Recount could set precedent
Posted Jan 13, 2011 04:35:01 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Today’s manual recount in Kitchener’s Ward 9 could have implications well beyond the borders of this region.
A court has ordered the recount after runner-up candidate Debbie Chapman filed a judicial appeal in the wake of a one-vote loss in the October 25th election.
Retired University of Waterloo professor Bob Williams says the province will have to watch today’s events closely because they could become a landmark in our use of electronic tabulators for elections.
The expert in municipal affairs says ambiguities over manual election counts could be sorted out manually. But the introduction of new technology has changed the game considerably.
“The idea that the municipalities use a tabulator to produce the results and the fact that that produced exactly the same results twice but now a judge says ‘oh that’s not good enough, when it’s close we can’t trust it,’ I think we’re opening up a whole new range of considerations that go far beyond Ward 9 in Kitchener,” Williams states.
Williams wonders if, in effect, the court could be saying today that we can only trust an electronic tabulator up to a certain point.
“In which case, we either have to amend the legislation to say ‘no, we do trust it and you can’t start second-guessing this electronic voting system,’ ” Williams explains. “Or we say ‘yes, we can use it for some purposes but we can’t use it for others’ and that sort of defeats the purpose of having (the system) in the first place.”
An electronic recount conducted November 3rd produced identical results to those on election night — Frank Etherington had won Ward 9 by a single vote over Debbie Chapman, 1689-1688.
Today’s recount, to be conducted at Kitchener City Hall, will manually review 40 disputed ballots.
