St. Thomas’ move to ditch in-person voting in 2022 raises concern from local cybersecurity expert – London | The Canadian News

Voters in St. Thomas, Ontario, will not go to the polls in 2022 as they did in previous years to cast their vote in a municipal election.

City officials say they are eliminating in-person paper ballots in favor of voting online and by phone next year in a bid to make the experience more convenient for residents and lead to greater voter turnout. .

St. Thomas offered online voting during the 2018 elections, but only in advanced polls along with telephone voting. For Election Day itself, voters had to cast their vote in person.

“It worked very, very well. The time people were online to do it (was) less than five minutes. On Election Day, we used the paper ballot and heard from a lot of people about long lines and not convenient polling places, ”St. Thomas Mayor Joe Preston said of the 2018 election.

“We will make it so you can vote from your La-Z-Boy or from anywhere in the world.”

Those who do not have access to a computer or telephone will be directed to visit a Mobile Voter Assistance Center where they will cast their vote and will be assisted by municipal staff.

In the 2018 race, of the 10,259 registered voters, 5,736, or about 56 percent, voted in person, while 4,205, about 41 percent, voted online, election data shows. Only 318 people chose to vote by phone.

In total, voter turnout was 36.09 percent, and 80 percent of registered voters were over 45 years old.

“During the pandemic, people have really focused on being able to use services like online shopping or ordering online from restaurants. It has become a much more important part of our life and we believe that we can make it part of the electoral process without problems, ”Preston said.

“Almost all banks have a large number of customers who never visit a branch again and do everything online. If we can be sure of how our financial system works, I am sure we can be sure of how the voting system will work. “

As it did in 2018, St. Thomas hired Montreal-based Simply Voting Inc. to be its Internet and telephone voting provider. 980 CFPL reached out to Simply Voting Inc. for comment, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

The convenience of online voting aside, a local cybersecurity expert says the risks that change brings, such as where and how voting data is stored, are real and should not be taken lightly.

“The thing about online banking … the banking industry loses several percent of its profits a year due to fraud, and that’s just that’s just tolerated because they make a lot of money anyway,” said Aleksander Essex, Associate Professor of Software Engineering at Western University specializing in cybersecurity and applied cryptography.

In the case of personal financial fraud, Essex says a customer can approach their bank if they find strange charges on their statement or suspect that money is missing from their account.

“What is the system that will get your vote back if it is lost, stolen or modified? How are you going to detect that that happened? Essex said.

“It’s a very different world than banking or buying things … I really want to send a message to these Ontario city councilors that it is not the same.”

On election night 2018, several dozen municipalities using the same online voting portal experienced system slowdowns and timeouts, forcing many to extend voting hours, including some until the next day.

“In many cases, these cities did not have a backup plan and had to invoke emergency powers,” Essex said. St. Thomas was among those without a backup plan, although it didn’t see any technical issues as it uses a different provider.

“I see 2022 as Groundhog Day again, and I am concerned about what is going to happen, especially in the context of what happened in the US last year with his election.”

The problems observed in 2018 are among the reasons why London has chosen to skip online voting in next year’s elections.

in a report before the London Corporate Services Committee in late May, city staff said they did not recommend that the council adopt online voting, citing data security and integrity concerns. Subsequently, the Council approved the recommendation.

“Recent security and data breaches in both the public and private sectors have highlighted the ongoing challenge of maintaining Internet security and voting integrity given the number of cyberattacks targeting governments, including Canadian municipalities.” , indicates the report.

“Online voting remains vulnerable to security threats and attacks, while raising concerns about the secrecy of the vote and the integrity of the results.”

City staff warned that even a minor technical issue that is resolved could put the integrity of the entire election in doubt and leave voters wary of the results.

“Any failure of a voting system that has the effect of violating the principles of the (Municipal Elections Law) could result in a controversial election,” the report says.

Of the 391 municipal elections held in Ontario in 2018, 177 offered an online voting option, of which 131 were completely paperless, the report says.

The staff recommended that if online voting was to be introduced in future elections, it should be preceded by at least three years of preparation with the city’s information technology team to develop, test, and implement a “voting solution. Fully integrated and secure Internet “.

“If you are going to have an election, you need to have some kind of evidence that the election was counted correctly. There are ways to produce digital evidence: compelling, cryptographically structured, mathematical evidence. There are even companies in Ontario that are working on electoral systems to provide this, ”Essex said.

“But we don’t have standards for online elections in Ontario. We do not have laws governing what kind of evidence must be provided, if any. “