THUNDER BAY – Voting in the 2018 Thunder Bay Civic election is underway. With advance polls and online voting, it is hoped that voter turnout will be greater than in the past.
John Hannam is Thunder Bay’s City Clerk, he reports “Voter turnout has be steady, in-person voting at the advance polls on pace with 2014 in addition to over 3,600 voters using online/telephone voting.
One of the most important issues is getting election results after the polls closed. Last civic election, getting results was a struggle. Computer servers were overwhelmed by the thousands of residents who logged on to websites to get the results.
Thunder Bay City Clerk John Hannam says, “Earlier this year when The City of Thunder Bay launched its new website that included moving to an externally hosted service, so we have no concerns about the capacity of the servers to cope with any surge of activity on Election Day (night)”.
“We will be pushing results out on Tbayvotes.ca, a separate website from the City’s main site but also using the same external host, so again no concerns about our ability to communicate out. We will also be pushing unofficial final results out on our social media accounts”.
In the past two elections, there was an online “widget” which updated results.
Mr. Hannam shares, “Sorry we don’t have the ‘widget’ used in the past 2 elections, it was a service provided by the vendor we used for our vote tabulators in those elections and we are using different vendors this election who do not have a ‘results service’.”
Traffic on web servers on election night will likely see a surge. During the last election, NetNewsLedger.com went down as 2800 persons per minute were logging on the site to get election results. Heading into election night on October 22nd, our web hosts, Thunder Bay’s Sencia.ca has been testing our server and we are far more confident that we should not have any problems either.
