Halifax elections are going hi-tech, but while election officials
hope internet voting is the cure for voter apathy, skeptics say it is a
threat to democracy itself.by Tim Bousquet | photos Aaron Fraser
he three weeks from October 14 to November 4 are something
of an election marathon: The Canadian federal election is October 14,
Nova Scotians elect their municipal councillors and school board
members October 18 and the US elections, when Americans vote for
president, all congressional positions, a third of the Senate and a
host of state and local offices and propositions, are November
4.
It is, truly, a momentous time, with astounding geopolitical,
economic, social and environmental issues in the mix.
But for what and whom citizens on both sides of the border vote is a
discussion for another time. What concerns us here is how they
vote. And when it comes to the mechanics of how people actually cast
their votes, there is no doubt: Canada gets it right, and the United
States gets it wrong.
Over the last eight years, the US has seen an embarrassing parade of
election failures and mishaps. The 2000 elections were plagued by voter
registration irregularities and ballot problems like the infamous
“butterfly ballot” and “hanging chads,” and were finalized only when
the US Supreme Court ordered a stop to the recount process and
summarily awarded Florida, and therefore the entire country, to George
W. Bush.
Afterwards, many states acquired electronic voting machines, which
were sold as a solution to confusing paper ballots. The new
touch-screen machines resembled familiar ATMs and results, which
required no interpretation from partisan voting officials, could be
reported immediately, as soon as the polls closed.
The reality, however, was something else. The new machines were
plagued by malfunctions, “lost” votes and programming and user error.
Because they left no paper trail, there could be no possibility of a
recount or audit. Election error again became an issue in the 2004
election, especially in the state of Ohio, another swing state that
brought victory to Bush.
Recently, some states have passed legislation that effectively bans
the electronic machines, and thousands of machines valued at many
millions of dollars have been scrapped. Earlier this year, Florida sent
30,000 electronic voting machines to a recycling company; the machines
had been purchased to replace the butterfly and other paper ballots.
Ohio’s new $138 million electronic voting system is mired in a series
of lawsuits left over from the 2004 elections.
Still, 36 percent of American voters will use electronic machines in
the upcoming presidential election, and two weeks ago the Washington
Post reported that a software error was detected in machines
manufactured by Premier Election Services, previously known as Diebold.
The error, which can result in votes being “dropped”—uncounted—as
results are transferred from the machine to a central tallying point,
has been present in the machines for as long as 10 years. These
machines will be used in 34 states in November.
It’s no wonder that Americans are increasingly distrustful of the
voting process. Voting experts challenge every aspect of elections,
including the registration process, the procedures at the polling place
itself, the use of electronic machines and the counting and recounting
of votes.
Contrast the sour American experience to Canadian elections: In this
country, voters show up at the poll and are handed a paper ballot and a
pencil. They check the box next to their preferred candidate and put
the ballot in a box. After the polls close, an election official opens
the box, and the official and poll observers from the political parties
examine each ballot and agree on how the vote was cast. A final tally
takes about half an hour.
The Canadian system is clean, unambiguous and fair.
But the Halifax Regional Municipality doesn’t like the Canadian
system, and is determined to change it.
To that end, HRM council has awarded a $487,151 contract to
Intelivote, a firm started by Dartmouth resident Dean Smith, to conduct
an internet and telephone vote as a component of the upcoming municipal
and school board election.
Through the last week of September, every HRM resident on the voter
list will be mailed a letter containing a personal identification
number and instructions for how to vote over the internet or phone. The
internet/phone vote will actually take place from October 4 to October
6, two weeks before the “regular” election day.
At any time over those three days voters can log on to a website
controlled by Intelivote. They’ll have to maneuver through a “capture
challenge”—the familiar security routine of retyping the squiggly
letters found in a blurred box—then use their unique PIN and date of
birth to identify themselves. From there, a simple menu will walk them
through the three or four steps of the election—the vote for mayor,
for councillor, for school board member and (if eligible) for the
African-Nova Scotian school board rep.
Alternatively, voters can call a phone number and maneuver through a
simple voice mail menu to cast votes. Technically, the phone vote is
just a component of the internet vote, with the phoned-in votes moving
through the same system as those votes cast from computers.
The three-day internet vote is a pilot project intended to
demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of the system. Smith, city
staff and councillors all say the internet vote will be successful, and
future elections will employ it for the entire election, not just for
an early vote.
