In case you haven’t heard, the voting deadline has been extended to tonight at 8 p.m.
Last night as the deadline approached, the service providing the town’s online voting option started lagging and went down intermittently. If you didn’t get your vote in, you still have time.
By about 7:30 p.m. when the service still wasn’t up and running, Collingwood’s clerk department sent out a notice extending the voting period by an extra 24 hours.
Town staff had temporary desks set up in the library hallway and Free Schools Room where they operated the voter help centre, registering people to vote and offering access to devices for online voting. A queue of people had formed and tension was high from some who had been waiting a while.
Clerk Services Coordinator, Christa Carter, said the town participated in a conference call with Dominion and the 51 other municipalities affected by the outage. The town received a statement from Dominion and it's posted on their website here.
According to Dominion Voting Services, the issue was the fault of a server hosting service and there was no security issue. In a Tweet, Dominion claims the server host was supposed to support limitless traffic, but instead limited traffic for 90 minutes.
Collingwood staff are back at the library today from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. to operate the voter help centre where they can register voters and give them access to devices for electronic voting.
The results will be displayed in the Community B and C room on the third floor of the town hall following the poll closing at 8 p.m. Those in line at the help centre by 8 p.m. will still get a chance to vote. As of last night at 9:30 p.m. (Oct. 22) 44 per cent of eligible voters had cast their votes.
Nearby, Meaford and The Blue Mountains also contracted Dominion for its electronic voting system and made the same decision as Collingwood’s election staff to extend the voting period by 24 hours.
CollingwoodToday will have full coverage of tonight’s election results.
