Polling booth confidential
Elections P.E.I. facing investigation from privacy commissioner over lists of who voted
Elections P.E.I. is being investigated by the province’s privacy commissioner over a practice increasingly in use in other provinces.
At issue is the practice of Elections P.E.I. providing political parties with access to the electronic lists of individuals who have voted, which are updated in real-time, on election day.
P.E.I.’s privacy commissioner Karen Rose is investigating this practice, which was used for the first time during the November 2017 byelection in the district of Charlottetown-Parkdale.
Drew Westwater, the deputy chief electoral officer for Elections Alberta, said the distribution of lists of which residents have voted has been common practice for years in most provinces. Like Elections P.E.I., the Alberta body recently allowed parties to have access to an electronic list, updated frequently, in a byelection in Calgary-Lougheed.
“They’re entitled to that information anyway. They currently get it when they have scrutineers working in the polls,” Westwater said.
Officials from Elections B.C. and Elections Ontario both said the agencies provide political parties with electronic access to information of who has voted.
Rose told CBC News earlier this week that her office was investigating whether Elections P.E.I. can disclose the information to parties electronically and whether “reasonable security measures [are] in place to protect the voter information from unauthorized collection, use or disclosure.”
The investigation concerns a software application called “VoterView,” used by Elections P.E.I. A representative from the privacy commissioner’s office said the software features an online portal where a single representative of each candidate can access information about the voters list, including updates of who has voted. These lists are updated every 15 minutes on election day.
Representatives of both the Liberal, PC and Green parties of P.E.I. told The Guardian the software allowed parties to better focus their efforts on turning out their supporters on election day.
Jordan Bober, who worked as a campaign staffer during the successful byelection campaign of Green MLA Hannah Bell, called the software a “brilliant system.” Bober has worked on election campaigns for the Greens in B.C., as well as P.E.I., and is currently working with the party on its election campaign in New Brunswick.
In past elections, Bober said the process for collecting information on who has or has not voted was often a tedious, labour-intensive process. Political parties often rely on an army of volunteer scrutineers and “runners” in individual polling stations who physically cross off the names of individuals who have voted.
“The traditional way of doing this, with the runners and the data entry and stuff, actually puts smaller parties with fewer resources, or independent candidates at a pretty big disadvantage relative to the bigger parties,” Bober said.
Bober said the login access to the VoterView portal was restricted to one individual per party by Elections P.E.I.
“As far as privacy, I actually think this is a superior system for the protection of privacy because it actually passes through fewer hands,” he said.
Westwater said allowing political parties to update their voters lists more easily also helps encourage voter turnout, as parties are more effectively able to push their supporters out to vote.
“We have a number of different stakeholders in the electoral process and obviously the candidates, the parties are an important part of that. We try to encourage as best we can voter turnout at every election,” Westwater said.
Elections P.E.I. declined to comment for this story.