October 28 will be the final day of voting for the Saskatchewan provincial election, with ridings looking to see who will be elected to represent them.
This year, early voting commenced across the province over five days, capturing a large amount of eligible voters across the province.
Now Monday, October 28th is the final day of voting for the province with different locations being set up between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m.
Micheal Boda, Chief election Officer with Elections Saskatchewan, reminds people of just how their counting process will work.
"As we've always done, we will begin our first preliminary count at 8:00 p.m. when the polls close on the last day of voting. During the first preliminary count, we will be counting all of the ballots from voting week as well as any homebound voting ballots and personal care facilities. Those are the 369 licensed nursing homes in which we've allowed people to vote in those homes."
While that's business as usual, there will also be some new changes coming to the voting process.
The first is that instead of reporting by ballot boxes, that will instead be renamed to voting stations reporting since that's the term used by Elections Saskatchewan.
The second, more complex change is that because there will be more final-day voting locations than early voting locations, Elections Saskatchewan is expecting that these final-day locations, which are rural areas, will be counted much quicker than more urban areas, as explained by Boda.
"It comes down to what you can expect for results reporting during the first preliminary count. Much of the reporting of results early in the night will come from those smaller last-day voting locations in rural constituencies. When the rural constituencies report first and you're not seeing results from urban constituencies until later in the evening, that is not evidence that there is trouble with our results reporting, we want you to know in advance that given the system we have, this is what we fully expect."
Following the first preliminary count following the end of voting on October 28th, Elections Saskatchewan will start their second preliminary count on October 30, which will include vote-by-mail ballots received by Saturday, October 26.
Then, nearly two weeks after the last day of voting, Elections Saskatchewan will hold their final count, conducting a ballot count which will look over all ballots received over the voting period as a verification process.
Boda wants to let people know that even though the preliminary counts will be released to the public it's the final one that really counts.
"Results are not final until the final count. No one wins or loses on the night of the first preliminary count. Things can change, especially given the volume of the vote by mail ballots. It's only following the final count that we will know which candidates have been selected by their constituents."