Following a divisive and months long debate, October of 2013 saw the implementation of an online voting option in the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU) elections. This year, the union’s Board of Directors noted an anomaly with the online voting, as well as drawing attention to the high number of spoiled ballots.

At the meeting of the Board of Directors on April 15, then-Engineering director Paolo Piguing said that he was concerned about the number of spoiled ballots, to which then-executive director Sandra Hudson responded that a high number of online spoiled ballots is common when the switch from paper to online ballots occurs.

The online results yielded an anomaly; ZiJian Yang, chair of the Elections and Referenda Committee, said that there were around 200 votes recorded as submitted within one second after online polls opened, which he says is “physically impossible under natural circumstances.”

Yang said that he considers the 200 votes “highly suspicious” and that the matter merits examination. “Whether it’s a system error of the voting company, or the product of other forces at work, it should be investigated nevertheless,” he adds.

Ben Coleman, UTSU president, says that he would support such an investigation, as long as there was a reasonable justification for the expense. Coleman believes that the SimplyVoting system provides a receipt with an anonymous code that can be used to check against a publically available list of results.

“I’m not sure why this hasn’t been implemented for UTSU elections, and I think it’s our responsibility to look into those things as we plan for the Fall election,” Coleman says.

“We should review the voting system anyway, because some concerns brought up by students two years ago when I was a board member, such as using out-dated SSL encryption, haven’t been fixed by updates,” says Coleman.

The UTSU president suggested reviewing the system in terms of its cost effectiveness for features provided. Coleman also hinted at adopting a policy regarding scrutinising online ballots. “Given that we’ve had a couple years with online voting, I think we should have the operational experience to be able to introduce [a policy],” he added.