Justin Towndale and Sarah Good
Editor’s note: our introduction draws comparisons to political leaders. This is not to say that Towndale himself has made claims of foul play in the results — he hasn’t.
Editor’s note: This article originally reported Justin Towndale’s online vote total as 2,671, the figure in the City of Cornwall’s statement. The City has since confirmed in writing that the correct figure is 2,617. The certified total of 4,559 is unchanged.
The year is 2026. Roughly six years ago, Donald Trump successfully convinced all of his supporters that there was a conspiracy to steal the 2020 Presidential Election from him. And what was this based on? It was based largely on vague graphs that displayed the election’s results over time — specifically when big mail-in polling stations reported results that heavily favoured President-elect Biden.
Perhaps more succinctly, Trump based his claims on weaponized incompetence. In politics, weaponized incompetence usually takes form in somebody intentionally refusing to acknowledge basic concepts or do surface-level research to understand a very simple explanation. In Trump’s case, it was looking at the aforementioned “specific graphs,” and, despite certainly knowing that there was no foul play involved, claiming to his followers that Biden staged a coup against America.
Recently, in Brazil, Flavio Bolsonaro has made similar claims after his defeat to President Lula. And in the wake of his defeat, where did he flee to? Trump’s America.
What does this have to do with Cornwall?
On election night at the Benson Centre, a human error caused a major display error in the live unofficial results shared by the City. This error was not made public until the evening of the following day, when the City first sent out a vague press release disclosing the mistake. In this initial statement, the City simply announced that Mayor Towndale’s unofficial vote count was inaccurate and that Towndale had in fact received over 2,000 more votes than the preliminary results showed.
To be clear, this is a major mistake. It’s an unacceptable one, a baffling one, and one that needs to be answered for. The reason that this mistake is so consequential, though, is that it opened the floodgates for Cornwall’s tinfoil hat-wearing brigade.
As somebody who was covering the event, upon hearing this news, I had a pretty good idea of what had happened: an election worker, in inputting numbers into the City’s preliminary vote display, merely made a clerical error. At the time, I had assumed that somebody had just forgotten to add a zero somewhere.
I was wrong in the latter assumption, but not by much. In a statement made by the City on the Wednesday after the election, it was revealed that a City worker had mistakenly entered the 199 votes in the “decline to vote” column into Mayor Towndale’s results display for the online polling station return. This was a mistake of 2,472 votes, as Towndale had actually received 2,671 votes from this return.
It was an easy mistake to make, but one that will sadly leave a stain on the perception of this election’s results — a sizable portion of Cornwall’s population has already decided that the election must have been rigged. There is a clear explanation for everything that occurred on election night, but it does not matter.
In 2026, you do not have to let THE truth get in the way of YOUR truth! This error sprinkled one grain of doubt into the election, and now anybody who was not happy with the results can claim that there was a conspiracy to rig it all or that there must be a recount.
To be clear, I don’t think that the online reaction is entirely explicit weaponized incompetence. Some of it is just incompetence, which is to say that people truly do not understand how anything works.
A lot of it, though, is what I will call implicit weaponized incompetence. Do I earnestly believe that the majority of the people interacting with this news are too dumb to grasp the concept of a basic clerical error? No, of course not. But these people have agendas. They have desires. These are the same people who have been slandering the names of the sitting Council for the entirety of the election campaign. Of course they are going to take the path of least resistance and claim that the election’s results are not credible — it gets them closer to the result that they want.
Any of these people could take the time to think critically about what occurred, realize that it was, in fact, an isolated clerical error, and be on their merry ways. They could, perhaps, consider that the unofficial election results contain the word ‘unofficial’ for a reason. They could consider that, in questioning the final results of the election, they are questioning the seismic gap in safeguards between the unofficial results process and the official verification process. These people will not do this, however. Whether intentionally or subconsciously, they are weaponizing their own incompetence.
