Chief Electoral Officer Harry Neufeld said he and his senior managers at Elections B.C. are looking at ways to cope with a $1 million funding shortfall next year, after a government committee made its budget recommendations yesterday.

“We've got some hard work to do here to grapple with the implications,” said Neufeld, who runs the non-partisan office that oversees provincial elections. “It puts us in quite a quandary.”

In a report released Dec. 18, the Tyee reported, the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services Standing recommended Elections B.C. get $7.8 million, about $1 million less than the agency requested, to cover its ongoing operating costs.

Neufeld said the agency will likely have to cancel plans to move its three offices into one central location and will reconsider replacing its six-year-old computer system “which is at end of life.”

Nor will the agency be able to add two staff positions required to cope with the effect of Bill 42, he said. That bill made numerous changes to the Election Act that Elections B.C. administers. Neufeld said he planned to hire a compliance and enforcement officer to make sure the Act is enforced fairly across the province, as well as a junior person to register voters by phone.

On the upside, said Neufeld, the committee approved Elections B.C.'s requests for capital costs and for running the May 12 election and referendum.

“The implications are down the road,” he said. The tight budget, projected to stay the same for the next three years, will make it hard to be ready for the 2013 election, he said. “You don't get a second chance. You can't fail.”

The committee includes five Liberal and four NDP MLAs. NDP MLA Bruce Ralston said the shortfall for Elections B.C. was one of the reasons he voted against the committee's report, as did other NDP MLAs. “My impression of them is their budgeting is very precise, very careful,” he said. “I think they will be impacted in a negative way . . . It's not really good for democracy.”

It's not like the committee members hadn't been reminded what the agency does. “Democracy costs a lot of money,” Neufeld told the committee during his Dec. 1 presentation, according to hansard. “We're doing our part to try and keep those costs in line, but these are constitutionally guaranteed rights that voters have to vote in elections.

“We need an infrastructure ongoing so we can pull off these big events when they come along. If we don't have that, we run the risk that elections are not going to be administered in a way that's seen as fair and appropriate under our constitution.”

Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee’s Legislative Bureau Chief in Victoria. Reach him here.