A total of 109 ballots were rejected in the municipal election, just one per cent of the ballots cast.
Ballots were spoiled if an elector voted for too many mayor, councillor, or school trustee candidates than the maximum number allowed.
Electors were allowed to vote for one mayoral candidate, six councillors, and five trustees.
Tracy Bate, the city’s deputy city clerk, confirmed that if ballots were spoiled the city’s automated voting machine automatically spit out any voting cards where someone over voted. Bate said all 109 people who did spoil a ballot were given a replacement voting card.
In a separate category, a ballot was considered rejected if a voter left a section blank – something which is allowed. Because the city treated the voting card as three separate ballots (one for mayor, one for councillors and one for school trustees), if one section was left blank, only that section was rejected, and the sections that were filled out still counted. Voters were also allowed to vote for as few candidates as they wanted. If, for example, someone voted for only four council candidates, instead of the maximum number of six, those four candidate votes would still be counted. Ballots were only considered rejected if someone completely blanked out a section.
In the case of the councillor candidates, 56 ballots were left blank while in the section for mayor, 91 ballots were left unfilled.
A total of 9,252 people cast a vote for at least one councillor candidate while 9,217 voted for mayor, which means slightly more people cast a vote for the councillors than they did for mayor.
In total, the city had 15,508 ballots printed but 6,068 of those went unused.
Voter turnout for the Nov. 15 election was 38.5, or 39 per cent, with 9,308 votes cast out of 24,167 eligible voters.
Voters elected Andy Adams as mayor and Michele Babchuk, Charlie Cornfield, Colleen Evans, Ron Kerr and Larry Samson as councillors.