Yes, the votes are finally in, and I lost by 36 to 45.

It feels a little inappropriate to use percentage points to analyze a race where less than 100 votes were cast in total, but that's 44.4% to 55.6%, an 11-point loss. The closest analogue in provincial politics would be Bronwyn Eyre, the former MLA who just lost Saskatoon Stonebridge by a nearly identical margin, 43.4% to 54.3%. Now I have something polite to talk about if I ever meet her!

That's enough votes that I'm not embarrassed, and in the world of municipal politics I think it's not a bad performance against a 21-year incumbent. Here's my campaign story:

The Paperwork

If you've never done it before, running for office usually carries some kind of signature requirement.

To get on a federal ballot, you need 100 eligible voters... but you're encouraged to collect 150, because there is no post-submission appeal process if any of your signatures are found to be invalid. Just imagine collecting 150 signatures on behalf of the Liberal Party in Weyburn! This mighty task is the greatest preoccupation of dozens of paid organizational staff come election time, and only a few parties have the resources to send those staff into every single longshot riding in the country. I personally gathered about 60 nomination signatures in my 2021 campaign.

At the municipal level, this task is much less onerous. Please flip open your copy of the Local Government Election Act, 2015 to Part VII, Section 67(3):

Val Marie is DEFINITELY:

• not a rural municipality (yes, really: RMs are their own distinct category, it's a Saskatchewan thing)
• a place with less than 20,000 people (19,880 less, in fact)
• not divided into wards (entertaining as this would be)

That means five signatures - an easy hour's work. With 4% of the electorate contacted already, I was feeling good.

The Long Month of October

In Canada, federal and provincial elections can be called by the executive branch at any time - and must happen automatically if a major deadlock emerges (if you ever wondered why we never deal with government shutdowns). In contrast, municipal elections happen on a fixed schedule, proceeding every four calendar years come hell or high water. (This philosophy is employed in the U.S. at all levels of government.)

What if a dysfunctional town council collapses halfway into its fixed term? Municipalities are "creatures of the province" with almost no guaranteed rights that cannot be stripped away by provincial legislation, and it is the province's thankless job to intervene.

In Saskatchewan in 2024, the provincial election happened to be called for October 28, while all municipal elections happening across the province were set for November 13. This close-but-not-exact overlap created an obnoxious time crunch for many, many politically involved people. In my own case, I was working as campaign GIS lead in Regina for all of October, so municipal politics were necessarily second priority.

After knocking a hundred doors on the 28th for Joan Pratchler (who, ahem, ended up beating a sitting cabinet minister by 7 points), I was finally free to go home and do the same thing in Val Marie.

The Platform

Val Marie, with its resident population of 120, has a very small tax base. The village government has very little leeway to spend money on anything other than basic services, so most options for a policy agenda are off the table. Why did I even put myself out there if I don't expect to have much power? My personal reason: tourism development requires that the village show up to professional stakeholder meetings sometimes, and with my day job sales experience I know that I'm good at leaving a positive impression on rural development types.

In a tiny community, I knew that everybody would already have some idea of who I am, so I thought I would re-iterate the personal basics:

• I'm here by choice
• My map business is a full-time thing
• I'm a volunteer museum chair
• I like to apply for grants

I also had the full endorsement of the runner-up from the 2020 election, who said that he had been the subject of unjustified rumours that he supported an expensive new water system (something which has proven to be a painfully high per capita expense in nearby Mankota and Climax). This proved to be the case on the doorstep, as multiple voters still remembered the water system gossip four years later.

I think Val Marie's appeal as a community has basically nothing to do with our water infrastructure, and there are so many other business development ideas that would be cheaper to try first. So I made sure to add a final line item into my platform:

• Very specific fiscal conservative pledge

At the start of the campaign, I knew that I had probably only ever spoken to about half the people in town, so I decided to get whimsical with a more personal back side of the flyer. Here are the basic messages that I hoped to re-iterate:

• You already know my family isn't from here, but I'm still a prairie person
• My business is successful
• Did you know I CONSTANTLY get asked about copyright traps?? Seriously, this comes up SO MUCH.

