{"id":241,"date":"2005-01-26T18:21:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-26T23:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=241"},"modified":"2005-01-26T18:21:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-26T23:21:00","slug":"241","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=241","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Hanging Chads
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I encourage everyone to read up on this story <\/a>that will likely get shuffled away by the local media. The Readers Digest version is as follows: Liberal Chris Kibermanis got more<\/em> votes than his Conservative opponent in Edmonton-Castle Downs during last fall\u2019s election. He won three<\/em> appeals to verify that he got the most votes. He\u2019s been working hard as an MLA for his constituents since November\u2026 Yesterday, a judge decided to award the election to his Tory opponent who received fewer<\/em> votes than Kibermanis.<\/p>\n

Kibermanis is taking this in stride and it appears the Alberta Liberal Party won\u2019t be appealing the results, wanting to avoid a long legal battle. Now, I know I\u2019m probably being somewhat partisan here but I have three big concerns over this:<\/p>\n

1. Once the lawyers decide things, you\u2019re inevitably not going to have a level playing field. One alert reader who brought this story to my attention, properly called Thomas Lukaszuk\u2019s lawyers a \u201chighly paid, O.J.-style legal team\u201d. Kibermanis <\/a>meanwhile works construction\u2026I suspect he likely didn\u2019t have the same caliber legal team.<\/p>\n

2. Why is a judge better suited to decide what constitutes a spoiled ballot than the Chief Returning Officer? The Election Act doesn\u2019t define a spoiled ballot so the decision should rest with the local returning officer since, you know, that’s the entire job of the CRO<\/em>!<\/p>\n

3. It\u2019s extremely rare for a judge to award an election to the loser. If there was significant doubt and the court felt the need to interfere, why not have a bi-election?<\/p>\n

Chris has said he\u2019ll run again next time and I encourage Edmontonians to get involved and help him out when that next time comes around.
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Hanging Chads I encourage everyone to read up on this story that will likely get shuffled away by the local media. The Readers Digest version is as follows: Liberal Chris Kibermanis got more votes than his Conservative opponent in Edmonton-Castle Downs during last fall\u2019s election. He won three appeals to verify that he got the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}