In Canada, voters in New Brunswick could know the results of municipal elections on May 12 within an hour of the polls closing. The province will become the first in Canada to use electronic tabulation machines to count ballots for every community.
Michael Quinn, New Brunswick's chief electoral officer, said the machines will count the ballots throughout the day as they are cast, but won't reveal the results until a returning officer inserts a key and a code after the polls close.
Dominion Voting has been contracted to provide 229 of the machines, which
look like a combination printer-scanner used for a home computer.
Quinn said the machines being used in New Brunswick are different from the
ones that led to a challenge of results in Florida during the 2000 presidential
election in the United States.
"These are not voting machines," he said. "You still mark a paper ballot and
slip that paper ballot into the ballot box. ... The difference is that it goes
through a scanner-tabulator before it goes into the ballot box."
Quinn said the accuracy of the machines should reduce or eliminate any challenges of the results.
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