We were coming out of the COVID lockdowns when I voted in the last municipal election..Like everything else, COVID had an impact on how the election was conducted. There were fewer voting stations and I was surprised to find that my ballot did not go into a box, but rather was fed into a machine and then placed into a ballot box. I was not given a receipt for my ballot to confirm the machine had read it correctly and appropriately counted my vote..Subsequently, I talked to a person who expressed considerable suspicion about the use of machines. He spent many weekends and evenings going door-to-door in his conservative riding talking to residents on behalf of his aldermanic candidate. Prior to the election he was convinced his candidate had a lock on the election. Instead, his candidate came in third. According to DJ Kelly who narrowly lost his election, "This means that Calgary just held an election in which not a single person looked at the ballots and no one, not even a judge, can legally do so. Under current legislation, no matter the argument or reasoning, for the first time in our 116-year history, there is no way to check the results.".Do I think there was cheating or machine manipulation in the last municipal election? I have no idea. How could I ever know?.But, I am troubled the shift to machine counting was not discussed publicly prior to the election..What issues drove the decision to use the machines?.What do we know about these machines?.Who owns and manufactures these machines?.Were the ballots hand-counted following the election to corroborate the machine count?.Was there even a representative sample of ballots hand counted to corroborate the machine count?.I have asked all these questions of my search engine and my city councillor and am awaiting an answer. This is not to disparage my councillor. She has many more pressing issues and my disquiet over machine counting in elections is not likely to rise very far on her to-do list..However, there does need to be a public conversation regarding the use of machines for ballot counting. If we don’t discuss it, then people like me will say the lack of transparency is troublesome and suggest we really don’t know if those elected received the most ballots. I trust a group of poll workers and observers hand-counting ballots. I do not trust a machine whose code is opaque and which does not give me a receipt confirming it captured my vote accurately..Calgary's city council would do well to authorize a publicly available third-party report on the processes used to authorize the machines and to select the machine vendors/owners..Such a report should also review the steps used to test, verify, and validate each machine, and the potential for the machines to print a receipt that confirms the intention of each voter..There also needs to be a process for contesting the results of machine counted votes and, if necessary, legislation to allow judicial recounts of machine counted elections..I'm sure the information necessary to write such a report is readily available and providing independent transparency about these machines will burnish the reputation of Calgary's city council..Of course, the reverse is also true: Failure to provide this kind of independent transparency will deepen council’s patina.
