How Do I Vote?

There are many advantages to adopting this method of voting:

Emergency Preparedness: Voting by Internet does not require any large gatherings at polling stations, and allows voters to vote from the comfort and safety of their home. Voting can still occur 

Efficiency: reduces printing, return postage fees, staff time for vote counting, and the amount of paper utilized.

Accessibility: Electronic Voting is a convenient option for electors allowing them to use their own devices and access their ballots anytime during the voting period, and from anywhere with Internet or Telephone access. The Town’s Accessibility Advisory Committee has vetted this switch, and have endorsed the use of use of Electronic voting.

Accuracy: Electronic voting uses electronic ballots exclusively, reducing counting error from manual tabulations.

Automatic Tabulation: 100% of the results will be available in the hours after 8pm on October 26, 2026, once all voters have completed their voting.

Convenience: Eligible electors being resident and non-resident electors are given the equal opportunity to vote from a location of their convenience. Whether you are travelling around the world, not wanting to leave the house, or still wanting to attend a location to vote, alternative voting allow you to choose how you vote for your future Council and Trustee. 

1. Check the Voters’ List to ensure you are on it, and your mailing address is up to date.
2. Wait for your Voting PIN Letter to arrive in the mail by October 7, 2026. 
   • Keep the Voting PIN Letter in a safe place until voting opens on Friday, October 16th 2026 at 9:00am
   • You will have 11 Days to vote, but do not wait until the last minute in case you have difficulty logging into the voting system
3. Open your Voting PIN Letter, and find the PIN number that will let you access to the voting system.
4. Voting - navigate to the Voting URL website, cast your Ballot anywhere, anytime with a browser.

If you did not receive your Voting PIN letter in the mail by October 13, you will be able to obtain your Voting PIN letter from the Election Office at Victoria Hall, 55 King Street, West, Cobourg, or during the voting period, at a Voter Help Centre. 

If you do not have access to internet at your home, visit a Voter Help Centre during regular business hours, and use the touch-screen kiosk or public-access computers.

Will paper ballots be available to electors?

The Town of Cobourg is committed to ensuring the security and secrecy of the vote. We will be conducting vote counting audits  and reviewing third-party penetration testing to ensure the final election results are secure, efficient, and accurate.

Simply Voting was designed from the ground-up to minimize the risk of electoral fraud or breach of secrecy:

• Voters who bypass authentication or have already voted are denied access to the ballot.
• One-vote-per-voter is guaranteed by marking electors as voted and storing the vote in a single transaction. Even if a voter submits the ballot simultaneously on several devices, this technology guarantees that only one vote is accepted.
• Ballots are rigorously checked for validity before being accepted.
• All administrator and voter activity is logged with timestamp and IP address.
• Communication between the voter’s computer and our website is encrypted with TLS 1.3 and strong cipher suites to protect against current and future encryption attacks.
• The entire voting system database is encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption.
• The servers are “hardened” and are subjected to daily Trust Guard PCI Compliance security scans.
• The voting system is regularly subjected to penetration tests by CyberHunter and source code security audits by HP Fortify.
• Simply Voting adheres to guidelines established by the Open Web Application Security Project.
• Any change to the voting system must pass an internal security review before going live.
• All staff workstations are kept up-to-date and protected by access password, firewall, anti-virus, anti-spamware and disk encryption.
• Simply Voting authenticates emails with DomainKeys Identified Mail and the Sender Policy Framework to protect voters from phishing attacks.
• Our servers are protected by a very powerful firewall, FortiGate Unified Threat Management, which includes an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and a redundant firewall on hot standby. Webservers are further protected.
• Network access is protected by a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).
• Simply Voting uses an automated and always-on solution from Radware to protect against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
• Simply Voting use redundant Anycast DNS deployments which protects against DNS-based DDoS attacks.