Snippets from the Court transcript-
” does not speak English, and has dementia” “Power of Attorney and he was concerned that his ill and elderly mother had signed the proxy form without him being present” “difficulty with the English Language” “that she did not give instructions on how she would like to vote” “never spoke with her on how he wanted to vote in the upcoming election” “did not know Mr. Webber and did not speak with him on how she would like to vote”.
The Words Councillor Chris Vander Doelen put on his social media October 28th 2018.
“That didn’t take long. Less than 48 hours after the people of Essex voted to end the tiresome infighting on their town council, the partisanship erupted again last week.
In case you hadn’t heard, Councillor Sherry Bondy has alleged via social media posts that started last Wednesday that last week’s election was a “nightmare” sullied by dozens of possible fraud and proxy abuses in her Ward 4, Harrow, and my Ward 3, the former Colchester South.
Coun. Bondy is painting herself as the only honest member of the new council-elect, the only one willing to “fight for democracy” while the rest of us supposedly let everything go to hell.
That’s quite an accusation against a council that won’t even be sworn in for another month yet – and quite a heroic starring role Bondy has assigned to herself.
Proxies are documents which transfer a person’s right to vote to a second party. According to a CBC report, a single, messily-corrected proxy in the Harrow area may have been signed without someone’s knowledge. The CBC story is full of dark innuendo (the voter was “targetted” and a complaint has been made to police) and clucking concern from distant academics who know nothing of Essex politics . . . but no detail of any known wrongdoing.
Bondy, meanwhile, claims that a second voter in Ward 4 was caught trying to vote when she had already done so via a signed proxy, and that dozens of votes are therefore questionable.
What neither tall tale includes is that the two voters probably simply forgot they had signed proxies. But our electoral process is so air tight that it prevented double voting in both cases.
One of the voters was 87, I’ve been told. Forgive the poor woman for forgetting she’d told someone else months before she would vote by proxy. This does not mean the election was a “nightmare,” or that “the process failed us,” as Bondy claims.
As Coun. Bondy herself rightly said a few weeks ago, we need to take steps to correct our low voter turnout. Only 45 per cent of the eligible voters in Essex came to the polls last week for the municipal election.
That’s why we have proxies. Proxy votes are useful for infirm citizens who have trouble getting to the polls. Or for those who simply couldn’t be bothered to go the trouble of going to a polling station – but don’t mind if someone else does so on their behalf.
I didn’t seek anyone’s proxy in this election, or arrange any. According to CBC, 94 proxy votes were cast in Essex out of a total of about 5,300 ballots marked, most of them in Harrow and my Ward 3 around Harrow. Not enough to affect most of the winners and losers, if any.
Rather than revealing a problem with our election, I think this overblown fuss shows how failsafe and accountable our electoral system is, and how vigilant our officials were.
The checks and balances of our voting system worked perfectly – even if the outcome of the vote didn’t pan out the way some politicians had hoped last week.
Also, remember this little drama the next time you hear anyone suggest that voters shouldn’t be required by law to show ID when they cast a ballot. The system works only because of ID and doublechecks”.
Source:
Councillor Chris Vander Doelen’s Facebook, 6 days after the 2018 election.
So Councillor Vander Doelen please tell me again about the “Overblown Fuss”….
https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/jarvis-snively-compromised-election-bondy-called-him-out
