HWDSB Ward 4 Trustee By-Election

The online voting system supports various operating systems and browsers such as: Android (v7.1.2 and greater), iOS (version 9 and above), Windows (10 or greater), Mac (OS X Cheetah - 10.0.4 or greater), Edge, Safari, Chrome, IE (Internet explorer), etc.

No, the multi-factor authentication can be set to email, SMS or authentication app.

Visit elections.hamilton.ca between December 1 and January 5, 2025 to register to cast your online ballot.

Acceptable Identification is an original or certified or notarized copy of a document (or combination of documents) showing the person’s name and qualifying address. There is an exhaustive list of Acceptable Identification as dictated by O-Reg. 304/13 on the City of Hamilton’s Election page at hamilton.ca/elections.

A photo of your identification is uploaded to the Voter Registration platform. All identification is deleted as soon as Voter Registration has been accepted or declined.

Registering to vote can take as little as a few minutes.

The cutoff for online Voter Registration is Sunday January 5, 2025 at 11:59pm.

Please contact the Hamilton Election Office at [email protected].

Online Voting opens at 12:01am on Thursday January 2, 2025 and closes at 8 pm on Monday January 6, 2025.

Each Voter registration is examined by Election Staff who will confirm voter eligibility prior to approving the elector for online voting. If the elector is unable to verify that they are a resident, or owner of residential land in Ward 4, their voter registration will not be approved, and they will not be eligible to cast a ballot in the by-election.

Your online ballot can be cast in minutes once registration has been successfully completed.

Online Voting closes Monday January 6, 2025 at 8 pm.

A live Voters’ List ensures that once an elector has been struck from the List and has voted (either online or in-person) that they are no longer eligible to vote again.

The online voting system is AODA complaint and meets WCAG 2.1 AA requirements.

• Neuvote (Neuvote.com) is an election service provider that provides online voting services throughout the world. This service is maintained exclusively on Neuvote servers and is not shared or hosted on the City of Hamilton infrastructure.
• Neuvote uses the most advanced cryptographic protocol available for online voting, the Estonian Protocol. Estonia has been using online voting since 2003 and has withstood cyber-attacks from Russia since its inception without a single
  data breach or failure.
• Neuvote employs the highest level of safeguards on its cloud infrastructure and regularly undergoes audits and security reviews both internally and by third-party auditors.
• Neuvote also is unique as it reinforces each digitally cast ballot with a printed cryptographic paper ballot.
• Neuvote is the first company to support the development of standards for Online Voting in Ontario and the system is fully compliant with the Digital Governance Standards Institute (DGSI) 111-1 Online Voting Standards. More details about the standard can found at dgc-cgn.org.
• Neuvote’s system provides End-to-End Verifiability (E2EV) and each vote cast is secured with a voter receipt for individual verifiability.

• Neuvote’s data center is hosted and managed in a Canadian Amazon AWS data center which employs government-grade information and physical security policies such as MFIPPA. Neuvote employs various security controls that are implemented to safeguard information assets.
• Amazon maintains strict physical security controls to prevent unauthorized access to its data center facilities. Access to these areas is restricted to authorized personnel only and is controlled at all times.
• Neuvote secures the disposal of all obsolete or redundant hardware or workstations to prevent any potential data leakage.
• Neuvote continually enforce strict encryption policies and all data is encrypted at rest and in transit at all times.

• The data is destroyed after a set time after the election. Scrutineers and witnesses may be assigned for data deletion and a certificate of data deletion will be provided to the City of Hamilton once completed.
• The data is maintained on encrypted servers and these servers are not visible to City of Hamilton staff and not stored after the election concludes.
• If the encryption key used in the Amazon KMS service is eliminated, the encrypted data within the volume becomes irretrievable. In the event of a provider failure in the wiping process, if the volume were to be transferred to another cloud user without wiping it, they would be unable to access the information due to the AES-256 encryption.
• The secure deletion of data will be achieved with a combination of the destruction of the encryption key with the destruction of the volumes and instances used.

• All data is encrypted at rest and in transit at all times.
• Neuvote only collects and uses data necessary for the verification of voters during the authentication process but anonymizes the voting session once a voter enters ballot casting screens. There is no way to associate the ballot with a
  voter's identity during the decryption and tabulation of the cast ballots.
• Neuvote limits access to all data based on documented and strictly define roles and permissions. All accounts, including voter accounts, are secured with complex password requirements as well as Multifactor Authentication (MFA)/Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) requirements.

