Waiting for mail-in ballot results in Sask., parties reflect on organizing strategies

With tens ofthousands of mail-in ballots for the Saskatchewan provincial election yet to be counted, eight races are still too tight to call.

Mail-in ballots reached record-high levels due to the pandemic, with 61,255 ballots requested and more than 40,000 returned to Elections Saskatchewan by election day.

So how did each party plan to turn out the mail-in vote this year? What were their strategies?

Saskatchewan Party

Parties have databases of whosevotes they think they can count on. This year, the Sask. Party notably used robo-texts from '"Kate" as part of their campaign.

Jim Billington, communications director for the Saskatchewan Party campaign, said the party is feeling good about the mail-in ballot situation.

"We're feeling confident about this election. When you look at it, it's going to be a pretty historic day," Billington said on election night.

Billington said the campaign focused on urban centres, because that's where the battlegrounds were.

"You can't take anything for granted, though."

New Democratic Party

NDPcampaign press secretary Sally Houssersaid she is optimistic the mail ballot vote will tilt some of the undecided races in her party's favour.

"Progressive voters do seem more open to the idea of the mail-in ballot," she said."They trust it more than necessarily conservative supporters do. So I do expect to see a good result, probably higher than the average of the other counts, in those mail-in ballots.

"I think that once they're counted we will see a few more NDP seats flip our way."

With the pandemic, Houssersaid she thinks all partiesredoubledtheir efforts to identify their supporters early in the campaign.

"This time [we]even further focused on identifying that support earlier on and ensuring that as many people as possible requested the ballot and mailed it in before the deadline," she said. "In terms of organization, all campaigns put a significant stress on that part of the campaign."

CBC poll analyst ric Grenier saidduring CBC Saskatchewan's election broadcast that larger cities, where theridings hinging on mail-in ballotsare, tend to vote more for the NDP than other places in Saskatchewan. He said that could sway some of those undecided seats toward the NDP.

"We did see a poll done by the Angus Reid Institute done earlier on in the campaign that suggested that roughly abouttwo-thirds of NDP voters expressed concern about voting in person, whereas it was more or less the opposite for SaskatchewanParty voters," Grenier said.

"So we might expect that the mail-in ballots be more likely to boost the NDPin some of those ridings where it's close. Maybe it will be enough to overturn some of those margins, maybe it won't."