isolated events and our system is protecting the legitimacy of the vote.
For this general election we trained 55000 polling workers who collectively served almost 5 million Ontarians.
— Elections Ontario
Both Jacobs and Jackson say they know of others that this happened to, including someone near St. Thomas. They know their votes wouldn’t have changed Thursday’s outcome, but they’d like to know what happened to the ballots cast in their name that they didn’t cast.
“Obviously it happened to my mother as well. But, I know a couple other people personally that it happened to too and that just seems odd. So yeah - it got us questioning things and hopefully we’ll find out where these ghost votes went,” said Jacobs.
“I’m not saying it was widespread, but I don’t know what they mean by isolated. Like what is - what does that mean?” said Jackson.
