Penticton city council candidate questioning vote counters

Kevin Proteau, a candidate for Penticton city councillor, is once again questioning the city’s use of electronic vote counting machines.

Related: Resident says voting machines a threat to democracy in Penticton

Proteau held a public press conference on the steps of city hall Tuesday to air his concerns, inviting all electoral candidates, incumbents and citizens of Penticton to join him.

Other than people involved with his presentation, his audience consisted of mayoral candidate Jason Cox and council candidate David O’Brien.

“The role of our mayor and city council is to represent their constituents, the citizens of Penticton. This has been neglected on many occasions, specifically with the issue of past and current councils refusing to a manual vote count. At the very least it should be agreed to conduct a manual vote directly after the election to assure the accuracy of the counting machines,” Proteau said, reading from a prepared speech, adding that he and others have requested manual vote counts be used, but been refused.

“This is extremely disappointing and begs the question from the community as to the trustworthiness of our electoral process,” he said.

Jonathan Sevy, who joined Proteau on city hall steps, pointed out that adding a manual count to verify the machine count would not be costly. He estimated it at about $6,000 or, by his calculations, about 15 cents per taxpayer.

O’Brien agreed that the cost of adding a manual count shouldn’t be considered prohibitive, explaining it would remove any question from Penticton elections.

However, Proteau contended that the machines were vulnerable to hacking, referencing a report from the University of Connecticut Center for Voting Technology Research, which detailed physical ways the machines could be affected.

Other opinions say the machines being used by the City of Penticton are unlikely to be hacked, due to a chain of security procedures.

The cards that record votes are strictly controlled and the machines themselves are never left unattended, according to chief elections officer Laurie Darcus, who held an information session last week to demonstrate the reliability of the machines, which the City of Penticton has used through a number of election cycles.

Darcus said the cards and the vote counters are kept in a safe inside the city’s vault, and she is the only one with access.

“I am keeping total responsibility,” said Darcus. “One of the key things, when I put it (a card) into the machine, we are running a zero tape and it is showing no votes.”

The cards are sealed into the vote tabulators and countersigned.

Ones from the advance polls are removed at the end of the day and sealed in an envelope, again countersigned by a third party and wrapped in tape, which would be broken if someone tried to open them before the end of the general election day on Oct. 20.

“We tape that envelope with packing tape so that if it was ever opened, it would be super obvious because it would rip the envelope. Those are then put back into the vault, into the safe,” said Darcus. “Even if I were to open that, it would be obvious. I can’t replicate that signature, they know they signed it. I don’t know how I could tamper with it.”

“This machine does not have a wireless connection, it has a plug-in only for power. There is an option for these machines to be connected by a modem for a telephone line,” said Darcus. “But we don’t use that option. We’ll be phoning from the Seniors’ Drop-in Centre to the main location.”

Proteau was unable to say where he thought the security chain could be interrupted to interfere with the vote.

Attendees of the Oct. 11 information session were also concerned these machines were the same model that have been banned for use in U.S. elections, but it was clarified that these are not the same machines.

“The reason some of them were banned in the U.S. is they were allowed to put intolerances in the machines, this one doesn’t allow me to do anything to it,” said Darcus. “What a tolerance does is allows a ballot to be disregarded if the mark is (not the right type).”

Local businessman Keith MacIntyre, the owner of Big Bear Software, has experience with electronic voting machines. He spent several years writing software for a touch-screen voting system in the U.S. called Elex, a competitor to the AccuVote system used in Penticton.

Related: Penticton’s U.S. election connection

He says the AccuVote OS machines used by the City of Penticton are secure, providing the process is followed and the testing is done.

“It has no network access whatsoever. Even if someone could physically access the machine, it would still be pretty much impossible to do anything,” said MacIntyre.

“The cards are secured, they go through the tests to ensure the voting is being done correctly and then the machines are locked away. They are fully monitored during the election.”

The AccuVote OS machines are capable of using a modem to send results, but the city is not using that system and is phoning the results into the main polling station.

“There is no point where anything could be hacked,” said MacIntyre. “Even if someone did have physical access to the machine, there is nothing they could do with this one.”