Election officials in Cambridge and Guelph say they don’t expect municipal elections to run afoul of the same technical issues that caused problems in New Brunswick last week – even though they’re using the same system.
“The integrity of the vote remains safe and secure,” Cambridge city clerk Di Lullo told CTV News.
Last Tuesday, results from New Brunswick’s provincial election were delayed by two hours.
According to Mike Quinn, New Brunswick’s chief electoral officer, a “slight discrepancy” was noticed between results being entered manually and those found on the tabulators’ memory cards.
In some cases, the discrepancies amounted to a difference of thousands of votes in individual ridings.
As a result, electoral authorities decided to stop releasing results until they had all the memory cards – which had to be brought in from returning offices around the province.
Dominion Voting Systems says it has now completed a comprehensive internal review of the entire system provided to Elections New Brunswick.
It found the issue was with a third-party software tool used to transfer results to the media reporting server, adding there were no issues with the tabulation of votes.
Dominion Voting systems will be in use in Guelph and Cambridge during the Oct. 27 municipal elections, but authorities in both cities say they don’t expect any difficulties – because they’re not using the same software.
“The process that they used in New Brunswick is different than that we’re using here in Cambridge,” Di Lullo said.
Tests are being conducted of machines in both cities to ensure everything runs smoothly on Oct. 27.
With files from CTVNews.ca
