Votes were cast using sticky notes, people tried registering for ballot kits using selfies as ID and more than 500,000 envelopes had to be ordered at the 11th hour as officials in Newfoundland and Labrador scrambled to switch to a provincewide mail-in election following a COVID-19 outbreak in 2021.
That’s according to more than 900 pages of court documents obtained by CBC/Radio-Canada, which reveal confusion at Elections Newfoundland and Labrador as what should have been the shortest campaign allowed by law stretched into the longest and most chaotic in the province’s history.
The filings — part of an election challenge launched in 2021 but settled last month on the eve of trial — show no fewer than four outages brought down Elections N.L.’s online voter registration system as people frantically tried to sign up for special ballots.
The first shutdown struck on Feb. 12, in the hours after public health officials decided to move the entire province to the maximum COVID-19 alert level and Elections N.L. suspended voting in all 40 electoral districts. On that day, Elections N.L. fielded six gigabytes of emails — per hour.
Two more outages happened on Feb. 19, the last day to register to vote by mail, with one period of “intermittent” failures occurring during the final half-hour before the 8 p.m. deadline.
According to interview transcripts from elections personnel, verifying voters’ identity became less and less of a priority for Elections N.L. as staff became inundated with more than 100,000 unexpected applications for special ballot kits.
Kim Petley, acting supervisor of special ballots for part of the election, said in one transcript that if someone called to register for a mail-in ballot but wasn’t on the voters’ list, “We took you on your word and we issued the ballot.”
Petley said in “normal circumstances … that would not have been acceptable, but the intent here was to get ballots out to people who were requesting them.”
Some applications came with a selfie or a photo of the voter in front of their house, intended to confirm their address. Some voters and candidates used what staff called the “shotgun method,” emailing questions to the full list of Elections N.L. staff directly, further clogging inboxes. Others sent “50 or 60 applications all in one fax,” according to an interview transcript of then-chief electoral officer Bruce Chaulk.
Meanwhile, phone lines were blocked.
“The calls were overwhelming”, said Travis Wooley, then second-in-command at Elections N.L., who was stuck home on COVID-19 lockdown during the first hours after in-person voting was suspended.
Wooley is now the top official at the agency. The province is set to go to the polls again within months.
Emails show electors and candidates frantically seeking help from Elections N.L. In one case, after the deadline to vote by mail was postponed, a Liberal staffer asked whether a constituent who’d just turned 18 years old was suddenly eligible to vote.
Woolley didn’t know and replied he’d need to “discuss [it] in the a.m.” with Chaulk.
In one transcript, Chaulk confirmed some voting kits had been returned, not with a ballot, but with an improvised “slip of paper” inside. He said his team counted the votes because he “could determine the intent of the elector, which is what’s required by law.”
“The whole thing didn’t make sense,” said Yvonne Bugden, a special ballot coordinator, who confirmed some people voted using sticky notes. “Why do we have a ballot at all?”
Lawyers also referenced one case where a single elector ordered 40 kits for rotational workers in Fort McMurray — all of which went to the same post office box.
Elections N.L. staff, including Chaulk, explained that given the voters’ signed a declaration in their ballot kits to attest they are who they say they are, they weren’t concerned.
Chaulk repeatedly defended Elections N.L., according to the transcripts, which recorded interviews conducted by lawyers preparing for the controverted elections application.
That court challenge was launched in April 2021 by then-NDP leader and St. John’s East-Quidi Vidi candidate Allison Coffin, as well as voter Whymarrh Whitby.
The case was settled in June when the winning candidate in that race, Liberal John Abbott, announced he would resign by the end of the summer. Elections N.L. acknowledged that Whitby, despite his best efforts to obtain a mail-in ballot, had been disenfranchised.
In the transcripts, Chaulk explained public health had approved Elections N.L.’s COVID-19 preparedness plans, but he said mass pandemic “hysteria” had led to resignations from elections staff “freaking out” and to closures at many facilities intended to be used as polling stations — events he said he never could have prepared for.
He said Elections N.L. had anticipated more people would vote by special ballot during the pandemic and had prepared some 60,000 special ballot kits ahead of the 2021 election, far more than the 9,313 kits used during the previous one in 2019.
