Municipality To Use Internet Voting Only This Election
It’s finally happening. An entire municipality will utilize online-only voting in the next election with all balloting to be run via Scytl, the tech company based in Barcelona, Spain.
The controversial rollout is being deployed not in the U.S., where Scytl two years ago acquired 100 percent of SOE Software – the leading software provider of election management solutions in the United States – but in Canada where, on October 27, Leamington, Ontario will become the first Canadian municipality to use an Internet-only voting process.
Every registered voter in Leamington, with a population of about 17,000, must cast ballots through mobile devices or computer.
The municipality’s website says “this sole method of voting follows Council’s strategic plan to be environmentally friendly and to embrace technology.”
“This cost effective type of voting will also address accessible voters’ issues,” said the site.
Canada’s CBS News reported the voting will be run with systems from Scytl.
Feedback on the news site expressed nearly universal concern about Internet security. Nearly all reader comments opposed the idea of online-only voting.
The U.S. may not be too far from Internet voting. In January, President Obama’s special commission on election reform recommended future electronic voting, even suggesting tablet computers, such as iPads, be used to cast votes.
In 2012, Scytl announced the successful implementation of technology that allows ballots to be cast using Google and Apple smartphones and tablet computers.
Deputy Director Ignores CIA Report, Believes Terrorist
Did CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell believe the claims of a terrorist organization over the account by his agency’s own Libya station chief regarding the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack?
That is the picture that emerges when Morell’s testimony from last week, his first public comments on Benghazi, is cross-referenced with the details of a recent Senate intelligence report on the murderous attack.
As has been widely reported, Morell repeatedly testified last week that he mistakenly believed the Benghazi attack stemmed from a protest over an anti-Islam film. The mistaken belief purportedly led to Morell’s central role in crafting the now discredited talking points used by top Obama administration officials in their public comments about the attack.
Morell was challenged with information he and others at the CIA received in an e-mail from the CIA’s Libya station chief stating the attack was “not an escalation of protests.”
The email was sent Sept. 15, 2012, one day before United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice infamously used Morell’s talking points when she went on five morning television programs to offer the official Obama administration response to the Benghazi attacks. In nearly identical statements, Rice asserted the attacks were a spontaneous protest in response to a “hateful video.”
When asked about the station chief’s e-mail, Morell said he immediately responded to the transmission by asking the station chief for more information.
He claimed the station chief’s assertions were contradicted by news media accounts and by CIA analysts’ own estimations. He said he petitioned intelligence analysts to “revisit their judgment” about a popular protest but “based on a totality of the information available to them, they stuck with their initial conclusions.”
Those initial conclusions, this column has learned, were formed in part by the statements of Ansar Al-Sharia, the terrorist organization that initially claimed it was behind the Benghazi attacks.
Page 34 of the January 15 report on the Benghazi attack by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence documents that the CIA’s assessment of what happened in Benghazi was guided by the agency’s “Analytic Line Review.”
That document states: “Of the 11 reports cited by the CIA’s Analytic Line Review, six were press articles, two were the public statements of Ansar al-Sharia, and the three others were intelligence reports.”