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City reconsidering advance poll options

More than 6,000 people voted online in 2014 election
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Timmins’ clerk is taking another look at how the advance polls will be run for the Oct. 22 municipal election.

“To clarify, we are having advance polls, there just is not a paper advance poll,” explained clerk Steph Palmateer after Tuesday’s council meeting.

“Council has requested that this be reconsidered, I will certainly be reconsidering as they requested. A lot of thought had gone into this originally and you know the decision wasn’t made lightly so I’m happy to reconsider the request from council and we’ll see how things go from there.”

For the municipal election, the clerk is the chief electoral officer.

Currently, online voting is slated to be open from Oct. 1 to 8 p.m. on election day.

By only offering the online option in advance, there are concerns that it isn’t accessible to all of the voters, especially those without a computer or internet access.

Palmateer told council there are two mobile polls on election day that travel to the senior and healthcare facilities “to ensure that those residents who are unable to leave those facilities can actually vote.”

During the online voting there will also be computer terminals at city hall for people to use.

“And we will have staff here that will be able to assist them. We have other public locations that have internet access and computers, unfortunately we may not have staff at those locations who can actually assist them, but the public can still go in and use them,” Palmateer said.

To vote online, he said you need an email address to register. A pin is sent to your email and is used to access your ballot.

“It’s a very simple process, so I don’t think a lot of people will need a lot of help but there will be some and we will have staff here available,” he said.

Voter information cards explaining what people need to know about the election will also be mailed in mid to late September.

In the last election, he said about 6,000 people voted online.

“Over 3,200 of them were over the age of 50 and almost 1,500 of those were over the age of 60,” he told council.