Among the public at large, nobody has suggested there was anything
wrong with the clean, unambiguous and fair Canadian system of voting
with paper ballots, and the public didn’t ask for the internet/phone
vote.
That said, Haligonians seem not to overly object to the prospect of
an internet vote. There has been no public protest in Halifax over the
issue, no opposition to electronic voting expressed at council meetings
and just one letter in a local newspaper about the issue.
South of the border, however, voting experts are aghast at the
prospect of an internet vote.
“Internet voting is a bad idea all around, and the fact that
election officials who do not understand the technology are willing to
risk such massive, and in many cases undetectable, fraud in the
municipal elections is exceedingly negligent,” says Rebecca Mercuri,
the leading US critic of electronic voting schemes. Mercuri defended
her doctoral thesis, on the then-obscure issue of “electronic vote
tabulation checks,” just 11 days before the contested 2000 election,
and found herself thrust into the limelight. Her writing was cited in
briefs submitted to the Supreme Court for the Bush v. Gore decision that awarded Bush the presidency, and she testified before
several congressional committees charged with investigating the
election fiasco.
“I remain skeptical over any security plans for internet voting,”
agrees Douglass Kellner, the co-chair of the New York State Board of
Elections, which oversees the second-largest state election system in
the US. “And I remain skeptical that there will ever be any security
plans that work. Experts have worked long and hard to make the system
fool-proof, without success, and I haven’t heard that the citizens of
Halifax have figured out how to do it.”
Doubts aside, Halifax’s internet vote is moving forward. And
depending on how many people use the new system, the internet vote
could determine the results of the municipal elections. In a very real
sense, Dean Smith might tell us who the next mayor is.
Which raises the question: Can we trust Dean Smith?
The motherlode
Smith’s involvement with voting started back in 1992. That year, the
Nova Scotia Liberal Party was the first political party on the planet
to choose its leader through an electronic voting system, a phone
voting system using servers in Ottawa to handle votes cast during the
Liberal convention at the Metro Centre in Halifax.
But in an inauspicious beginning for electronic voting, the
computers crashed and the election couldn’t be completed. Smith, who
was then doing IT work with MT&T (the precursor company to Aliant),
was called in to fix the problem.
“It was a Bell Canada system that they were running here in Nova
Scotia,” Smith explains. “I took a team to Ottawa, and we very quickly
determined the types of problems that it had. It was a simple IT thing,
but the long and short of it was it was a big black eye for the
company.”
Smith repaired the system and two weeks later the Liberals tried
again; the system worked without a hitch. Smith worked for a few years
on other telephone voting projects with MT&T, then moved on as a
manager for various IT companies. “But in the back of my mind I always
knew that the next evolution in voting would be electronic voting.”
There simply wasn’t the volume of electronic voting necessary to
sustain an independent business, says Smith, until Ontario approved
electronic voting in 1996. Intelivote was incorporated in 2003, and has
since run union and organizational votes—Smith mentions a soccer
league’s evaluation of a coach—and, increasingly, municipal
elections.
In 2006, Intelivote handled elections for eight small Ontario
townships, the largest of which, South Frontenac, had just 18,528
voters. But that experience gave the firm a reputation as a reliable
vendor, and last year Intelivote ran two elections in the United
Kingdom—for the Borough of Rushmoor, with 101,000 voters, and the
District of South Bucks, with 68,000 voters.
Halifax, with about 280,000 potential voters, establishes Intelivote
as a leading player in the field. Success here will position Intelivote
for the 2010 Ontario municipal elections, which Smith characterizes as
the “motherlode.” And, he notes, officials from Winnipeg will be
observing the Halifax election in anticipation of using internet voting
in that city’s 2010 regional election, an area containing 1.2 million
people. “That will be the largest electronic event ever done,” says
Smith.
And while the US public remains skeptical of all electronic voting
schemes, election officials there are moving forward with
internet-based elections. In 2004, the US military aborted a plan to
use the internet for the two million personnel based around the world
after Mercuri and Avi Rubin, a computer scientist at John Hopkins
University, questioned the security of the system, but the military is
moving ahead with an internet vote for the 2008 elections. Further,
some 13 states are investigating using the internet to allow troops in
Iraq to vote in state elections, and both the Republican and Democratic
parties are moving toward internet votes for their primary elections of
presidential candidates.
