Questions & Answers
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to common questions from municipal clerks, election coordinators, IT teams, and procurement officers evaluating Civic Internet & Telephone Voting for their municipality.
Civic Internet & Telephone Voting is a secure multi-channel voting platform purpose-built for Canadian municipal elections. It enables eligible electors to cast ballots via a web portal (internet), touchtone keypad (telephone IVR), or accessible kiosks — alongside traditional in-person voting. Unlike paper-ballot elections that require dedicated polling stations, printed ballots, and manual counting, Civic uses cryptographic ballot separation to guarantee ballot secrecy, encrypted ballot storage with blockchain audit trails for integrity, and automated tabulation that produces certified results within 30 minutes of polls closing. The system is designed to comply with the Municipal Elections Act (MEA), MFIPPA, PIPEDA, and AODA requirements.
Ballot secrecy is guaranteed by the Cryptographic Ballot Separator — a core component that mathematically separates your voter identity from your ballot choices at the moment of casting. Once separation occurs, no person — including system administrators, election officials, or Civic engineers — can ever reconnect your identity to your ballot. Encrypted ballots are stored in the Encrypted Ballot Store with no linkage to voter credentials. Multi-custodian key management means no single person holds the full decryption key. Ballots are mixed/shuffled before decryption to further protect anonymity.
Over 200 Ontario municipalities have adopted internet and/or telephone voting under the Municipal Elections Act (s.42) alternative voting provisions since the technology was first used in 2003. Civic Internet & Telephone Voting builds on this established foundation with modern cryptographic ballot secrecy, blockchain audit trails, ML anomaly detection, and source-code-available licensing — capabilities that did not exist in earlier-generation systems.
Yes. Civic Internet & Telephone Voting is designed as a multi-channel system that augments — not replaces — traditional in-person voting. Councils can configure any combination of internet, telephone, kiosk, and in-person voting. The voters list is synchronized across all channels in real-time (< 5 seconds) so that if an elector votes via any channel, they are immediately marked as 'voted' across all channels — preventing double voting.
Yes. Civic provides full source code ownership through its municipal licensing model. Unlike vendor-proprietary voting systems that require black-box trust, Civic's source code can be inspected by the municipality, independent auditors, academic researchers, and the public (if the municipality chooses to make it available). This transparency model enables the strongest form of election system verification.
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