Elections Canada head suggests candidacy rules should be reviewed after byelection delays

Canada's chief electoral officer says it's time to review candidacy rules after a massive ballot caused delays in declaring byelection results for the second time this year.

Ballots for Monday's byelection in the Montreal riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun included the names of 91 candidates.

Special ballots nearly a metre in length had to be printed to accommodate all the names. The overly large ballots caused delays in vote counting and a final result wasn't announced until after 2:45 a.m. ET Tuesday.

The lengthy ballot also created problems for voters with accessibility issues, Stéphane Perrault, head of Elections Canada, told a committee of senators on Tuesday.

«This situation is starting to raise accessibility issues for voters who may be blind or have other accessibility issues. And so I think that we need to look at the rules,» Perrault said in French.

LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was the second byelection this year to feature a very long ballot. Ballots for the Toronto-St. Paul's byelection in June listed 84 candidates; final results in that contest were not released until 4:30 a.m. ET the next day.

Most of the candidates in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun and Toronto-St. Paul's were linked to an electoral reform advocacy group called the Longest Ballot Committee. The group wants to put a citizens' assembly in charge of electoral reform and says political parties are too reluctant to make the government more representative of the electorate.

«We can say without a doubt our campaign was a success because we had so much fun and sparked important conversations about our shared democracy,» the group's organizers said in a statement on Tuesday.

Election rules used to require that candidates place a $1,000 deposit in order to run. That requirement