In the end, this kind of thing probably only changes 1 or 2 votes, especially in a tiny social environment where both candidates are already known to everybody. But it was honestly just fun to try and use my political skills in a non-partisan environment, and nobody could accuse me of not running a full-scale campaign.

Financial audit

The flyer ended up being my only campaign expense. I still have a few left over!

Total campaign expenditures: $155.23 ($4.31 per vote)

Sadly, just giving a $5 bill to every likely supporter would be very illegal.

Ten Miles from the Border

For a couple days around the U.S. election I finished all of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and drew 30 neurotic little depictions of my own face from memory, but otherwise I did not manage to change out of my pajamas or get any useful work done, so the effective campaign period was really a little shorter than two weeks.

Data Operation

With my flyers going out on the Friday before election day, I was free to spend the Remembrance Day long weekend canvassing. Uh-oh... there's a catch!

Section 53.1(1) says that the council may provide for the establishment and maintenance of a voter registry. Well, Val Marie doesn't.

Provincial and federal canvassers work off a big central voters list, maintained with data from the relevant election agencies (which collaborate with the CRA, so file your taxes correctly). Among its other uses, this crutch is an essential part of my electioneering social routine because I'm really not good with names. There was only one thing to do next.

Fearlessly hit the doors anyway? No, let's just make our own voter registry!!

With the help of five volunteers, I called a data meeting where we simply went... street by street... block by block... house by house... naming every resident in every building, from memory. I was really curious how accurately this could be done, but after two and a half hours, we were at something like 95% completion and estimated an electorate of 128 people. (More than our census population? Yes, any Saskatchewan resident who owns property inside the municipality can vote for mayor.)

In addition to being a useful social tool - because I was not about to open every conversation by asking "I'm Alex, who are you?" - we also used the list to do a rudimentary tiering operation, estimating the likelihood that every individual person in town would vote for me.

Canvassing

It took two afternoons to hit every door in town, and I took a third afternoon to try all the uncontacted Tier As again. This pushed my contact rate up to an even 50%, which is great but could definitely have been improved with more lead time.

Most people do not make up their mind about politics because their door got knocked on once, but the data collected is a useful way to identify the needs and priorities of the general public, and it's also a great way to predict how the election will actually go.

Compared to my federal experience, I was shocked to discover that nobody would directly tell me that they were going to vote for my opponent - it just wouldn't be polite in a small town! I ended up getting all of four explicit negative responses. When you canvass for the NDP, this is much less of a problem. I realized early on that it was probably safe to assume that every single "undecided" voter was going to show up and vote for the incumbent.

With voter contact done, here's how things stood the night before the election:

For your reference, this is the NDP spreadsheet code: a 1 has explicitly said that they will vote for you, a 2 is a likely supporter, a 3 is undecided, and a 4 has explicitly said that they won't vote for you. Easy!

First of all, it was frankly incredible to see our tier list hold up this accurately, given that it was literally created off the top of a couple people's heads.

This put me on track to win 80% of A's, 45% of B's, and 10% of C's, provided that you assume...

1. ...that I had recorded a representative sample of the electorate.
2. ...that I was accurate at differentiating 2's and 3's.
3. ...that nobody was lying to my face.

Three risky assumptions in politics, but if they all held true, then our simple tier model returns 64 votes for me (yay!!) against 55 votes for my opponent. In practice, I think 2. and 3. did hold up, but with such a tiny campaign, I assumed that my canvassing efforts were disproportionately reaching my own people. When I went to bed before the election, the most optimistic thing I was willing to believe was that the race was tied.

Election Day, November 13

In Saskatchewan, it is legal for a municipal candidate to spend all day watching people vote at the polling place! I decided to give this a shot, because with a 50% complete canvass sheet in my hot little hands, I would be able to cross names off the list and plan a bite-sized GOTV operation to go find any supporters who were late to show up. My colleague, the 2020 candidate, kindly tagged me out so I could go on a lunch break.

