Touch-screen voting electrifies electorates  
By Scott Foster

OTTAWA — Voters in the next federal election may see pencils and paper vanish from their polling stations.

Integrated circuits, like this one, hold  voter information. They are placed on smart cards and read by touch-screen voting machines.

People in the elections software industry and at Elections Canada say the time is ripe for the nationwide introduction of such new voting technology as touch-screen monitors.

Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley will soon make a decision on whether to change Canada’s voting process, says Elections Canada spokesperson, James Hale.

This decision could turn polling stations into rows of computer screens. Voters would have to familiarize themselves with a new breed of voting aids — such as  "smart cards" containing encrypted voter information on tiny integrated circuits.

"It’s certainly on the horizon," Hale says. "The chief electoral officer has quite a broad interest in different types of electronic voting."

Kingsley is currently tracking the comfort levels of voters in select municipalities across Canada and several U.S. counties that have already introduced touch-screen voting technology.

Election Inc.

The City of Barrie first used touch-screen technology in its 1997 municipal election, and in its last election, on Nov. 13,  all voting stations were converted to touch-screen kiosks.

There are 75 other Canadian cities adopting the new elections technology, including Toronto, Hamilton and Ottawa. Some, including Toronto, are piloting touch-screen systems in combination with optical readers, which count votes digitally at lightning speed. Both machines send all information to a central computer.

Thanks to the highly controversial recount of paper ballots in Florida during the U.S. presidential election, interest in the technology has hit an all-time high, says Clint Rickards, spokesperson for Global Elections Systems Inc. 

Voters confidence in the conventional system was badly shaken, he says.

"What we’re hearing in the last few weeks is that,  now, the voters do not feel secure that their vote is going to be counted as they cast it. You’ve got your election people who run the elections saying, 'We don’t want to go through this fiasco again.' And you’ve got your candidates saying, ‘I don’t trust the totals.' "

And those concerns aren't unique to North America. Global is at the proposal stage of providing nationwide touch-screen voting in Ireland and has submitted a $90-million bid for a three-year deal to supply equipment to the Philippines.

Secure system

The system is successful because it’s convenient for voters, says John Sisson, Barrie’s deputy city clerk. Centralized voter lists on mainframe computers allowed Barrie residents to vote at any station in any ward during the city’s Nov. 13 election. Polling stations also opened six days in advance, allowing residents to choose the most convenient day to vote.

The AccuVote-TS computer makes paper ballots obsolete. It sends encrypted voter decisions to a central computer.

"We thought it was a way to enhance participation," Sisson says. "The city provided an opportunity that few municipalities can offer."

But Barrie’s city council went to great lengths to convince voters these machines would not reveal their identities and that the system was hacker proof. 

The possibility of intrusion always exists, but the suppliers of touch-screen systems to Barrie say they are taking all possible precautions.

"The data is all double encrypted," says Rickards.

"If the information being transferred has been tampered with, we find out about it through our audit trail at the other end."

The Vancouver-based Global Elections Systems Inc. has teamed up with Soza and Co., a Washington-based computer software firm that does encryption for such organizations as the U.S. defence department.

In case of power outages, each of Barrie’s machines has a backup battery. There are several memory systems built in to each machine, and they can be recovered in the event of a complete system failure.

Though each touch-screen system costs around $5,000, they will save money down the road, Rickards argues.

"You save on the number of man-hours and the cost of paper," Rickards explains. "The machines can pay for themselves over the course of two and a half federal elections, if they were held about once every three or four years."

Stuck in the ‘70s

The Canada Elections Act has been the ultimate barrier to automating the federal election. It currently does not allow the use of automated equipment, and the process to change it has been stalled for three years.

"The legislation is still written towards a system that we’ve had for over 100 years of hand voting."

Rickards has been talking to Kingsley for the last eight years about automating Canada’s federal elections. Kingsley is sympathetic, says Rickards, but it’s taking a "horrendous amount of time" for new provisions to be legislated.

Until the federal government makes the appropriate changes, Elections Canada will continue to be stuck in the '70s using an "ancient system that is slow and inaccurate."

For more information, please visit:

Global Elections Systems Inc.
KPMG report: Smart Cards
Elections Canada