Towards making extension work with Smarty3
This gets this extension close to working with Smarty3 - which is likely to be the Smarty package in use from around 5.70. It is available from CiviCRM 5.67 with the setting of a 'define'
These changes should be compatible with Smarty2 but there might be a couple more changes needed to make it work with Smarty 3 - ie there is still one backtick place left in ElectionResults - I think it might need the use of one or more assigns as smarty can be grumpy about crawling too many layers deep
I also think the use of |@ in smarty might be an issue
See dev/core#4633 (closed) and https://github.com/kanshin/CakeSmarty/blob/master/vendors/Smarty-3.0.9/SMARTY2_BC_NOTES