With many Ontario municipalities scrapping in-person ballot boxes in favour of tech-only voting methods, a systems expert believes higher standards and more verification are necessary before voting machines and vote tabulators receive the level of trust Canadians currently place in them..“We need our elections to be legitimate, and we need this to succeed for all of our sakes. And so we can't be using this technology with no backstop, with no transparency," Aleksander Essex, an associate professor of software engineering with a specialization in cybersecurity and applied cryptography at Western University, told the Western Standard..In the recent Ontario municipal elections, problems began Oct. 7, the first day of advance polling. Voters in the Thunder Bay ward of McKellar who cast ballots online were wrongly given the list of candidates running in Red River. After a voter notified the clerk’s office of the problem, the platform was paused until it could be corrected..City clerk Krista Power said the “confirmed anomaly” was the result of a program error made by the vendor providing the online platform, reported CBC News. Only 27 voters were affected, but had a margin of victory been lower than that, a byelection would have been called..The Thunder Bay Catholic District School Board trustees election race also had problems. The ballot in the municipality of Shuniah omitted candidate Matt Pearson. Shuniah clerk Kerry Bellamy told TBnewswatch the omission was not known until a resident notified them late in the afternoon of election day. All other Catholic School District election results are being withheld until a new election can be held for the Shuniah district..Dryden also had problems in its English Public School Board trustee race. A press release on election day revealed some voters received credentials from both the City of Dryden and the Keewatin Patricia District School Board, allowing them to cast multiple votes for trustees. The election was suspended and will be held again at a later date..Essex, who runs Whisper Lab, a cyber security research group at Western University, says such incidents could have been avoided by procedures that are standard in most other places electronic voting is conducted..“If we do something called logic and accuracy testing, that would traditionally pick that up. I don't know what we're doing here,” Essex said..“We did see a number of cities extending their voting periods, and that means they have to invoke emergency powers under the [Municipal Elections] act to do that. It was in many cases just for a half-hour or an hour. But we saw a bunch of cities that had a variety of smaller problems, and we are following up on investigating if there's a common link.”.Essex doubts in-depth answers will be forthcoming..“The cities are very secretive, as are the vendors, about what they're doing, and specifically what happened in these instances. We can get some ideas, but we won't know until they explain it, and there is a chance that they simply won't,” he said..“There's no laws to make them explain themselves on this file, so you just have to take their word for it.”.Nicole Goodman, associate professor of political science at Brock University, is working alongside Essex and the CIO Strategy Council — a non-profit that brings together Canada's chief information officers to find solutions to information and communications technology challenges — to develop standards to guide the use of vote tabulators and electronic poll books..The process of developing standards for Ontario provincial elections was initiated by Elections Ontario, but the strategy council and professors are developing a voluntary set of standards for municipalities across Canada..“Aleks and I put in a proposal for that because we had been writing about it and calling on people to do something, and we just hadn't seen the political will. Sometimes government acts proactively, but more often than not they respond reactively to situations, and as someone who cares about elections, we didn't want to see that happen," Goodman said in an interview..“Canada is the only jurisdiction in the world that's using these technologies and doesn't have some kind of regulations or standards or guidelines in place.".Goodman said most municipal officials she spoke to welcome standards being established, and some want to help lead efforts to fill the void.
