British Columbia’s Liberals let their fingers do the voting — and elected a new leader this weekend with the help of Nova Scotia telephone technology.<\/p>\n
Maritime Tel & Tel’s televoting system performed well, processing 6,540 votes ‘flawlessly,’ said Don Farmer, MT&T’s vice president of operations. Former Vancouver mayor Gordon Campbell took the first-ballot victory in the leadership race with 4,141 of those votes.<\/p>\n
Televoting has “only been done (in two places) in the world, in Nova Scotia and once in British Columbia,” he said.<\/p>\n
He added future prospects for the voting system are exciting.<\/p>\n
Televoting was first introduced to Nova Scotians in June 1992 when the province’s Liberals were choosing a new leader. That first attempt to vote by telephone ended in a highly-publicized failure, but a second vote, held two weeks later, went off without any problems.<\/p>\n
Since that first system was developed, the telephone company has partnered itself with IBM and has developed a “totally new system,” he said. This weekend’s vote in British Columbia was the first application of that system.<\/p>\n
While the mechanics of the system did work well, there were some problems with voters who did not understand how the system works, said Mr. Farmer.<\/p>\n
Some callers to a special problems’ hotline said they were unable to get through to cast their votes, but it was discovered that they were not using touch-tone phones required by the system. [Technology exists to permit voting with dial phones as well. This was used in the 1974 Televote trials -editor]<\/p>\n
As a result, Mr. Farmer said the Liberal Party asked that the members be allowed more time to get to other telephones to cast their votes, so the first-ballot results were tabulated later than originally expected.<\/p>\n
Mr. Farmer said both the telephone company and IBM are discussing the televoting service with organizations around the world. <\/p>\n
THE CHRONICLE-HERALD
\nMonday 9\/13\/93 pg. A12
\n(Halifax, Nova Scotia)
\nby Kelly Shiers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
British Columbia’s Liberals let their fingers do the voting — and elected a new leader this weekend with the help of Nova Scotia telephone technology.<\/p>\n
Maritime Tel & Tel’s televoting system performed well, processing 6,540 votes ‘flawlessly,’ said Don Farmer, MT&T’s vice president of operations. Former Vancouver mayor Gordon Campbell took the first-ballot victory in the leadership race with 4,141 of those votes.<\/p>\n
Televoting has “only been done (in two places) in the world, in Nova Scotia and once in British Columbia,” he said.<\/p>\n
He added future prospects for the voting system are exciting.
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