What goes into getting the election polls ready?

It takes millions of dollars.

Hundreds of thousands of ballot boxes, forms, pencils and signs.

And thousands of employees across the country — but what do those election workers do?

With a federal election consuming the country’s attention, Elections Canada is hard at work behind the scenes.

Thomas Lynd knows this better than anyone.  Back for his third term as returning officer for Windsor West, Lynd is responsible for many areas, including hiring people, doing background checks and even correcting mistakes on the electoral lists.

This year, Elections Canada had 90 truckloads of election material sent across the country, including 257,000 voting pencils – about 45 kilometres of pencils laid end to end, 240,000 voting signs for voting stations and 475,000 guidebooks which will be used by polling place workers. 

With all the planning, hiring and work that must be done, Lynd said the work that goes into preparing for a federal election makes him lose sleep.

“There’s sort of benchmarks that have to happen,” said Lynd. “You’re trying to get all of the leases signed for all of the 60 different locations. Once that’s done, you have to figure out where all your people are going to be working. But hiring people is significant, and we have to hire about 800 people and there’s a lot that have to drop out for personal, medical or other reasons.”

“It’s a pretty daunting accomplishment,” says Elections Canada.

Rejean Grenier, one of Ontario’s regional media advisors for Elections Canada said the election workers are a key piece to allow the elections to run smoothly.

“Without them, there wouldn’t be an election,” said Grenier. “It’s pretty simple. It’s like anything else. What would happen if a store didn’t have employees … they’d be closed. It’s the same for an election, except for the only difference [is] the huge number of people that have to be hired, the training they need to have for a very specific job and the fact that most of them are part-timers. It’s a pretty daunting accomplishment just to have hire all these people, train them and have them work.”

Lynd said hiring locally on short contracts gives people a good opportunity for people to participate in the electoral process — and boost the local economy at the same time. 

Without the mass of workers, exercising the democratic right to vote could be much harder. Lynd believes new technologies, including phone, online and mail-in ballots, could make it easier and increase voter participation.

“I’ve noticed a lot of younger people are registering and they’re registering online,” said Lynd. “I think that’s sort of the nature of communications now, and I think personally, more technology has to be introduced.  We went to the University and St. Clair College and we got some feedback forms back and over half of them said, ‘you have to have some type of phone voting, and people have phones now with them.”

Election polls across Canada will be open on Monday, Oct. 21 from 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.