According to the filings, Chaulk’s team also hired between 20 and 30 special ballot workers — more than double the number on the payroll in 2019 — and had 3,000 litres of hand sanitizer on hand.
However, in the end, 200 special ballot workers were necessary and half a million extra envelopes had to be ordered last minute. Thousands of pieces of personal protective equipment went unused.
“We have 5,000 face shields sitting here in the warehouse. Don’t know anybody [who] wants them, do you?” said Chaulk, according to the transcripts.
Chaulk said he felt that the province’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Janice Fitzgerald, could have intervened and shut down the election, but demurred, while his office had no statutory authority to put an end to the campaign.
“Everybody was expecting me to be able to stop the election,” he said.
“She certainly had the power,” Chaulk added, contradicting statements Fitzgerald and her office gave in 2021.
Chaulk came under fire for hand-delivering ballots to certain candidates living near his house, while tens of thousands of voters waited for the ballots to arrive by mail.
“Would I do it again? No,” he said, according to the transcripts.
He was also criticized for other decisions, such as briefly allowing four people to vote by telephone, a practice not permitted under provincial law according to the agency’s own lawyers.
But during the lengthy discovery interviews with lawyers, he said he faced threats and “unfounded accusations” during the campaign, and police patrolled outside his home in St. John’s after his car was vandalized.
He said certain candidates yelled at his staff, describing PC MHA Lloyd Parrott as “quite abusive” and Independent MHA Eddie Joyce as “not very civil.” Joyce flatly denied the allegations on Thursday, while Parrott said in a statement he had “passionately argued on behalf of my constituents.”
In the transcripts viewed by CBC/Radio-Canada, no one interviewed said they had ever seen clear evidence of fraud, or of people voting more than once.
In a statement on Thursday, Elections N.L. reiterated it had found no evidence of electors voting more than once in 2021 and said its manual verification protocols and electronic adjudication system were used successfully in 2021 and in subsequent by-elections.
In the court documents, the agency did, however, acknowledge more than 40 voters in St. John’s East-Quidi Vidi should have received a ballot but didn’t, or voted in the wrong district.
When he resigned, avoiding a costly trial just a few months before the deadline for a new provincial election, Abbott said 100 to 140 witnesses would have had to testify about numerous alleged irregularities.
Amanda Bittner, a Memorial University political science professor, said Thursday the numerous “anomalies” during the election call into question the vote’s integrity.
“Sticky notes? I mean, come on,” she said. “There’s nobody in the world who’d think that’s the way that ought to be done.”
Kelly Blidook, a fellow political science professor at MUN, said Wednesday the apparent scrambling at Elections N.L. made for an environment “ripe for errors” at the agency, which “diminishes trust” in the electoral process and could impact future voter turnout.
“I think this is unfortunate for the number of people who didn’t get to vote because we know voting once begets voting in the future,” he said.
Blidook added that going forward, an independent body should be responsible for reviewing the election and reporting back to the House of Assembly.
He did acknowledge, however, that Elections N.L. was placed in the unenviable position of running a wintertime pandemic vote called by then-Liberal premier Andrew Furey months before he needed to.
After the 2021 election, the Liberal government said it would reform the Elections Act, a promise it will not be capable of fulfilling. The House of Assembly has suspended work for the summer and a new election must take place between on or before Oct. 14.
In a statement on Thursday, Elections N.L. said its 300 officials are prepared for the upcoming provincial vote and that it’s “committed to continuously improving our processes and making sure that we oversee a fair and democratic election.”
It said it completed a “comprehensive review” after the last election and has made “significant improvements to electoral operations” at its headquarters in St. John’s and in district returning offices, including the adoption of a new elections’ management system, providing better training for staff and opening a larger warehouse capable of maintaining an inventory of more than 100,000 special ballot kits.
“For the 2025 general election Elections N.L. has proactively established working groups to address various threats to the electoral process such as cyberattacks, incidents at electoral offices or polling locations, and emergency response,” the statement reads.
Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our daily headlines newsletter here. Click here to visit our landing page
