The Saugeen Times

Lower voter turn-out expected
in township, says clerk
By Liz Dadson

To Comment on this article Click Here

Huron-Kinloss Township had a 34.5-per-cent voter turn-out, down from 45 per cent in the last election.

But that was to be expected, says clerk Sonya Watson, because there was no race for mayor or deputy mayor.

Both positions were acclaimed, with mayor Mitch Twolan and deputy mayor Wilfred Gamble leading council for the next four years. Joining them are Don Murray, Jim Hanna, Lillian Abbott, Carl Sloetjes and Jeff Elliott.

Despite a glitch in the E-voting system, Watson says that all the processes that were in place, worked. For the first time, the township went with Intelivote which allowed eligible voters the opportunity to cast their ballots by telephone or over the Internet. Each voter received a personal identification number (PIN) which was used to gain access to either the telephone or Internet in order to vote.

"We were getting excellent feedback from those who used it, especially on the simplicity of the Internet vote," says Watson. "There are improvements that could be made to the instruction component of the telephone method for next time, but there are improvements to any election method used."

She says the enumeration and voting process was working very well until 7 p.m. when Intelivote's server went down. It slowed the transmission process for voting and enumerating; however, votes were still being cast.

"The decision to extend the voting period was made to ensure those electors who choose to vote in the last hour and were experiencing delays could have their votes processed," says Watson. "It's much the same as serving those people who are in the voting place at 8 p.m. on Election Day."

Dean Smith, president and founder of Intelivote Systems Inc., says the company is sorry for the inconvenience experienced by voters in the slow voting period.

"We can assure municipalities and their voters that the integrity of the vote activity was not compromised and we are confident in the official election results," he says.

South Bruce and Brockton were also using electronic voting and experienced the same problem.

Smith says that municipalities using the Intelivote system had record voting activity over the multi-day election, especially during the final few hours of the event on Election Day.

"During the heavy loads, the Intelivote system experienced a hardware server error that resulted in the entire load on the system being switched to the redundant load-sharing server," he says. "A combination of the heavy voting activity and the administrative activity resulted in the system reducing the capacity to process voter activity over a 57-minute period."

He says that while the system continued to successfully process thousands of voters, many voters were frustrated with their slow response time and the degraded service of the system. In addition, some administration services of the election officials were impacted for the same period.

"System technicians restored the system capability, and many election officials extended their voting time one hour to allow any voters who had experienced slow response problems, the opportunity to cast their ballots if they had not already done so," says Smith.

carl