Yellowknife elects new city council

Yellowknife residents have elected a new city council, and despite an overwhelmingly male pool of candidates, the elected council is a relatively mixed group.

"To me it reflects how Yellowknife is a diverse and sort of socially aware community, which I think is really cool," said Cat McGurk, who received the second-highest number of votes.

"Now that Garett [Cochrane] and I have been elected, we are the most openly queer people that have sat on council," said McGurk, adding that council also has two Indigenous members with Cochrane and incumbent Stacie Arden Smith.

Yellowknifers were tasked with picking eight candidates from a group of 16. Mayor Rebecca Alty was acclaimed. 

There are six new faces on council. Incumbents Smith and Steve Payne were re-elected.

Polls closed at 7 p.m. The unofficial results are here. The top eight names are those who made it onto council:

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

Official results will be posted to the city's website once all the results have been verified. 

Several candidates gathered in camps to watch the results come in Monday night.

Cat McGurk, Tom McLennan and Rob Warburton were at Makerspace YK. 

Meanwhile, Steve Payne, Rommel Silverio, Dwayne Simmons and Stacie Arden Smith were at the Monkey Tree Pub. Devon Hodder appeared at both celebrations.

At the Monkey Tree, Dwayne Simmons, who didn't make it onto council, said he was disappointed by the results, but thanked his voters for their support. 

"I wanted to get in and shake things up, but it's democracy at its finest, it spoke, it is what it is," he said. 

Simmons said the next council should make the city's economic outlook a priority.

"There's some tough times coming," he said. "By the time we get to the next election Diavik [Diamond Mine] is probably already closed and there's certain things we need to get done now to set us up for a promising future." 

Incumbent Smith, who got the third-most votes, said she was "terrified" on election night, but felt relief as the numbers started rolling in. 

"A great mahsi for the vote of confidence," she said in reaction to the results.

Steve Payne thanked voters for giving him a third term.

He said he would miss working with the previous council, especially Rommel Silverio, the only incumbent who wasn't re-elected. 

Although he was happy for the win, Payne said he felt the decision to conduct the election by mail-in ballots was "a big fail."  

"You can see our numbers are way down," he said. 

"I think mail-in ballots should have been a secondary source of voting. I think we should have stuck with what we normally do." 

Voter turnout

According to the unofficial results, voter turnout is down significantly when compared with the last municipal election.

There were 8,190 eligible voters, but only 48 per cent of them cast ballots.

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

Earlier on Monday, Yellowknife Mayor Rebecca Alty told CBC News that as of Sunday at 6 p.m., about 1,600 people had voted ahead of election day.

The city reports that 3,004 people voted by mail, while 935 people voted in person at a voter assistance location.

This year's municipal election was held by mail-in ballot, a change from previous elections.

It 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. On Monday, 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, there were no lineups reported at either of the voter assistance locations.