“I don’t think you’ll get this type of voting at the federal
election in the Untied States, but you’ll get it in everything up to
the federal election—local races and primaries,” says Smith.
Intelivote is poised to become one of the primary electronic voting
vendors in what could potentially become a multi-billion dollar market.
Seen in that context, the Halifax election is about much more than
whether Peter Kelly’s votes are counted correctly, or whether a few
votes are dropped in the Ecum Secum district race for school board
member.
To catch a voter
But why should the electronic voting industry exist in the
first place—especially in Canada, which already has a functional and
fair voting system?
The answer to that question invariably comes back to one concern:
declining voter turnout. Halifax hasn’t yet reached the abysmally low
rates of voting regularly experienced in the US, but voter turnout is
universally agreed to be too low— just 54 percent of eligible voters
took part in the 2004 mayoral election, with still lower rates for the
election of individual councillors.
In general, those districts with the lowest average incomes also
have the lowest voting rates—only 35 and 36 percent of potential
voters turned out to vote in District 12 (downtown-north end) and
District 9 (north Dartmouth), respectively, while the sprawling Eastern
Shore district, which includes many poorer communities, did only
marginally better. Collectively, all council districts averaged just 48
percent turnout.
There could be many reasons for declining voter turnout. Perhaps
citizens think their government is not responsive to their needs,
regardless of who is elected. Perhaps the electoral process is viewed
as a cynical exercise in marketing candidates, unrelated to the real
concerns of the voters. Perhaps potential voters feel government is
simply broken beyond repair, so why bother? Such reasoning, anyway,
might explain why people disenfranchised from the wealth and prosperity
of society might also disenfranchise themselves from the political
process.
But rather than dealing with hard issues concerning the
effectiveness and responsiveness of government, bureaucrats and
politicians have found another explanation for low voter turnout: It’s
too difficult and bothersome to get to the polls. Never mind that in
past decades voting often meant trudging long distances through
inclement weather, and yet voter turnout was higher; today, when
polling places are well-placed around the community, including in
retirement homes, university dorms and even prisons, getting to the
polls is said to be a monumental chore—too much to ask of the average
citizen.
The corollary to this argument is the supposition that people,
especially young, “connected” urbanites and the tens of thousands of
students in Halifax, are “used to” doing all sorts of things on the
internet—their banking, their shopping, etc. Betwixt downloading
iTunes and updating their Facebook status, they’re just another mouse
click away from voting for mayor.
Additionally, our aged population has a difficult time moving
around, and so letting them vote via phone or on the computer is
likewise a worthy service.
Yet when BBC political research editor David Cowling looked at 14
elections in Britain that used internet voting, including the Rushmoor
election conducted by Intelivote, he wasn’t impressed. “There seems to
be no evidence that e-voting increases participation in elections,” he
concluded. “The experience of pilots to date suggests that those who
vote by internet would have voted by more traditional methods in any
event, in the absence of any e-voting option.”
Cowling believes that a five-percent increase in the Rushmoor
turnout was unrelated to the internet balloting.
Still, internet voting might increase turnout, so what’s the
harm?
“But is it necessarily good that voting should be made so easy?”
replies Douglass Kellner, the New York State election official. An
attorney, Kellner was appointed to the election board by the Democratic
Party, which traditionally looks to increase voter turnout. “There’s
something to making the commitment to get to a polling place, to stand
in line with your fellow citizens and voting,” he says. “I’d be very
concerned [about Halifax’s internet vote]. You have to wonder, why is
this necessary—especially when it compromises the integrity of the
ballot?”
Security
Smith has heard the concerns about ballot integrity many times
before.
“They’re valid concerns,” he says, when asked about the issues
raised by Mercuri, Kellner, Rubin and others in the US. “They’re
educated academics that understand that those are important issues. And
there’s another subset of the population that says, ‘We understand
that, we appreciate that, but we still need a solution. Is it a
reasonable solution to offer internet voting?'”
Smith has no doubts about his system, and is willing to discuss it
openly, at length and in detail. He repeatedly expresses “respect” for
skeptics, and only occasionally reveals a frustration at “naysayers”
who “have made a lot of money from this.”
As Smith tells it, there is a categorical difference between the
electronic voting machines used in the botched US elections, which are
known as “a direct recording electronic device,” and his internet
voting system. In fact, he keeps a direct recording electronic device
in the lobby of Intelivote’s Burnside office, a kind of object lesson
in how not to run an election.
