FORT FRANCES—With the town using electronic voting tabulators for the first time this election, results are expected to be known very shortly after 8 p.m. on Monday (Nov. 13).
Mayor and council candidates were given a chance to see how this new system works, and have their questions answered, last Thursday afternoon during a presentation put on by Clerk Glenn Treftlin (also the town’s returning officer) and Information and Technology manager Darryl Allan.
Two electronic voting tabulators will be used this Monday to process the ballots. And while the election officially ends at 8 p.m., the counting of votes actually will begin around 4 or 5 p.m. that day.
These will be processed at a rate of 500 per hour.
Each machine will manned by two people—one to open the envelopes containing the ballots and a second to feed them into the tabulator.
The ballots are fed into the tabulator face down, scanned by the machine, and then spit out by the tabulator into a box for storage.
The information on the ballot (i.e., the number of votes for which candidate) is stored in the tabulator and added up. When all of the ballots are processed, the total number of votes for each candidate then is printed off.
This information also is stored onto a memory card, which can be plugged into a computer, making it possible to project the results onto a screen on election night for the public to see in person at the Civic Centre or on Shaw Cable (Channel 10).
Allan noted the electronic tabulator also is equipped with an audio feature to aid the visually-impaired vote in the election.
If someone is unable to fill out their ballot due to a vision impairment, they can come down to the Civic Centre on voting day (Nov. 13).
One of the questions asked by several candidates was if the tabulators could “read” ballots if they were filled out improperly.
While the ballot instructions say to shade in the boxes beside the chosen candidates’ names with a black pen, town staff has been running tests on the tabulators to see if ballots will be counted if they’re filled out in any other fashion.
Allan noted that 20 different tests have been done, with ballot boxes having been marked with X’s, small, medium, and large dots, blue ink, red ink, hi-liters, crayon, and more.
The tests showed that only 10 percent of the box had to be filled in to be picked up by the electronic tabulator and count as a vote, so shading the whole box isn’t necessary.
In fact, making a mark bigger than a small dot was all that’s necessary.
They also found that blue ink and crayon was picked up by the machine but lighter inks, like red ink and the translucent markings of hi-liters, would not be recognized and thus those ballots would not count.
“Black is going to work for sure. Other colours may work, but black is the standard,” said Treftlin, adding that’s why the mail-in ballot instructions, which come from the company supplying the tabulators, tell voters to shade in the boxes completely using black ink.
Another question was what would happen if one part of a ballot was done wrong (i.e., both boxes for the mayoral candidates were filled in instead of just one), but another wasn’t (i.e., only six council candidates were filled in)?
Allan replied the votes for the council candidates would still be counted, but not the ones for mayor.
And in the case of a power failure on Monday, Allan said the electronic voting tabulators will be hooked up to uninterrupted power supplies (UPS), so there will be no period of time in which they lose power.
(Fort Frances Times)
Fort Frances Times
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