Shelby Sim’s says her father-in-law received a package including a personal identification number to vote in Sarnia’s recent municipal election.
Shelby Sim’s says her father-in-law received a voter’s package, including the personal identification number need to cast a ballot in Sarnia’s municipal election.
The problem, the Sarnia woman said, is Roy Ferdinand Sereres has been dead for 12 years.
“Now I’m wondering how many other people in town are receiving stuff like this,” said Sim, who’s worried bad actors could use voter information packages that aren’t theirs to commit election fraud.
Sim has reported the issue to city hall, Sarnia’s mayor, the area’s member of Parliament, Municipal Affairs Ontario and talked with police, but said she felt ignored by officials.
“It didn’t matter enough to them to bother,” she said.
Sereres — whose middle name was misspelled on the card sent to Sim’s house — also received a voter information package with a PIN for Sarnia’s 2018 municipal election.
Sim said she thought he would have been taken off the voters’ list when she contacted city hall four years ago.
“This time, the same song and dance,” she said.
She remains skeptical of internet voting, suggesting ballots cast digitally in Sarnia’s municipal election, where internet and paper-ballot voting were allowed, shouldn’t be counted.
“Because you can’t determine who’s real and who’s not,” she said. “You can’t even determine who’s dead and who’s not.”
About three-quarters — 16,861 — of all votes in Sarnia were cast using internet votingcity officials have said.
Sarnia’s overall turnout this election was 40.41 per cent, a drop from 48.9 per cent in 2018.
A post-election survey is planned to gauge feedback from electors about the voting process, city clerk Amy Burkhart said.
Similar voters-list incidents have happened occasionally in Ontario, but the potential for fraud isn’t exclusive to internet voting, said Aleksander Essex, a Western University assistant professor specializing in cybersecurity and applied cryptography.
Similar vulnerabilities exist to varying degrees for any kind of unsupervised voting, including mail-in ballots and telephone voting, said Nicole Goodman, an associate professor at Brock University who studies technology in elections.
Other things Essex said he’s heard anecdotally include parents receiving voting cards for adult children who’ve left home, people voting for others in their house without permission, or people transferring their login information to others if they don’t know for whom to vote.
“There’s a lot of folklore accounts of this kind of stuff going on,” he said.
People mostly tend to view it as not a big deal, he said.
Moreover, he said, this type of fraud requires effort for every stolen vote.
“Whereas, on the other end of the spectrum, you could have what you might call a wholesale attack where you attack the system one time and just change the whole thing,” he said.
The bigger concern is verification of the trust-based system if there’s ever a challenge, he said, since much of the internet voting technology in Ontario is not open source.
“If you want a comment about the shadiness of online voting, (mailing the wrong card do someone) as an attack is not up there as much,” he said.
Meanwhile, there is cause for hope, said Goodman.
Standards are being developed for online voting, tabulators and electronic polling lists of electors to be used in time for the next municipal election cycle in 2026, she said.
Elections Ontario is also taking over the compilation of voters’ lists from the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation in 2023, something roundly viewed by experts as a positive step that should diminish the type of error Sim experienced.
“Are we still going to have gaps? Yes … but we’re making progress,” said Goodman, noting better technology was also used this year for internet voting in Ontario, where the alternate voting method has been allowed since 2003.
The technology was previously available, but there wasn’t a demand for it in the province, she said. That’s changed as the number of municipalities using internet voting this year grew to around 230 from about 180 four years earlier.
Ensuring safety and accessibility likely played a part as decisions about how to conduct voting were being made during the COVID-19 pandemic, she added.
“The next election cycle is really going to be telling for the future of digital elections or electronic elections in Ontario or in Canada,” as the standards and new voting-list processes play out, Burkhart said.
Burkhart, meanwhile, said she’s heard from fewer than five Sarnia residents about information packages sent to voters who no longer lived at the addresses.
“If someone reported to me that a deceased person was listed … then I deleted them” from the list, she said, “and there were some.”
Safeguards against fraud include disclaimers on the package that the PIN supplied is only for the person identified, she said. The person’s birth date is also required to cast a vote using their PIN.
It’s not a perfect system and it does rely on voter education, Burkhart said.
“Trusting that if you receive a piece of mail that isn’t yours, you’re not going to open it and you’re not going to deliberately commit an offense under the Municipal Elections Act.”
There should be more than simply trust to certify and verify election results, Essex said, expressing doubts that enough is being done in Ontario to maintain transparency in the electoral process.
“The core idea of end-to-end verifiability is it’s providing evidence to someone else that’s not the vendor,” he said.
While internet voting providers in Ontario are adopting the language, Essex suggested they’re not necessarily following the practice of allowing verifiability, something he said he’s involved in helping develop in Switzerland with mathematical proofs that also protect ballot secrecy.
“There is a culture of secrecy in the online voting world in Ontario that needs to get broken up,” he said.
There’s been speculation – but no evidence – of fraud during this election in Sarnia, Burkhart said.
“If there was … it would be forwarded to Sarnia police for investigation.”
Sarnia was one of a handful of Lambton County municipalities using Paragon Group’s Scytl Canada for this election after requiring evidence from would-be providers their systems were in compliance with the principles of the Municipal Elections Act, she said.
The group opted to go with Scytl and its $203,000 price tag over a cheaper option because of its security track record.
“We were satisfied it was a safe and secure alternative voting method,” Burkhart said.
Scytl’s global marketing manager did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
In a press release, the company said roughly one-million voters in Ontario municipal elections this year had the opportunity to cast a virtual ballot “using Scytl’s end-to-end verifiable online voting technology.”
It lists Sarnia as one of the municipalities it was proud to partner with.
Ontario’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing referred comments to the municipal clerk, but noted people who receive voting cards in error should notify the city officials. The ministry spokesperson also noted it’s an offense to vote more times than the Municipal Elections Act allows or when ineligible.
Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley said he also received a half-dozen complaints about voter information packages sent to addresses where the recipients no longer lived but, overall, believed the election went well.
“Some of them were just people telling me that they got two or three PIN numbers, or they have a family member who lives out of the country who got a PIN number,” he said.
“So then you need to have trust in the system that they won’t do something to use that PIN number.”