Ballots to be counted by machine for first time

Officials express ‘utmost confidence’

This election will be Ontario’s first with electronic vote-counting machines, which Elections Ontario hopes will make results faster and more accurate.

The machines come from Dominion Voting Systems, which is based in Toronto but works worldwide. They cost $32 million and are a partial solution to a problem the agency says it has finding tens of thousands of people to work one very long day, monitoring balloting and counting after polls close at 9 p.m. It expected to need over 100,000 workers for this election but machines cut the staff need in half.

Ottawa has used electronic vote-tabulators in civic elections for more than 20 years with few known problems. Plenty of other places have, too. But New Brunswick, in its first attempt with Dominion devices in a 2014 provincial election, choked. Elections New Brunswick had to stop counting for hours, figure out what was going on, and re-enter some results.

The problem there, according to the agency, wasn’t with the counting machines themselves but with how a central database processed the numbers they produced.

“Elections Ontario has the utmost confidence in the accuracy of vote tabulators and has piloted them successfully in by-elections. So far the machines have performed without issue during advance polls,” said Cara Des Granges of Elections Ontario.

At heart, the machines are counting devices: Voters mark ballots the traditional way and feed them in. The machines register the voter’s choice and then drop the ballot into a secure box. At the end of voting, the returning officer at each poll uses an electronic command to print out the machine’s count and then calls the results in to Elections Ontario as if the team at the poll had just counted the ballots by hand.

So far, the machines have performed without issue during advance polls.

There’s no touchscreen or keypad for voters to use, no internet connection to be hacked. The machines could, in theory, have been sabotaged in advance, though they’ve been tested in Elections Ontario’s custody to make sure they’re counting and tallying the way they’re supposed to.

In case of challenges, all the original ballots are to be kept for a year. So will digital images of each ballot a machine scans, recorded with the machine’s interpretation of each one.

In a test in the 2016 byelection in Whitby-Oshawa, they performed “flawlessly,” working faster and more accurately than dumping ballots on tables and counting by hand, Elections Ontario boss Greg Essensa reported to the legislature then.

But if they fail, the old-fashioned way remains an option.

“In the event that the vote tabulator is not functioning, poll officials are instructed to count the votes manually,” Des Granges said.

Voters can appear but decline their ballots. Several dozen people typically do that in each riding. A blank ballot will go into a separate envelope to be counted at the end of the night, Des Granges said.

Voters can also mark their ballots so as to make them unreadable — choosing two or more candidates, for instance, or scribbling them up. Most people call those ballots “spoiled”; Elections Ontario calls them “rejected.” Those go into the machine but will be tallied as rejected ballots.