Liberal Party members and supporters had such difficulty with a complicated online voting system as the Liberal leadership election began over the past two days that the party had to beef up its telephone help lines to cope with a flood of calls, party members and a campaign officials say. Campaign phone banks with Liberal MP and candidate Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) campaign received more than 1,000 calls from supporters who could not complete the electronic balloting—in part caused by the sequence for entering day and month numbers for birth places by the company conducting the election for the Liberals—and as of Monday afternoon the Liberal website numbers for registered voters in each province did not match the total number of registered voters. The number of registered voters according to the site’s display of provincial totals—represented in a map of Canada on the page displaying the vote results—totalled 125,471. The number of votes cast showed at 37,856. But the aggregate total displayed in a separate line on the website cited a total of 127,122 registered voters.
Liberals have told The Hill Times many people who attempted to vote in advance balloting the party held at its “minivention” candidate showcase in Toronto experienced difficulty at the outset, including inability to enter correct birth dates and difficulty being able to accurately interpret and enter word combinations and mis-shaped letters designed to prevent subversion of the online election with denial of service attacks.
An attack of that kind successfully subverted the NDP online voting system for its leadership election in March 2012, and delayed voting for several hours.
Dominion Voting, founded in Canada, has several U.S. offices and one in Toronto. Liberals told The Hill Times the sequence of numbers to enter birthdates uses the U.S. method of entering the month, rather than day of the month, first.
Full Article: Liberals receive more than 1,000 calls from members, supporters who couldn’t vote online | hilltimes.com.