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The Maple Leaf Lounge

Owain Taggart said:
So, there's been trouble with online voting, haha. Go figure. There was an issue with the online server used for polling yesterday for the municipal elections. It just up and crashed from having too much demand. They've extended the voting to today as a result. To me this shows that we're not quite there yet, and that we shouldn't rely on a single method. I much preferred the option we had last time around which was a hybrid paper/electronic system.
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Wereyou totally electronic or a mix of both?

There's was also one area near me that also had to extend voting today because of the faults.

We had electronic/phone/polling in here and had a minor glitch with the online voting so they extended for an hour but we got the results about half past nine throwing out a mayor and one Councillor and filling two vacancies.

Where my in-laws they were totally phone and online and didn't have any issues that I know (well other than one of my in-laws who was seeking re-election as mayor lost).

edit

just seen the report on the news on the issues.

being reported that Dominion Voting who hosted the system were being speed shaped for breeching their data cap.
 
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Totally electronic, which is ironic because the current mayor was the tie-breaker for it voting in favour of it with the current council, and now he's expressing disappointment in the system and blaming city staff for it blowing up in his face, rather than the company in question. And now candidates are blaming him for not having a backup solution. It's quite a farce.

It's not that hard to put two-and-two together. If a website receives a lot of demand, you better damn well be prepared for it and anticipate it. Now the polling company is blaming their provider for restricting bandwidth leading to the issue at hand. How the hell weren't they prepared in the first place? Number 1, you'd think that as a polling company they would have experience in anticipating that demand, and 2, they had months to get this prepared to have functioning properly. It's not a situation in which I'd expect them to be caught off-guard by the amount of increased traffic on the day of. And 3, people will wait until the last minute to vote.
 
We had our first ever ranked-ballot election. Seemed to go well enough, although we didn't get through to the final round until almost 2:00 pm today. (My understanding is all the results were tabulated by computer, and could have been announced last night, but since this was the first time for this system, they wanted to count everything manually too before announcing anything.)
 
^ You can vote for up to three choices, indicating them as your first, second and third choice. On the initial round, they count everyone's first choice, and if no one won a majority of the votes (50% + 1), then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Then they retabulate the votes, but the people whose first choice got eliminated get their second choice counted instead. Then they just keep doing this, eliminating one candidate at a time (and moving on to the third choices as necessary), until one candidate eventually gets 50% + 1 of the votes available for that round.

We actually made some of the national news sites because we're the first city in Canada to do this! :D

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-election-ranked-ballots-1.4870624

ETA: That CBC article said that the mayoral race may go to a "second or third ballot". It actually took 14! :lol: (Although there was only one candidate left in round 14, so it was technically over after 13. :) )
 
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Fallen Angel said:
^ You can vote for up to three choices, indicating them as your first, second and third choice. On the initial round, they count everyone's first choice, and if no one won a majority of the votes (50% + 1), then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Then they retabulate the votes, but the people whose first choice got eliminated get their second choice counted instead. Then they just keep doing this, eliminating one candidate at a time (and moving on to the third choices as necessary), until one candidate eventually gets 50% + 1 of the votes available for that round.

We actually made some of the national news sites because we're the first city in Canada to do this! :D

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-ontario-election-ranked-ballots-1.4870624

ETA: That CBC article said that the mayoral race may go to a "second or third ballot". It actually took 14! :lol: (Although there was only one candidate left in round 14, so it was technically over after 13. :) )
Click to expand...

it's also known as preferential voting and is the system used in Australia for state and federal elections. It's also a the sort system we should have here for elections rather than the abomination that's first past the post (thanks justin for wimping out on that promise /s).
 
Fallen Angel said:
^ You can vote for up to three choices, indicating them as your first, second and third choice.
Click to expand...

Very interesting! I think it would have made such a difference to use that here. Would have made the whole process of waiting for the results much more entertaining too. We ended up getting our Mayor re-elected.

Oh and here's an article about the server snafu, and how it raises questions about the system: https://www.sudbury.com/around-the-...-communities-raise-systemic-questions-1096622

I heard there were a lot of people that were at the voting stations that just got fed up and threw their voting cards in the trash.
 
