Local officials defend vote tabulations

NB election raises concerns

A bizarre vote-counting snafu in New Brunswick’s provincial election on Monday has led to grumblings for a recount — and questions about how votes are tabulated.

New Brunswick’s Liberal party led by Brian Gallant was declared the winner, but only after vote-counting was suspended for hours due to technical problems with the ballot- scanning machines. There were reports of numerical discrepancies and missing memory cards.

David Alward, the province’s Tory premier, conceded defeat — but said voters are owed a “thorough review” of what happened.

It was New Brunswick’s first provincewide election involving more than 700 electronic tabulation devices provided by Dominion Voting Systems.

Founded in Toronto in 2002, the firm has been contracted for vote-counting technology in jurisdictions across Canada — including Windsor-Essex.

LaSalle clerk Brenda Andreatta said this year’s municipal election (on Oct. 27) will be the third time LaSalle has retained Dominion Voting devices for the official vote count.

“We’re using (the tabulators) again this year in conjunction with vote-by-mail,” Andreatta said.

Andreatta said there were no problems in the previous occasions LaSalle used Dominion Voting, and she doesn’t anticipate any this time either.

“We do a fair bit of logic and accuracy testing of the tabulators prior to election day. We take test ballots for all the races and feed them through the tabu- lators, then compare the results to a manual count,” Andreatta said. “We make sure the tabulators are correctly reading the marks on the ballot.”

Andreatta said Dominion Voting provides an “audited trail technology system” that stores and tracks an electronic image of every ballot that’s processed.

The system is so comprehensive that Andreatta said one losing candidate in LaSalle’s 2010 election decided against asking for a manual recount after being shown the electronic audit trail.

“We know with certainty that we are never out a single ballot,” Andreatta said.

Part of that certainty may be a matter of scale. Elections in the Town of LaSalle only require two tabulating machines. Around 10,000 people voted in the municipality’s 2010 election — compared to hundreds of machines and hundreds of thousands of voters in New Brunswick.

This fall’s upcoming election will also be the third time the Town of Lakeshore has depended on Dominion Voting devices.

“We haven’t had any issues to date,” said Lakeshore clerk Mary Masse.

“But we use vote-by-mail, so we don’t have numerous polling stations located through the municipality. We do all the scanning and tabulating here at the town hall. All the ballots are run through two scanners ... I think our process is more simplified (than New Brunswick).”

Dominion Voting could not be reached for comment.

The City of Windsor does not use Dominion Voting Systems.

Chuck Scarpelli, the city’s manager of records and elections, said Windsor has rented devices from U.S.-based Election Systems & Software since 2002.

ESS tabulating machines — about 100 in all — are set up at each polling station. Paper ballots are scanned and stored on-site, in the presence of the voter. A roving team from the city’s IT department is available to troubleshoot.

“We haven’t had anything happen. The machines run beautifully,” Scarpelli said. “In 2002, we had an exit survey that we gave to voters as they came out of the polls. We asked them what they thought of the machines.

“Overwhelmingly, people said they loved them.”

Previous voting technology used by the City of Windsor has included computer punch cards and centralized counting of ballots. “It was very timeconsuming,” Scarpelli said.

“THE MACHINES RUN BEAUTIFULLY.” CHUCK SCARPELLI