• Online voting has been widely used throughout municipal elections across Ontario including cities such as Markham, Vaughan, Newmarket and provincial and territories such as NWT and PEI.
• This recommendation was made by Council in response to Report FCS24053 on October 9, 2024 and was approved by a vote of 12-3.

• Neuvote employs a threat risk assessment model that includes ensuring proper planning for worst-case scenarios and disaster recovery planning.
• Offline backups exist of election data in the event of data center failure.
• We support each digitally cast ballot with our secure paper ballot system that can be used to verify votes by auditors or for manual recount purposes via identical processes that would be used for in-person or mail in ballots that are part of any
  municipally run election process.

• We implement multi-factor authentication to verify voter identities while protecting personal information.
• We use verified identification methods to confirm voter eligibility, prevent impersonation and prevent duplicate entries.
• Each vote is End-to-End Verifiable (E2EV) and each voter can check that their vote is counted using the vote receipt.
• Each vote is secured both digitally and physically.

• Names and of the individual vote cast by voters will not be shared and are completely anonymized.
• All records are stored with high-level encryption both at rest and in transit.
• The solution's architecture is assigned exclusively to the City of Hamilton. Resources are not shared between customers.
• Neuvote voting system is governed by the Laws of Ontario and is compliant with the Municipal Elections Act of Ontario.

• As an End-to-End Verifiable (E2EV) system, each vote cast produces a cryptographic receipt that can be validated by the voter to ensure their vote was cast accurately.
• The election itself produces a cryptographic audit that can reviewed by third parties.
• The vote decryption process will be observed by Elections Hamilton.
• The online voting process is monitored in real-time, including updates on election progress, and Nevote has staff standing by to address concerns promptly. (Have Neuvote review for accuracy)

• Neuvote believes that as a vendor trust is earned and we do so by providing the most auditable and secure method of voting, a hybrid digital and physical combination of vote results to ensure the integrity of the election can be audited and understood by all stake holders and that can be audited and verified by the City of Hamilton or third party auditors prior to, during and after the election process.

• Our online voting system is AODA compliant and can work with various assistive technologies to ensure everyone gets the opportunity to vote.
• Neuvote regularly undergoes user accessibility testing to improve system performance and has worked with leading researchers to provide feedback.
• Neuvote fully supports translating materials into multiple languages to reach diverse populations.

Online components of the Online Voting Platform take advantage of the Monitoring component. The Monitoring component gathers logs concerning all events within the voting system and performs automatic anomaly analysis and intrusion detection on these logs. This way we reduce the amount of information that the administrator must process, make it possible to detect problems early on, and guarantee that critical security incidents get the immediate attention of the personnel.

• The Neuvote online voting platform uses encryption and tamper-proof technologies to safeguard vote integrity.
• Neuvote conduct third-party reviews of the online voting process to validate accuracy and fairness.
• Clearly explain how votes are recorded, stored, and tallied, ensuring no bias in system operations.
• Neuvote performs simulations and stress/load tests to confirm that the system functions correctly under all conditions including a high amount of user using the online voting system simultaneously.

• Voting Volume: Our voting services are designed to be auto-scale to meet full demand of the election requirements in real-time.
• Data volume (Elastic Scalability): Our Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Database Service) can dynamically adjust their instances and storage capacity.
• Auto Scaling: Neuvote’s hosting vendor Amazon AWS utilizes AWS Auto caling monitors for Neuvote applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance.

• Neuvote uses cryptographic methods to allow voters to verify that their vote was cast, recorded, and counted correctly, without revealing their choice(s).
• Our audit trails maintain a secure and tamper-proof log of voting transactions for post-election audits and can be audited by third parties if required.
• Neuvote is currently the only company that produces an End-to-End Verifiable (E2EV) paper ballot which also provides additional auditability and verification of voting results and are not reliant on a just the online voting casting process to
  ensure the highest level of election integrity.

• Each voter account is secured with 2FA and after a voter is verified, their voter session provides them a secure portal to cast their ballot.
• The system is designed in such a way that no vote can be cast without having an eligible verified voter access their ballot.
• Neuvote produces both a digital and physical result to ensure each count is a 1-1 match between and online ballot case and paper ballot to ensure election results have not been tampered and can also be verified both via detailed secure audit
  logs as well as paper ballot validation or recounts if ever required.