Mar 25 2009
Election Costs
Three hundred million dollars that’s what it costs to hold a federal election and when you add the cost of provincial and municipal elections the cost to tax payers is enormous. We’ve had 3 Federal elections since 2004. That’s 900,000,000 dollars. There are also other costs for example if you drive to the polling station to vote you pay for the fuel to get there and add more pollution to the air.
We currently vote at polling stations which has two workers at a cost of $350 and there is often as many as 200 polling stations in a riding and currently there are 307 ridings. That’s over 21,000,000 DOLLARS for one day. That doesn’t count the cost of 307 Elections Canada riding offices and trainers and admin personnel for 4 to 5 weeks, paper, Internet connections etc. I know there are costs that I don’t have access to.
I know that this puts tax payer money back into the communities in the form of wages, office rent and supplies. But in my view there are much better places for that money. You could help adults get their grade 12, improve health care, subsidize child care, increase home care, fund environmental clean up projects and a host of other things. I’m in favour of using tax payer dollars to improve our society but I want the money spent wisely and with proper accountability.
To spend our tax dollars more wisely I would suggest that we vote on line. The vast majority have Internet access and are at least able to go on line to search for information. For those don’t have access or don’t have the knowledge other accommodation can be made.
I can hear it all now we’ve always voted this way ( not true ) not secure ( we do EI and income tax, and buy on line wouldn’t that info be secure?), people will hack in and flood the process with ballots ( there are ways ensure one person one vote) and I’m sure there would be other reasons why we couldn’t or shouldn’t do it.
Here are the reasons why I think we should. We would save millions of tax payer dollars. Maybe more people would vote. There might be a way to have a “vote” pop up when people start their computers for a couple days before voting days. People wouldn’t have to go to an advanced pole they could vote anywhere there is Internet access. People who are house bound or disabled could vote easier. The results would be faster and you could have them at the same time.
What I don’t get is that there are obvious common sense ways to save money and streamline procedures but it doesn’t happen. I know that there are millions of people a lot smarter than I am ( some might be MP’s) so I’m sure they could come up with some money saving ideas. So what is the problem? I wish I knew.
As an aside I think that we should outlaw lawn signs that are not environmentally friendly.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
My thoughts:
Cost of an election is huge (although it pales compared to the $5.3 Billion for the US election), but the majority of the cost is probably not where people expect it to be. As a candidate, I saw all kinds of stuff going on behind the scenes. I got a LOT of paper that I would never use. Stacks and stacks of lists, laws, binders of info, maps, etc. etc. etc. In this age of info, any and all of this could easily have been handed to me on a CD-ROM. To elections Canada’s credit, quite a bit of it was on CD, compared to previous years, but this did not seem to cut down the cost.
As for voting on-line, this would not cut down significantly on voting day costs, nor help our economy, in my opionion. Much of the high-cost activity comes from reaching those that are not able to come into the polls, who would likely be those that don’t have or want computer access either, such as going to hospitals, nursing homes, military in the field, etc. Secondly, the $21,000,000 you calculated often goes to people in our society that can really use the money, as many of the poll workers are retired or otherwise unemployed folks, so these dollars are not misplaced, in my opinion.
A huge amount of time and money goes into ensuring that the voter list is up-to-date. To try and get this list with proper on-line access and passwords in the short time period of an election would be as overwhelming and expensive as the present process, and would likely present many legal hassles beyond the security of on-line tampering. I think this is different than the security of on-line banking and taxes. A single person’s banking is insured by the banks (many do get hacked and reimbursed by the bank), and taxes have a paper trail that can be used to correct tampering. But an election is higher stakes and tampering harder to track. If someone managed to hack the system, there would likely be no choice but to hold the entire election again, and the legalities of that would tie up government for months.
Where the vast majority of the money goes is to each of the candidates. Most people don’t know this, but if a candidate in any riding, for any party, achieves more than 10% of the local vote, a SIZEABLE percentage, fully 60%, of their campaign expenses are GIVEN BACK TO THEM, out of taxpayer dollars. So, if a local candidate spends $80,000 on signs and flyers, we taxpayers are on the hook for $48,000 of that. So, if three candidates in a riding all pass the 10%, and they all maxed their spending limits, taxpayers could be on the hook for $148,000 per riding. Yup. So, if you really want to cut down on the cost of an election, don’t look at Elections Canada or the voting process, but at the candidates themselves. See how they are wasting your money! Those signs, mailing, full page ads in every paper, and full colour leaflets cost big money. If you want more info on what candidates are allowed to spend, go to the elections canada website, and look up “election financing”. It boggles the mind.
The sign company I used for my election signs told me that one candidate in our area (they did not specify who or which riding) bought 14,000 signs. I used 500, all small. Which, by the way, were on post-consumer and recyclable plastic, with reusable frames. Most signs these days are recyclable, but it depends on whether the campaign teams are taking the time to see whether they are disposed of properly. A lot of people wanted me to play the “sign game” and order more signs, but I think this is the most wasteful and unnecessary election practice. Even in a riding as big as mine, 500 signs was enough to get my name out to most corners of the area, along main roads.
What a candidate spends on an election campaign is a matter of public record. The numbers should all be in soon, if not already, and newspapers usually publish the candidate spending of the area. My campaign was less than $2000, of which the taxpayers are on the hook for nothing, as I did not pass the 10% mark.
March 26th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Here’s some fun election number-crunching.
You can do this for any riding…calculate how much it cost a candidate to obtain a vote. The info to do this is all on-line on the Elections Canada website.
In our riding:
Winning candidate’s costs: $70,360
Number of votes:19 960
Cost per vote: $3.52
My costs: $1214
Number of votes: 2712
Cost per vote: $0.54
Here is the website to go to if you want to see election spending details.
http://www.elections.ca/scripts/webpep/fin2/select_search_option.aspx
Where taxpayer money goes:
Let’s say there’s Sue, the candidate, and Joe, and elector who donates money to Sue’s campaign.
Joe donates $400. Under election donation laws, Joe can claim this donation on his taxes, and get 75% of it returned to him. Therefore, the candidate gets $400 to spend, Joe is out $100, and taxpayers are on the hook for $300 of that.
So now, the candidate spends that on the campaign, and at the end, files the campaign return with elections Canada, and assuming Sue obtains more than 10% of votes cast, she receives $240 back from the taxpayers (under election laws, candidate is returned 60% of spending).
Assuming the $400 is spent in a way that attracts 200 voters (average of $2.00 per vote), and Sue’s party qualifies to get the vote subsidy, assuming $1.80 per year per vote cast for Sue (very close, though each party is different, as it is pro-rated), taxpayers are on the hook for another $360 per year. If there are two years until the next election, this works out to $720.
Here’s the rub: For Joe’s $400 donation, he is on the hook for $100 of it, taxpayers are on the hook for $1260 of it. Huh. Cool math, eh? As a math teacher, I find this fascinating. We could develop a whole new math called “election math”, where the numbers don’t have to add up the way they did in school!
None of this is contingent on whether Sue wins, only that she and her party reach certain percentage benchmarks.
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