Cambridge confident in its online voting system
The City of Cambridge is hoping the second rollout of online voting will be the only means of casting a ballot in the future.
As was the case in the 2014 municipal election, online voting will accompany the 50 polling stations in the city to allow more accessibility for voters. Online voting begins Tuesday at 10 a.m. and will run until Oct. 22 at 7:59 p.m. Telephone voting, which was an option in 2014, is no longer available. City clerk Michael Di Lullo didn’t have the exact number of voters by telephone in 2014, but surmised the number was “really low.” But that wasn’t the reason for scrapping the option, as security was the main concern. Di Lullo is confident in the security of online voting, as a two-stage security system was put in place with Dominion Voting Systems Inc. — also the provider in 2014 — for the 2018 election. Besides a PIN number that has to be entered, voters will also have to answer a unique question about themselves by email to enter their birth date, which strikes them off the voting list once they cast their online ballot.
Di Lullo is hoping that with more security added to online voting it will quell public fears of a data breach or the possibility of the election being hacked by an outside source. In 2014, 5,171 of 25,395 voters cast ballots online.
The city was the victim of a security breach in February when its website was hacked by cryptocurrency miners through a vulnerable text-to-voice plugin. Di Lullo said the city uses a different provider for online voting and Dominion is a “tried, tested” company. The company is under contract with the city until 2022. Di Lullo said it’s impossible to say that there will never be a breach with voting. But “there’s safeguards in place,” he said.
“The vendor has proper security features in place and that’s why we’re going with the vendor, but I can’t foresee the future. Anything can happen in the future. But we have to do everything we can in our will to make sure these things don’t happen. The vendor has made sure to put in the right safeguards to make sure that things go as smoothly as it did in 2014.”
Di Lullo understands people feel a comfort level with voting in person and “to touch a pen,” but he said online voting is no different than banking online or even using a debit card to withdraw money.
“The one thing people miss in this whole message is the whole point of democracy is to have confidence in the system and to allow trust in the voters. Voters have to educate themselves, voters have to believe in the democratic system.”
Online voting does have its skeptics though, including Cameron Shelley, a lecturer in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Shelley does accept that online voting makes the process more accessible, but believes that accessibility comes with a cost.
“With e-voting, such as Cambridge or other places in Ontario, we’re extending absentee balloting to the entire electorate,” he said, noting that absentee balloting always existed, with a limited number of voters using mail-in ballots.