The idea that there should be an entire re-election due to this mistake is a laughable one. It is far more laughable when you consider that these are the same people who have been whining online about Council’s salary for years. The City’s 2026 budget estimated that this election would cost $261,950. To want to spend that money (or more likely, a sizable fraction of it) again on the basis of one person’s simple mistake is a mind-numbingly ill-informed position to take.
Perhaps more responsible in the face of what has happened in this election would be a manual recount. This would also cost Cornwall taxpayers some money, but it would at least not be entirely unprecedented and based on somebody’s toilet-time Facebook feed-scrolling.
Moving on…
I’m not going to name names here, but I’ve seen multiple Council-hopefuls take to Facebook in the wake of the City’s error. At best, they’re sharing vague skepticism from the Cornwall Community Page, and at worst they’re publicly questioning the entire election outcome.
This kind of sentiment is in remarkably bad taste. You lost; get over it.
This is a prime example of the weaponization of incompetence. Some of the individual Council candidates who prompted this section have had their fair share of political experience. To make such statements (some of which now have hundreds of likes and comments) is an action that can only be explained by an unwillingness to understand the basic details of a situation. Most likely is that this unwillingness is rooted in the shame that came with failing to secure a seat on City Council.
To Conclude
The City’s mistake is one that is easily explained: somebody made a clerical error. It’s also one that should not easily be forgotten. Not only did it cause a lot of confusion on the night of the election, but it also opened Pandora’s Box for dissatisfied conspiracy theorists. The City needs to answer for this mistake beyond the (admittedly sufficient) explanation as to what occurred.
But to close, I just want to reiterate that the City’s certified election results are accurate. There are too many safeguards in place which ensure that this is the case. The City provides live unofficial results as a courtesy; per Section 55 of the Municipal Elections Act, 1996, a municipality is only required to provide accessible results “as soon as possible after voting day.”
The Municipal Elections Act also outlines a fair bit of the process in applying for a recount in Sections 56-58. Council may vote to have one, certain local boards may vote to have one, or any of you may apply to a Superior Justice that there should be a recount. Typically, a Justice is informed enough to understand that a routine clerical error isn’t grounds for a recount in an election won by over 3,000 votes, but perhaps you can catch them on a good day!
Live results are not, were not, and were never meant to be certified on the fly for the very reason that we saw on election night: because human error does indeed happen. But this human error cannot carry over to the certified election results. People would know this if they did their due diligence in researching Ontario’s municipal election process. But they don’t.
Weaponized incompetence.
About the Author
Mateo, I would really like to agree with you, but there have been just too many “human errors” coming from City Hall over the last few years; there has been just too much incompetence, look no further than the whole issue about Ms. Good’s former election expenses, look no further than the cost of the balloon called the Arts Centre.
I just learned, and this may only be a rumour which needs verifying, that another $750,000 has been added to the cost of the Centre for a sound system. Let’s hope it was included in the budget and is not an add-on, if it is an add-on we are all being taken to the cleaners.
Hi Mateo,
I liked the article. I feel that the entire thing was “much ado about nothing”. It was a clerical error that was corrected the next day. No razor-thin margin. No hiding the error. And ultimately this did not change the mayoral result.
I think that we must allow for human error in this type of thing. Anyone inputting data can make this kind of error. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the clerk who mistyped the numbers.
One thing that is missing in the equation is the difference between the Trump election and ours: prior to the 2020 election, Trump made many emphatic efforts to prime the collective conspiracy mind about a potential “rigged” election. He worked very hard to delegitimize the electoral process BEFORE the election by condemning mail-in ballots and telling his supporters that “the only way they could lose” the election was if it was rigged. We had a fair bit of nastiness online with respect to the candidates, but otherwise, I don’t think many of us ever thought that we would or even could have a stolen election locally.
Will this leave a “stain” on the perception of these election results? I don’t think it will. I hope it won’t. And if it does, that stain will likely remain for those who need more excitement in their lives.
Or sore losers.
I don’t think you understand what weaponized incompetence means. Maybe try using “a fallacy of irrelevance” or “Non Sequitur”.
Weaponized incompetence is more like a journalist who intentionally writes a bad article, to try to get out of having to write more articles in the future.