On Wednesday, May 24 my friend (and former Sun News colleague) Ada Slivinski, a conservative columnist at the Postmedia-owned Vancouver daily 24 Hours, wrote a piece making the case for online voting, using our recent election in British Columbia for context. Four days later, on Sunday, May 28, Jamie Watt wrote an editorial for the Toronto Star under the headline “B.C. election fiasco shows need for online voting.”
Watt’s piece is very similar to Ada’s, and in some areas contains outright plagiarism, with Ada’s exact words repeated without attribution.
Ada wrote:
Estonians have been able to vote online in their national elections since 2007. Brazilians vote using electronic terminals and this move has cut the time it takes to count ballots from a month to six hours. Some local British elections have let people vote by text message.
In Canada? Online voting is available in some Ontario and Nova Scotia municipalities but it has never been offered at the provincial or federal level.
Watt wrote:
Estonians have been able to vote online in their national elections since 2007. Brazilians vote using electronic terminals, cutting the time it takes to count ballots from a month to six hours. In some local British elections, people can vote by text message.
In Canada? Online voting is available in some Ontario and Nova Scotia municipalities, but it has never been offered at the provincial or federal level.
In another part, Ada wrote:
Data collected by EKOS Research in November 2016 found 77% of Canadians say would be likely to vote online should the technology be available.
Watt wrote:
In fact, data collected by EKOS Research in November 2016 found 77 per cent of Canadians say they would be likely to vote online, should the technology be available.
Today, on June 14, the Star‘s public editor formally acknowledged the plagiarism, posting a note on Watt’s column that “This column contains unattributed material from a May 24 article published by 24 Hours Vancouver,” adding that “Mr. Watt apologizes to Star readers for this mistake.”
Will Mr. Watt be allowed to continue contributing content to the paper is the question.
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