AT AODA ALLIANCE’S REQUEST, ELECTIONS ONTARIO EXTENDS DEADLINE TO JUNE 3, 2011 TO GIVE FEEDBACK ON ACCESSIBILITY OF PROPOSED OCTOBER 2011 ELECTION’S POLLING STATION LOCATIONS

May 6, 2011

SUMMARY

At the request of the AODA Alliance, Elections Ontario has extended the deadline
to June 3, 2011 for giving your feedback on the accessibility of the locations
that Elections Ontario proposes to use for polling stations in the October 2011
general election. See details below.

A number of people reported to us that the link was broken that we got from
Elections Ontario for looking up your polling station location on the Elections
Ontario website, and giving your feedback. At our request, Elections Ontario
created a shorter link that should work. It is:

We appreciate Elections Ontario’s flexibility and responsiveness to our requests
on this issue. Please take advantage of this opportunity to give Elections
Ontario your feedback on the accessibility of proposed polling station
locations. We won this opportunity to have input into polling station location
last year, via amendments that we proposed to Bill 231, legislation to reform
and modernize Ontario elections.

At our request, Elections Ontario has also emailed us an Excel file of all
proposed polling stations in Ontario. We post this here as a
downloadable file, as a permanent public record of their starting point in this
process. To download this file, click here:
VotingLocationFileMarch11.xls

Send us your feedback. Write us at:
aodafeedback@gmail.com

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A MESSAGE FROM Elections Ontario

Elections Ontario emailed the following information to us, for public distribution:

“One of the most significant amendments to Ontario’s election laws requires that all voting locations be accessible. To make sure Elections Ontario met this requirement, we established Site Accessibility Standards in consultation with accessibility experts.

Using these standards Elections Ontario has assessed the accessibility of more
than 11,000 potential voting locations and has compiled a list of almost 8,000
sites.

On April 6, Elections Ontario asked for feedback from the public by May 6 on
nearly 8,000 possible sites that passed our initial inspection. We have extended
the public consultation process for another month to June 3, 2011.

You can visit

www.elections.on.ca to view all proposed locations. Elections Ontario welcomes all feedback and is asking the public to help propose alternative accessible locations that may be used for elections.

Any feedback received between April 6 and June 3 will be included in Elections
Ontario’s report on the public consultation process. However, we welcome public
feedback at any time and can be reached through our general inquiries email
address at

info@elections.on.ca.”