Owain Taggart said:
Oh and here's an article about the server snafu, and how it raises questions about the system:
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Okay something is a bit dodgy there. Why could a company (not named) in Toronto be restricting bandwidth to servers in Colorado and just those systems?

it's not just not adding up.

Think it's more likely that dominion screwed the pooch and are looking for some-one else to blame.

And I'm sure that we've got the talent here to develop an online voting system and host it here rather than outsourcing our requirements to the U.S which could also be helpful for electoral security as you could block connections that don't originate in Canada (it's not foolproof but it's good starting point to keep the russians etc out).
 
Marc said:
Okay something is a bit dodgy there. Why could a company (not named) in Toronto be restricting bandwidth to servers in Colorado and just those systems?

it's not just not adding up.
Click to expand...

I read it as a Colorado-based company with a server in the Toronto area, but the way it was written, I could have read into it wrong. It really is confusing. But yeah, it's weird that this wouldn't be a Canadian company in the first place. What a screwup this has been!
 
Marc said:
it's also known as preferential voting and is the system used in Australia for state and federal elections. It's also a the sort system we should have here for elections rather than the abomination that's first past the post (thanks justin for wimping out on that promise /s).
Click to expand...

I actually prefer proportional representation for federal and provincial elections. The ranked ballot worked well for municipal, since there are no parties.

I prefer straight proportional representation, but I did vote for the mixed-member proportional representation option in the referendum way back when, since it's still better than FPTP. Of course, it lost resoundingly. I didn't realize FPTP had that many fans. (Or maybe people were just afraid of change. :shrug: )

Owain Taggart said:
Very interesting! I think it would have made such a difference to use that here. Would have made the whole process of waiting for the results much more entertaining too. We ended up getting our Mayor re-elected.
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We didn't have an incumbent running, so whoever won was going to be new! :) But interestingly, in the mayoral race, the person who ultimately won was the first-place finisher in every single round. So assuming that everyone's first choice would also have been how they voted under the old system, then based on the round one results, the same person would have won under either system.
 
Fallen Angel said:
We didn't have an incumbent running, so whoever won was going to be new! :) But interestingly, in the mayoral race, the person who ultimately won was the first-place finisher in every single round. So assuming that everyone's first choice would also have been how they voted under the old system, then based on the round one results, the same person would have won under either system.
Click to expand...

Interesting. So, it sounds like it pretty much ensures a popular vote, which is fairer in the end, not only for those who got voted in, but for the people too. I'm assuming most felt satisfied with the outcome.
 
Fallen Angel said:
. I didn't realize FPTP had that many fans. (Or maybe people were just afraid of change. :shrug: )
Click to expand...

probably has a lot to do with protecting vested interest. The U.K had a referendum on moving away from FPTP and the tories there ran a big scare campaign saying how bad things would be if it was abandoned so the change was voted down.

FPTP makes it harder for smaller parties to win seats in the parliament.

Owain Taggart said:
Interesting. So, it sounds like it pretty much ensures a popular vote, which is fairer in the end, not only for those who got voted in, but for the people too. I'm assuming most felt satisfied with the outcome.
Click to expand...

yep no more of win a political seat with 30 - 40% of the vote.

There was a by-election in Australia last weekend to replace a former conservative P.M who was dumped a couple of months back in an electorate the conservatives had held since Moses played fullback for Cairo which has lead some conservatives to claim Australia needs FPTP.

On the primary vote the conservative candidate got 43% of the votes when the preferences votes were counted (know as the two party preferred) the conservative candidate finished with 48% of the votes and the independent who won the seat finished with 51%



And for another story out of the municipal elections, a guy in London was double plus lucky.

Won $1mil in the lottery on the weekend then elected to council on the monday.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/steve-hillier-lottery-win-councillor-london-city-1.4877779
 
Marc said:
On the primary vote the conservative candidate got 43% of the votes when the preferences votes were counted (know as the two party preferred) the conservative candidate finished with 48% of the votes and the independent who won the seat finished with 51%
Click to expand...


Interesting. I wonder if more Canadian municipalities will end up adopting this format. It could certainly shake things up for the better.

Marc said:
And for another story out of the municipal elections, a guy in London was double plus lucky.

Won $1mil in the lottery on the weekend then elected to council on the monday.
Click to expand...


I wonder if he's already considered retiring :D
 
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