Elections.ca temporarily down on Election Day

Did you wait until Election Day to find out where you should vote or what ID to bring? Then you might have had some trouble this morning getting the information you need. 

The Elections Canada website had intermittent problems loading on Monday morning, with people in different parts of the country reporting issues accessing it. 

At 9:45 a.m. ET the official Elections Canada Twitter feed reported the outage, saying "We're experiencing high volumes of traffic on our website. We appreciate your patience."

Elections Canada received online criticism for the outage, from both voters and reporters. Some argued that bandwidth problems should have been anticipated before Election Day, given the high turnout at advance polls and the longer campaign.

Others, however, took the outage as a positive sign of sorts, saying they hoped it meant many Canadians were planning to vote and therefore looking up the information they needed to do so.

By 10:18 a.m. Elections Canada had tweeted again to report the problem was resolved, saying "Our website is now working normally. Thanks for your patience."

The agency wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Turnout is expected to be high during this federal election, due in part to the larger-than-usual numbers seen at advance polls. About 3.6 million Canadians voted at advance polls over the four-day Thanksgiving long weekend,, an increase of 71 per cent over three days of advance voting in 2011, according to Elections Canada.

Elections Canada has made plans to account for busy polls, The Canadian Press reported, saying that extra staff can be added and counts can begin early if necessary.

If the Elections Canada site isn’t loading, you can access its information on voting through Archive.org. CP also has information on the required identification for voting.