The Race for School Trustee

If you're an avid reader of my blog, you'll recall that the mayoral election was held concurrently with a contested school board election. With different franchise rules (anybody living within thirty miles of Val Marie could vote for public school trustee), this meant there were two separate tables inside the municipal hall, each independently checking voter ID.

Name recognition seemed to be a problem for school trustee... which makes sense because we live in an electoral subdivision with three schools, and neither of the two candidates were associated with ours. At least twenty voters declined a school ballot because "they didn't know either one". (The incumbent, Susan Mouland, had paid the same $18.14 as me to get her flyer placed in every mailbox in town two weeks previously - a great illustration of the limits of postal advertising.)

In practice, although the eligible electorate was much larger, only about five people came out from the countryside to vote for school trustee without being allowed to vote for mayor.

No such problem for me, every single person who walked in the door requested a mayoral ballot. I was the star of the show!

The Day Drags On

Turnout was very healthy. In fact, every single identified supporter voted without needing that 7pm follow-up! A great problem to have, so my GOTV operation ended up amounting to nothing. Parks Canada has a very large footprint in Val Marie, so there was a big rush starting at 4pm when many of the scientific staff get off work.

The final turnout for the municipal election was 82 votes. With no official voter registry, it's impossible to calculate turnout by percentage, but that's 69% based on my personal voter list, and a whopping 82% of our census adult population (math problem, guess how many adult residents they counted in 2021). In the end, there was a significant undervote for the council race on the same ballot, so I really was the star of the show!

At the end of a very long day of sitting on my butt, I was pessimistic: every single one of my identified supporters turned up, but there were quite a few people coming to vote who I hadn't been able to contact. In particular, I realized that I had made very few contacts inside the assets department of the Park, which is in charge of doing all the blue-collar stuff that keeps our local tourist attraction functioning. When these younger people started to show up at 5pm, I started to expect a close loss.

The Count

If you've been following all these numbers really closely, there was one pair of spoiled ballots for Mayor and Council: somebody had written some initials in the corner, seemingly by accident, but this is clear grounds for rejection under Canadian election law. I would like to remind all my supporters to not draw any identifying marks on their ballot!

Drama and excitement as the doors finally closed at 8pm. I overdramatically shook the box and said "It sounds like I'll lose by 7 votes", the signed seals were ripped open, the ballots were dumped in a big pile, the counting sheets were readied... and the count was tied until the halfway point!! Finally, Roland Facette pulled slightly ahead by a couple votes, and I realized the narrow lead was going to be insurmountable. I said some kind words to Rolly and wished him the best for his latest term. (With no recounts on the table, all of the election workers seemed very happy to finally go home.)

Things I Learned

• I never wanted to say it, but I thought this race would just end up being a census of old families vs. transplants. Wrong! It's fair to say that I did better with newcomers, but during voter contact I was surprised on both counts by a number of exceptions.

• I had been wanting to meet everybody in town for years anyway, I just knew that I was never going to do it unless there was some kind of challenge behind it.

• I identified 36 1's and 2's, and I ended up getting 36 votes.

• The Sask NDP typically gets 15 or 16 votes in the Val Marie polling place, so I can now officially call myself an electoral overperformer. Thank you, thank you!

• Actually, there were multiple partisan NDP supporters who did not support my mayoral campaign.

• Traditional field strategies are a very effective basis for predicting the result of a small-scale election.

• Nobody mentioned either my known affiliation with the NDP, or the fact that I was visibly married to another man when I first moved to town.

• Losing was a relief. There is nothing like talking to every voter in town to make you realize that being elected to any public position is a solemn and terrifying responsibility.

In the end, it really was about the friends we made along the way: I was able to mobilize eight volunteers and I could have had access to even more, except there is absolutely no practical need for a large volunteer operation in an electorate of 118. My people were really passionate... and therefore tended to be more eager to get on my spreadsheet, it turned out.

Having lost a few races in my life: if you expect politics to satisfy your desire for fame and fortune, you'll run out of motivation really quickly, but working with a core group of dedicated people who like the things you represent is usually enough to keep me going. Thank you to everybody who has been a part of this community over the years!