Thunder Bay IT workers probing election night website crash

Thunder Bay city hall is investigating why the city's website crashed last night.

The malfunction had widespread repercussions. Candidates, voters, and news reporters were left waiting for the first results to be released at city hall about an hour longer than the city election staff had hoped.

Mayor Keith Hobbs was among the nervous candidates, admitting his hands were shaking as he waited for the numbers to come out.

Long lineups of voters at four polling stations also contributed to the delay as they had to be kept open well past 8p.m.

Hobbs called the situation unacceptable.

"A lot of people are ticked off that they got turned away, or they waited over an hour outside. The system obviously has to be looked at."

City clerk John Hannam agrees the issue needs to be resolved before the next election.

"Certainly having people wait in line for half an hour to get a ballot and [taking] as much time to cast their ballot is not acceptable, and we need to find a solution to it."

Hannam said city staff are still looking into why the website crashed, further delaying the release of the vote count.

"Our information technology folks are meeting as we speak having done some investigation this morning to try and understand why the server crashed, he said.

There was high traffic on the website. But whether or not that was the cause, they haven't been able to say yet."

There were relatively long lineups of voters at the Woodcrest polling location.

"We're looking at what we can do to better manage that volume of people in a tight time frame, Hannam continued.

This was the first time the city used Woodcrest school as a polling station. Hannam said he was unsure if it was the layout they used that caused an issue.

"One option is having more staff there to process [voters], he said.

And that certainly is an option. Some people commented, maybe we should have two tabulators to process the outgoing vote more quickly. That's an option. Everything we do around administering the election is a cost-benefit analysis."