The internet system that will be used in Halifax has four levels of
security checks, he explains.
First is what is known as a “penetration test,” which is conducted
by Thor Solutions, an IT security firm. That company tries to break
through “six or seven different levels of security” in the Intelivote
system in order to see if the security mechanisms can prevent someone
from hacking into the machines running the election.
The second security check is an analysis of Intelivote’s encryption
system, the process by which the several computers running the election
“speak” to each other. Smith maintains this really isn’t an issue in
the Halifax election, because the machines are only “millimetres apart”
in the Aliant data centre on North Street.
The third security check is an external audit of the entire voting
process conducted by the prestigious auditing firm Ernst & Young.
That company will examine the issuing of PINs, how the list of voters
is handled, the spelling and placement of candidates’ names on the
ballot, protection of voters’ privacy and all the other minutiae of the
election process.
Lastly, there is an analysis of the overall network security, the
Aliant “blanket” that lies on top of the Intelivote system. With an
internet election, election officials have to be prepared for both
aggressive attacks by people looking to disrupt or steal the election,
and for accidental or happenstance problems with the internet
generally. Smith says he is confident that the Aliant network is
prepared.
But Rebecca Mercuri isn’t at all convinced.
Like Smith, Mercuri speaks quickly and with an obvious enthusiasm
for her work, and is willing to talk at length about what she sees as
the many problems facing internet voting.
Although she is unfamiliar with Intelivote, “these companies all
claim that they’ve done this,” she says dismissively of security
guarantees. “But you don’t know how fraudulent it is; you have no way
of knowing whether it’s secure. And for political office—a local
municipal election, is it going to get hacked? Who knows? Depends on
what city it is, really.
“The fact of the matter is that the internet is not a secure medium,
so there is no way to secure an internet election to make sure you
don’t have some massive denial of service attack during the election,
spoofing, re-routing, and it also brings up this whole possibility of
election fraud, coercion, vote selling—all of that now becomes even
more possible with internet elections.”
Mercuri details some of her concerns, including vote selling and
coercion, problems in the transmission of votes, spoofing and the
recording of votes.
Vote selling and coercion
“Coercion doesn’t have to be a person with a gun to your back, it
can be very subtle,” she says. “Think of a religious group: They’re
against a certain candidate because they’re for abortion or what have
you, and they say to all their parishioners, ‘OK, we’re going to set up
computers here Tuesday night, you all come and vote here, and we’ll
have a big party afterwards.’
“It can seem very benign, but people might be fearful that other
members of their church community say, ‘Oh, we didn’t see Jane at the
party, how come she wasn’t there?’ That sort of thing.”
Likewise, she says, a union might organize a vote in exchange for a
promise of landing a road contract from a certain candidate, or a
husband might cast his wife’s ballot, particularly if there’s an
abusive or unstable family situation.
“That’s done now,” says Smith, referring to the broad acceptance and
use of paper absentee ballots, and the problem of people “assisting”
elderly voters in the voting booth. “The question is, in an organized
forum, in our solution, you’d have to get to me in the two minutes it
takes me to vote, and that can be anytime over the three days or
week.”
Mercuri agrees that vote coercion is already a potential problem.
“But in the precincts you do have more protection,” she says. “You can
say to your union leader, ‘Hey, I voted for Joe,’ but when you go into
the precinct they’re not there, they’re not hovering over your
shoulder. You can vote however you want in the private booth.
“If we have more rampant internet voting, I think we’re going to see
more shenanigans.”
Transmission of votes
There are several ways to interrupt the transmission of votes over
the internet, says Mercuri.
“Denial of service attack is when the capacity of a server is
overwhelmed,” she explains. “Many are due to viruses. You could plant a
virus with a ‘time bomb’ in it—it’s all over the internet but doesn’t
become active until a certain time. If you did this a day or two before
the election, no one would know because the virus companies are a week
behind.”
In such a scenario, the entire internet could be shut down, although
Mercuri admits it’s unlikely someone would go to such trouble for a
small-ish municipal election. But there could be a specific denial of
service attack aimed at a particular set of servers or URLs that are in
use for the election.
