Council abandons mail-in system in favour of 'supervised' vote
Oct 28, 2009 - 09:36 AM
By Jennifer Stone
CLARINGTON -- Instead of driving voters down the information superhighway, Clarington councillors have decided they'll backtrack to the traditional method of voting for the 2010 municipal election.
After three elections in which mail-in voting was used, the Municipal clerk's department had suggested going one step further in making voting more accessible, by using Internet voting.
But after hearing from a number of residents concerned about the "unsupervised" nature of both mail-in and online voting, council voted by a slim majority to eschew technology altogether, opting to go back to the pencil-and-paper ballot system.
Paper ballots have a number of advantages, a number of residents told council Monday.
"Any method of remote voting is flawed," said Bowmanville resident Louis Bertrand. "Mail and phone have problems and the Internet is worse."
Remote versions allow for the possibility of "loss of confidentiality," he said. They allow for the "potential for coercion, vote selling or voter solicitation by a candidate."
Not only that, but online voting relies on numerous personal computers being secure, he suggested.
"The weakest link is not the server, it's not the software, it's the individual PC," said Mr. Bertrand, adding he has years of experience in information technology. "The system is no more secure than the weakest link."
Voting via the Internet will always present a problem, he said.
"It's an intractable problem that you have to be able to trust the process and also be able to say that this person is the person who actually cast the vote and nobody was standing over the (voter's) shoulder, coercing the vote," he said. And in homes where several voters share a computer, "it's very difficult to have a secret ballot."
The mail-in version, said local resident Brian Mountford, is the "most wide open to manipulations."
Despite concerns, there "have been no situations of fraud that have been found" in the elections in which Clarington used the mail-in ballot, or in other nearby municipalities where the method has been used, clerk Patti Barrie said.
Continuing to use mail-in voting lost in a 4-3 vote, prompting a motion from Councillor Gord Robinson calling for the return to the traditional voting system. Coun. Robinson contended the traditional method would be significantly less expensive, but others didn't agree.
"It's going to cost what it costs," said Regional Councillor Mary Novak, noting moving back to the traditional system will require extensive advertising.
"We'll need to let people know there's been a significant change," she said.
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