Yellowknife set to elect new city council tonight

Yellowknife residents will elect a new mayor and council today.

It's the last day voters can cast a ballot in the 2022 municipal election. Mayor Rebecca Alty was acclaimed, but the race is on for eight council seats, with 16 candidates in the running.

Polls close at 7 p.m., CBC News will publish the results here when they're released. 

This election, ballots are being counted by vote-counting machines called "tabulators." 

The city says election workers will phone the results in to the returning officer, and that unofficial results will be published on the city's website. Official results will be posted once all the results have been verified. It's unclear when exactly the list of elected councillors will published by the city.

This year's municipal election worked differently from previous ones — it was held by mail-in ballot.

This meant registered voters were supposed to get a ballot in the mail, which they could send back, or put in a drop box, ahead of election day.

But seven business days before Oct. 17, residents had yet to get their ballots in the mail. When they finally started arriving on Oct. 7, people reported getting ballots that didn't belong to them, or not getting a ballot at all.

Some residents also worried about the low number of in-person voting locations. 

In the past, there have been seven polling stations open on election day. Today, there are only two so-called "voter assistance locations," one at the Tree of Peace Friendship Centre and one at the Multiplex. There's also a mail-in ballot drop-box at city hall.

At around the lunch hour on Monday however, there were no lineups reported at either of the voter assistance locations.

In the 2018 municipal election, voter turnout was 56 per cent among the 9,544 eligible voters. 

On Monday, Yellowknife Mayor Rebecca Alty told CBC News that as of Sunday at 6 p.m., about 1,600 people had already voted.