That wouldn’t stop an election that uses the Intelivote system, says
Smith. For one, he’s confident that the Aliant network can handle any
attempted denial of service attack. But even if it can’t, “the longest
internet outage that ever was was short of a day,” he says. “We have
three days for the Halifax election, and most are held over a week. If
you had an instance where people couldn’t get on the network, a denial
of service that was national or regional, well, wait a couple of hours,
wait a day, wait five days, you can still vote.”
Still, as Mercuri points out, a large portion of the electorate
waits until the last day and even the last hours of the election to
vote.
“They can still use the telephone or go to the polling station,”
says Smith. “If there’s an internet virus that day, what happens? Well,
in our system, you go to the phone. And that’s one of the things we do
that’s different from anyone else—if the internet goes down, you can
pick up the phone.”
Spoofing
Mercuri says there are problems at both ends of the voting process,
in the creation of the ballot and the reception of the ballot.
On the creation side is what is known as “spoofing,” when someone
creates a fake internet site that looks exactly like what the official
voting site looks like. A voter might be tricked into going to the site
by a fake email.
“Spam comes in your mailbox and it looks like it’s from the official
election people,” explains Mercuri. “It says ‘We’ve had to change the
address that you got in your packet, it was wrong, here’s the right
address.’ Some people are going to fall for that, and then they’ll go
to the other website.”
At the fake website, the tricked voter will enter in his or her PIN
and date of birth, information that will be used by the spoofer to cast
an actual vote via the real website.
“If this seems preposterous,” says Mercuri, “it’s actually going on
right now with the US Internal Revenue site. A congressman accidentally
posted the link to a scam IRS site on his congressional information
page recently! So these spam/scam folks are very crafty, and you can
imagine they will become even more so if votes can be siphoned
off.”
Smith discounts the concern completely. In order to affect the
outcome of an election, “you’d have to get thousands of people to agree
to do something that dumb,” he says.
Recording the vote
On the other end of the voting process, when the vote winds through
the Intelivote servers in the Aliant building on North Street, “you’ll
have no way of confirming that your vote actually transmitted the way
it was intended to be transmitted,” says Mercuri.
“It’s unverifiable, there’s no paper audit trail, there’s no way to
know that your ballot was recorded as intended. You have all the same
problems as a direct recording electronic device, and then you add on
all the problems of the internet. That’s why internet voting is just
the worst possible thing.”
In the US, many states are moving to what is known as the “Mercuri
method,” a vote tabulation system suggested by Rebecca Mercuri.
(Mercuri does not profit from use of the system.) In the Mercuri
method, a paper ballot is run through a digital scanning device, and
the votes are counted by a machine. The system leaves a paper trail,
and it is therefore possible to run a recount.
The problem with the Mercuri method, says Smith, is that it still
relies on computers to count the votes. “If you have 12 million
ballots, you’re not going to count those by hand.”
Moreover, the insistence on a paper trail merely moves the problem
one level down: “If I’m printing something out, I’ll just print up what
you want approved,” he says. “It may have nothing to do with how the
vote is counted.
“We do have a recount capability in [the Intelivote] system,” he
continues. “If you run it 20 times, you’ll get the same result 20
times. Say you have a thousand people who went to the polls, you look
at your elector list, and see you have a thousand people who went to
the polls, and then you have a thousand ballots. But there’s no way in
any system to match the ballot with the voter.”
Smith relates horror stories that have transpired in traditional
paper ballot systems, his point being that no system is foolproof. For
example, election officials in one British jurisdiction told him that
when they pulled out the ballot boxes for use in an election, they
found three of them were stuffed with ballots from a previous election
that had somehow gone uncounted. In another jurisdiction, the ballot
box caught on fire and was doused with orange juice, which left the
ballots unreadable.
If three ballot boxes aren’t counted in an election, you’ve lost
those three boxes full of ballots, but if an internet system fails,
doesn’t the entire election fail?
“You’ve got to have risk mitigation processes in place,” Smith
answers. “Part of that is proving beforehand that the thing works, and
that’s what we’ve done, prove that our system works.”
A matter of trust
Which brings us back to where we started: Can we trust Dean Smith?
It’s a rude question, but there’s good reason to ask it.
Much of the distrust of electronic voting in the US stems from the
failed experience of the Diebold machines, especially in the
battleground state of Ohio, which still, four years later, hasn’t
worked through the complications and court battles stemming from the
2004 presidential election.
