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The problem there, according to the agency, wasn’t with the counting machines themselves but with how a central database processed the numbers they produced.

“Elections Ontario has the utmost confidence in the accuracy of vote tabulators and has piloted them successfully in by-elections. So far the machines have performed without issue during advance polls,” said Cara Des Granges, a spokesperson for Elections Ontario.

At heart, the machines are counting devices: Voters mark ballots the traditional way and feed them in. The machines register the voter’s choice and then drop the ballot into a secure box. At the end of voting, the returning officer at each poll uses an electronic command to print out the machine’s count and then calls the results in to Elections Ontario as if the team at the poll had just counted the ballots by hand.

There’s no touchscreen or keypad for voters to use, no Internet connection to be hacked. The machines could, in theory, have been sabotaged in advance, though they’ve been tested in Elections Ontario’s custody to make sure they’re counting and tallying the way they’re supposed to.

In case of challenges, all the original ballots are to be kept for a year. So will digital images of each ballot a machine scans, recorded with the machine’s interpretation of each one.

In a test in the 2016 byelection in Whitby-Oshawa, they performed “flawlessly,” working faster and more accurately than dumping ballots on tables and counting by hand, Elections Ontario boss Greg Essensa reported to the legislature then.