In 2006 I was the editor of thecannon.ca when my colleague Scott Gilbert had an idea to prove how easy it was to hack the municipal election. His method was sophisticated, he would walk into five different polling locations and cast a ballot, and he did. Guelph police even investigated, though they chose not to charge him, and Gilbert’s ballots were all invalid anyway because he intentionally spoiled them.
Now, to the credit of City of Guelph staff, they buttoned up the system by creating new I.D. requirements, and the fact that there’s now live voter verification that’s updating as people vote is another layer of protection. In other words, a flaw in the voting system was detected, and then they addressed it.
Gilbert’s point was that you could organize a few hundred people to flood the zone and stuff the ballot, and if you think that can’t make a difference, I give you Ward 3 in Guelph, where June Hofland beat Craig Chamberlain by five votes in 2014, and Michele Richardson beat Kevin Bowman by 65 votes in 2022. There’s a reason why they say every vote counts.
The idea of undermining the vote itself was at the heart of the 2011 robocall scandal. Theoretically, “Pierre Poutine”, whoever he is, was under the impression that, in a close election, if you could stop a few thousand people from voting, you can put some weight on the scales for one candidate in particular.
Liberal candidate Frank Valeriote ended up winning that election by 6,322 votes; Elections Canada confirmed that at least 7,800 robocalls went out on election day in 2011, all with the intention of confusing people and stopping them from voting.
Robocalls remains a bête noire in Guelph, it’s a kind of trauma on the democratic efficacy of the community. Having said that, the architecture of the scandal was lo-fi, the most difficult part was getting access to the list of electors, but if you had a confederate with access to the list then that’s easy peasy. After that, all you need is a VISA gift card, a burner phone, a fake name and an email address. My seven-year-old niece could do it. She’s crafty, she makes the snack cart at her school run on time.
But things don’t have to be malicious. Down the road in Cambridge, they spent an extra $45,000 for the 2022 election because the city clerk discovered that two names were left off the ballot for Catholic school board trustee two days before election day. When the election was rerun, not even six per cent of eligible voters chose the Cambridge reps to the Waterloo Catholic District School Board.
If you think that sounds bad, look at Ward 3 in Toronto’s French-language secular school board, Viamonde that same year. Two candidates stepped up there, and, according to an investigation by The Local, one seemed confused about his own qualifications, and the other had some thoughts that identified her as among a slate of anti-LGBTQ+ candidates who ran in municipal elections that year.
Naturally, neither of them spoke French, the language in which the Viamonde board does business, and neither of them thought that was a problem.
Parents interviewed by The Local talked about how concerns were raised because these candidates filed their papers in the final days of the nomination period, and there was no documenting information beyond a name to show that these were real people actively seeking a role in governance, nor were they taking part in debates and other public events or campaigning.
I’m reminded of the classic M*A*S*H episode where Hawkeye and Trapper create a fake officer to get around army red tape only to have it blow up in their face when “Captain Tuttle” earns citation for his good deeds. I confess that there were times in the last election here in Guelph where I wondered if some of the people listed as candidates on the City’s website were as real as your imaginary friend.
The message is that election security is a matter of constant vigilance, it doesn’t begin and end on election day. I’ve heard it mentioned the work of malicious state actors like Russia or China, but it’s important to note that while their manipulations may include hacking the actual election machinery, they also hack the people. Spreading fake news and misinformation is an election security issue too, and one that our city clerks’ office has precious little control over.
I’ve tried to take a five-thousand-foot view on this issue of election security because I acknowledge things got a little tense at this week’s meeting to ratify the internet voting option. I take some measure of credit for that with my own delegation, but in my defence, I’ll say that I wasn’t the one who hired a lawyer and brought them in to delegate.
To me, the first most essential question of our democracy is whether everyone that wants to participate feels like they can participate, and the answer to that question is no. I feel my bias on this because I’ve seen the members of our disabled community fight this fight for a decade and felt my heart break every time they pulled out all the stops and were told, “no”. How many times does someone hear “no” before they decide to no longer try, and is that the message we want to send in a democracy?
I don’t think many of us realize when we walk into a polling station just how collapsible our system of self-governance is; how if you breath on it wrong it will collapse like a house of cards. And yet, so many of us don’t even walk into that polling place at all or wear proudly such terms as “non-political” or “double hater” as if apathy as ever made a difference.
Enthusiasm is the antidote to apathy, and perhaps it’s also a balm for the hurt feelings and bruised egos of this week’s meeting. Will it hurt the next election if there are more people active and engaged, vigilantly looking out for fraud and bad actors while also engaging people who will be able to participate in their first municipal election in over a decade?
I guess we’re going to find out.
