Elections PEI working to speed up results

As Islanders and political observers across Canada as well as the candidates themselves anxiously refreshed Elections PEI's webpagefor the results of Monday night's District 11 byelection, some were left wondering why it took so long and why the site kept crashing.

The final results of Monday's Charlottetown-Parkdale byelection came in after 9 p.m.,two hours after polls closed.

Tim Garrity, the newly appointed chief electoral officer for Elections PEI, said they would be taking the lessons of why it took a little longer to get the results in to better train poll workers. The ballots are counted by hand, and getting everything set up after the last voters leave takes time, he said.

Accuracy key

"We were very encouraging to the election workers that were there, we were on the phone with them, we were speaking with them constantly just trying to make sure they were getting it done as fast as possible, but accuracy is key," Garrity said.

He said they would be updating their training process to make sure poll workers can maintain accuracy while speeding up the process.

Elections PEI had similar speed problems a year ago in the District 21 byelection, but Garrity said the delay then was caused by different issues, such as confusion from ballot counters as to when they were calling in numbers. Elections PEI said that problem has been addressed.

New platform for website

As for the website crashing throughout the night, Garrity noted the byelection received unexpected attention from Islanders and observers in the rest of Canada.

"The website did have a bit of a challenge but we did notice that when the first advance poll results came in and it was a very close race, that all of a sudden it got quite a bit of attention, even nationally it was trending number one on Twitter but it did cause some unexpected traffic," Garrity said.

"We have met with the IT people that are involved in this and we have discussed moving to another platform in the future so this will not happen again."

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