Doesn’t this sound familiar? Maybe we are not ready for electronic vote counting

A news report from CBC at 11:25am June 7, 2018 states,

“Voters at a few polling stations in Toronto, Ottawa and London, Ont., reported problems with new machines being used to check voter lists and tabulate votes on election day.

The glitches were causing long lineups, slowing down the election process, voters said.

There were reports of electronic vote tabulators not working, errors in electronic databases, internet connectivity outages, and staff who were not well versed in the new machines giving long explanations on how to use ballots.”

Does this sound familiar? I posted a blog a day after the New Brunswick provincial election in 2014, called “Panic in the Midnight Hour,” recounting the response to …. breakdown and glitches in the electronic voting machines.

As elections go Monday night was rather exciting not because of some very tight races, but because of the growing hysteria fueled by the on-air media coverage about the tabulation. “Glitches” with the tabulation machinery, “missing” data chips/cards (actually in transit to the central returning office), no one at Elections New Brunswick returning calls, and having to wing-it when you run out of relevant things to say, increased to an on-air panic rife with throw-back comments (“we won’t say this, but oh we are saying it”) about the 2000 U.S. election and Florida. This all peaked between midnight and one in the morning when an on-air personality grilling the head of Elections New Brunswick suggested this was all because some local returning officers had gone home for the night with the data chips and was also part of a conspiracy foisted on New Brunswick by a Toronto computer company that were suspiciously not answering their phones. It seemed lost on this personality that maybe no one was answering calls because they were too busy doing their jobs of tabulating the results and checking for correctness. (This it later turned out included representatives from the Toronto computer company, who were in Fredericton helping to solve the problem and oversee the process. So much for the central Canadian conspiracy). On top of all this, a PC candidate stated lawyers had told him not to concede and then a spokesman (not the leader) from the trailing Progressive Conservative Party announced they were not going to recognize the count unless it was done by hand. 

So much for trying to increase or even maintain public belief in the electoral system and the democratic process. Here’s another nail for democracy’s coffin, i.e., its legitimation crisis. 

According to the CBC, new technology such as e-Poll books and electronic vote tabulators were being used, the electronic vote tabulators having been tested in past Ontario byelections, and one guesses during the New Brunswick election. Most of us are familiar by the rather arcane and random functioning of our computer devices so it’s not a bit surprise the general (as opposed to computer-geek) public hired to work at polling stations are not going to be beset by common problems of program glitches, connectivity problems, and just learning a whole new type of machine. Problems at polling stations included the one at the Eastern Star Temple on Fanshawe Rd. East in London North Centre. According to the article the explanation was, “"It's our first time using these computer systems, so of course there's been a bit of a hiccup…. It is a new technology that we're using, but we've smoothed it out."

Elections Ontario does state that if all fails they would retain the paper ballots and undertake a manual count.

However, as in New Brunswick in this doesn’t help in the maintenance of public belief in the electoral system and the democratic process. As the CBC report, quoting a voter in Tillsonburg, concluded, "Oh, it was ridiculous. It was such a mess. … Although I'm a really committed voter, I worry that there's a lot of people that would just say 'oh, forget this.'"