The NDP touted its online voting system as one of the most up-to-date in the world, but it still took the party more than 12 hours to crown its new leader, Thomas Mulcair.

Stalled voting lineups snaked throughout the Metro Convention Centre Saturday, angering party members, many of whom waiting hours to cast their second-, third- and fourth-round ballots. The delays also riled online voters nationwide, who faced frozen screens and crawling connections.

The party blamed the fiasco on an attempted cyber-attack, in which mischievous Internet users clogged the NDP’s voting website.

“The only thing that we know is that the delays that were being caused were caused by those outside the system who were attempting to mess with our system,” said Brad Lavigne, principal secretary to the leaders of the official Opposition.

Lavigne emphasized the party’s online voting system — operated by Scytl, a Spanish company — had not been hacked.

The NDP said it has isolated the IP addresses responsible for the traffic jam, but late Saturday did not say where they were located. Lavigne stressed that first- and second-ballot results, the latter of which were announced after a nearly two-hour delay, were not compromised and that Scytl representatives were at the convention working with party personnel.

“The system has not been compromised,” he said. “They did not get into the system.”

Sally Housser, the party’s acting deputy national director, said Scytl was able to reconfigure the system so the saboteurs were no longer able to flood the system.

Second-ballot results were not announced until just before 2 p.m. Third-ballot results were revealed four hours later, 10 hours after the first round of votes were broadcast.

About 4,600 delegates were on site to vote at the convention centre. At points throughout the day, more than 5,000 across the country were expected to vote online, but the party reported thousands of non-voters were also on the website.

New Waterford, Cape Breton-residents John Wilson and his wife, Sandra, tried all day to vote unsuccessfully online from their home. Wilson says every time they tried to enter their pin numbers and vote, a message would appear onscreen telling them that they had already voted or that their time had expired.

“If so, that means someone hijacked our vote,” said Wilson, 64. “It’s terrible. How else are you going to feel? Very honest people figured that this wasn’t going to be a problem, so we didn’t back up our votes in any way. If I had had any inkling that this was going to happen, we would have mailed in our paper votes.”

The NDP also suggested heavy website traffic was driven by voters who cast unchangeable preferential ballots in advance, then tried to access them later to make changes in the second and third rounds. But even at the convention centre, where dozens of online polling kiosks were set up, voters faced slow computers.

Former party leader Ed Broadbent reportedly sat for eight minutes at a booth before he could cast a ballot.

But some members welcomed the delays as an opportunity to meet and talk politics.

“This is the easiest hour I’ve had in the last six months,” said Gary Burrill, MLA for Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley, in Nova Scotia.

While Lavigne, the principal secretary, quickly dispelled rumours that Scytl’s security was breached, and no attack actually occurred, the company has faced high-level criticism in the past. An electronic voting trial during municipal elections in Finland, for which Scytl provided software, “failed due to due to flaws in the machines,” according to a 2008 Elections Canada report.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Amidst controversy that the attempt hack violated the integrity of Saturday’s vote, the NDP pledged an investigation.

“Certainly if anybody was trying to circumvent democracy, that’s unfortunate,” she said. “We’re going to be investigating this probably for a few days to come.”

With files from Kenyon Wallace, Joanna Smith and Niamh Scallan