Faith in Internet voting took a major hit Tuesday when the company in charge of disseminating results in a Canadian city had to apologize for delays in what one major newspaper there described as a "fiasco."
The episode may be instructive for U.S. cities since the company in question, Scytl, two years ago acquired 100 percent of SOE Software, the leading provider of election-management software in the United States.
The U.S. may not be too far from Internet voting. In January, President Obama's special commission on election reform recommended future electronic voting, even suggesting tablet computers, such as iPads, be used to cast votes, as WND exclusively reported.
Tuesday's elections in Ontario were seen as a major test of Internet voting as an entire municipality, Leamington, for the first time utilized online-only voting, with all balloting being run via Scytl.
Every registered voter in Leamington, with a population of about 17,000, had to cast ballots through a mobile device or computer.
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The municipality's website says "this sole method of voting follows Council's strategic plan to be environmentally friendly and to embrace technology."
"This cost effective type of voting will also address accessible voters' issues," said the site.
Leamington was just one of several Ontario townships that saw delayed results with Scytl's vote-counting. The municipality is reportedly considering withholding payment to Scytl.
Ontario's Cornwall Seaway News called the delayed results an "election night fiasco."
The newspaper reported Scytl issued an apology for the nearly three-hour delay in announcing the winners in the municipal elections, leaving voters without results past midnight.
Scytl Canada North America General Manager Brian O'Connor explained in a statement that the company's "quality assurance process detected an inconsistency in the naming of certain election results."
"Upon the detection of an anomaly, Scytl reran the tabulation and conducted a thorough manual audit," OÇonnor said.
An opinion piece by the editor of the local Standard-Freeholder newspaper complained Scytl's explanation is "lacking and in 2014 not enough to either understand the problem or explain the delay."
Hugo Rodriguez, managing editor of the Standard-Freeholder, said, "No one questions Scytl's requirement to provide accurate results. A file-naming inconsistency should and could have been caught in beta testing and quality assurance testing before the company started peddling the product and taking people's cash. That the one which happened Monday night wasn't caught is also lacking – particularly considering the overall number of votes to be counted across all six townships."
U.S. next?
In January, Obama's 10-person Presidential Commission on Election Administration released its recommendations in a 99-page document available online.
Much of the media coverage of the commission's conclusions focused on a summary of key recommendations provided by the White House.
The recommendations are:
- Modernization of the registration process through continued expansion of online voter registration and expanded state collaboration in improving the accuracy of voter lists;
- Measures to improve access to the polls through expansion of the period for voting before the traditional Election Day and through the selection of suitable, well-equipped polling place facilities, such as schools;
- State-of-the-art techniques to assure efficient management of polling places;
- Reforms of the standard-setting and certification process for new voting technology to address soon-to-be antiquated voting machines and to encourage innovation and the adoption of widely available off-the-shelf technologies.
However, a WND review of the commission's full paper finds far more extensive recommendations for electronic voting.
The document states that software-only products "can be integrated with off-the-shelf commercial hardware components such as computers, laptops, tablets, scanners, printers, and even machine-readable code scanners and signature pad products."
"Tablet computers such as iPads are common components of these new technologies. They can be integrated into the check-in, voting and verification processes in the polling place."
The commission called attention to new technologies that allow voters to "pre-fill" sample ballots at home that can be later scanned at the polling place.
The panel addressed concerns that such technologies can be hacked.
The commission stated: "The fact that a tablet or off-the-shelf computer can be hacked or can break down does not mean such technology is inherently less secure than existing ballot marking methods if proper precautions are taken."
The concept of electronic voting is already being tested.
WND reported in 2012 that Scytl announced the successful implementation of technology that allows ballots to be cast using Google and Apple smartphones and tablet computers.
Obama's panel was chaired by Robert F. Bauer, the president's personal attorney who served as White House counsel until 2011.
With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott.