I understand the instinct to go to one polling station from three for the next municipal election. In a normal year, just having one spot does decrease confusion, and Yorkton is small enough that physical distance isn’t a massive barrier to voting. Polling locations can also sometimes feel arbitrary, such as the year I had to vote at Yorkdale School in spite of it being the furthest polling station from my house, so it’s not like this is an added inconvenience, distance wise, for the average voter.
I say a normal year because we are not currently in a normal year. And this year, if anything, there should be more polling places, not fewer.
The reason is because if you’re in a pandemic, and we are and likely will be for the remainder of the year, the main goal should be to limit the amount of people gathering in a single location. Given that an election, by definition, requires many people to gather in one location, that’s going to be a risky proposition.
Some might make an argument that a central location is easier to sanitize, but the problem there is that surface-to-person is not as large a risk factor as person-to-person transmission. While proper sanitation is important, all the sanitation in the world won’t do much help if you’ve got a sick person hanging out near everyone else. Breaking it down into smaller locations and more spread out is going to be a smarter method of handling an election in 2020.
One could argue that the Gallagher Centre is a large enough facility that you could easily spread everyone out, and that’s not entirely wrong. There are many rooms, many places to go, and many paths people could be directed down to vote. However, the issue is those common points. There are not that many entries and exits, and everyone in the city - ideally, though likely not in reality - would have to go through. One sick person and suddenly Yorkton’s one of the hot spots on the daily COVID-19 map.
Effectively, going to one polling place in 2020 is needlessly risky, and the goal with polling locations should be to limit crowd sizes as much as possible.
Which isn’t to say the City of Yorkton isn’t doing some good things with regard to this election - specifically, the move to increase mail-in voting is a smart move, because the more mail-in ballots the fewer people have to vote in person. Since this year is one where limiting crowd size is the biggest priority, the more people who vote from home, the better.
But the single polling location, this year, is a mistake. It won’t always be a mistake, in 2024 they might be able to safely move to a single polling station without putting people at risk, as hopefully we shouldn’t have to deal with this forever.