In 2004, Diebold Inc. had as its CEO Walden O’Dell, a member of
“Rangers and Pioneers,” a Republic Party group whose members had each
raised $100,000 towards the re-election of George W. Bush. In pursuit
of those fundraising goals, O’Dell wrote a letter inviting 100 wealthy
and influential fellow Republicans to a party event at his home. “I am
committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the
president,” wrote O’Dell in the letter.
Additionally, Diebold refused—and its successor company, Premier
Election Services, continues to refuse—to make the code running its
machines public. The machines are a “black box;” there is no way for an
outside observer to know how they operate or to test them for software
errors or purposeful routes to steal votes.
Smith doesn’t have any identifiable political attachments and says
he isn’t connected with the candidates or players in municipal
politics.
“It’d be very difficult for us to stay in business if it failed
every time or if we had an interest in making sure Candidate One or
Candidate Two wins,” he says. “Is there any interest in us screwing up
our business future by compromising an election like that?”
To his credit, Smith will allow examination of Intelivote’s software
and code. “In our world, anyone who wants to take the time, effort and
money to come to look at our code is welcome,” he says. They will,
however, have to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Still, the electronic voting industry reads like a series of train
wrecks: The 1992 Liberal leadership fiasco, the multiple problems with
the 2004 American election, the US military’s aborted internet vote,
Walden O’Dell’s partisan activism and the just-discovered long-term
error in the Diebold machines. Have we, in Halifax in 2008, suddenly
moved past that? Are we now in this new world where the concerns about
electronic voting don’t outweigh the benefits?
“Reflecting on the Liberal vote in 1992, compared to 2008, that’s
like comparing the Wright Brothers to the space shuttle,” answers
Smith. “In technology lifespan, that is 150,000 years. We fixed it the
day after. Believe it or not, I bring that up. They ask, ‘How did you
learn about this?’ We learned about it because it failed once and you
learn never to do that—you never want to appear on the front page of
the paper on a failure.
“You’ve got to make sure you understand the technology, and you’ve
got to understand what’s involved with the processes and you have to be
really good at what you do to ensure that doesn’t happen. And I think
our company is really good at doing that.”
Coupled with the auditing and security checks, Smith’s openness and
confidence will likely be enough to satisfy many observers. Halifax
election officials, in any event, are confident the system will work as
promised; internet voting will be as safe as the space shuttle. They
trust Dean Smith.
But there’s no placating the most studied critics of internet
voting.
Mercuri fears the industry, which started by running relatively
non-controversial and low-profile elections in small towns, is becoming
more broadly accepted as it matures and starts running bigger and more
important elections like that in Halifax—and ultimately, the vote for
president of the United States. “People should realize that by turning
their elections over to this kind of process, well, maybe it isn’t
crooked this time, but it opens the door to it being crooked the next
time,” she says.
Kellner, the New York State official, agrees. “Saying Halifax is
foolish for adopting internet voting would be an understatement,” he
says. “Unless they really don’t think elections are so important to
keep uncompromised.”
Tim Bousquet is news editor at The Coast.
Electronic voting failures:
1992 The Nova Scotia Liberal Party is the first political
party in the world to use electronic voting to select a leader. The
computer servers crash, and the vote can’t be completed.
2003 Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, the manufacturer of
electronic voting machines used in the US state of Ohio, promises
fellow Republicans that he’ll “deliver” Ohio’s votes to President
George W. Bush.
2004 The US military cancels its planned internet vote for
overseas personnel after computer experts demonstrate the system is not
secure.
2004 Activists claim the Ohio elections are faulty, and
question whether votes cast for the presidency were accurately
recorded.
2008 Premier Election Services, the successor company to
Diebold, admits that its machines have long contained a software error
that may have incorrectly recorded votes. The machines are in use in 34
US states.
Dean Smith’s successes
1992 As an employee of MT&T, he is called in to fix the
problems with the Liberal Leadership vote. He repairs the system, and
the Liberal election goes off without a hitch two weeks later.
2003 Smith starts Intelivote with four partners, and the
company grows to include 70 private investors.
2006 Intelivote runs elections in eight small Ontario
townships. No problems are reported.
2007 In Britain, Intelivote conducts an internet election in
Rushmoor and South Bucks. Rushmoor sees a five percent increase in
voter turnout.
2008 Halifax Regional Municipality hires Intelivote to manage
an internet voting component for the October election.
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This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2008.