The Commissioner of Canada Elections has released statistics about complaints received during the 45th general election, which saw Mark Carney’s Liberal party elected as to a minority government.
The office responsible for ensuring compliance with and enforcement of the Canada Elections Act received 700% more complaints than in the previous election. That’s 650 complaints per hour during the campaign!
Canadians filed 16,115 grievances with the office. These ranged from allegations of foreign interference to reports of unauthorized election advertising, voters posting images of their ballots on social media, and failures by third-party advertisers to register. Third-party advertisers are allowed to promote during elections but must first file the proper forms with Elections Canada.
Amusingly—and perhaps predictably—the vast majority of complaints reviewed so far have been deemed out of scope for the Commissioner. That’s a more technical way of saying the complainants didn’t have a case.
Due to the high volume, most complaints remain unprocessed. As of June 25, the office had only reviewed 2,330 of the 16,115 complaints.
The Commissioner noted that many complaints were the result of a general ignorance of the law.
As an interesting aside, the office had expected far more complaints related to artificial intelligence and disinformation, but such concerns turned out to be overblown in the lead-up to the election.
In case you were worried: so far, the Commissioner has found no evidence that any of the complaints processed to date had an effect on the final results of the election.
