Jensen says being a returning officer is interesting work
April 28, 2025, 10:32 am
Joey Light
Debra Jensen is the returning officer for Riding Mountain, which includes the St. Lazare, McAuley, and Manson areas. This is Jensen’s first time working as returning officer for the federal election. She says she finds being a returning officer interesting work.
“This is my first time federally. I have done three provincial elections, and probably 33 years of municipal elections,” she said last week.
“It’s interesting work, it’s kind of part time for a very short time. For Riding Mountain electoral district, the job is a matter of establishing all your polling places throughout the riding, ensuring we have sufficient staff on hand to staff all of those polls—whether it be advance, ordinary, or mobile polls—and dealing with the candidates and any of their requests, taking their nominations, as well as looking after all the finances, getting everyone paid, and getting everyone trained.”
Jensen says the riding’s territory has expanded since the last election.
“Because of the redistribution we cover a little bit of a bigger territory so it’s a matter of becoming familiar with some new polling areas that are now within our riding.”
Jensen says the snap election means much of the work that is done is manual as opposed to electronic.
“If the election would have been called in the fall we would have been doing the electronic strike off, but because of the snap election everything here is basically still manual. So everyone calls in the results to our returning offices or to our AARO offices that we have and then we upload it to our system and it’s instant, it goes right to Ottawa.”
Jensen says getting young voters out to vote is one of their main goals.
“This year we were able to hire what we call community relations officers and they were specific to their demographic, so we had a community relations officer for the seniors and some that targeted the youth. So in those cases we try to get four youth throughout our riding that would go to the schoold and explain what we were looking for—people to work at the polls—and making sure if they are over the age of 18 that they registered, went online and they could do that. So just trying to really promote getting some of the younger people to come and really work at our polls was one of our goals.
“As a young voter I think it’s important that they look at the platforms of the different parties and really exercise their right to vote and be knowledgable about what’s going on and having a say in the outcome.”
Jensen says fewer polling places are available in this year’s election.
“I think our challenge mainly is around the fact that some of our communities are getting smaller and so our electors are having to drive greater distances to polling places and being able to find people who want to work at the polls.
In this election in particular, advanced polls were held over Easter weekend so some people don’t want to give up their weekend wether it’s religious or just family time to actually spend four days at the poll and it’s a long day for people.”
