Canada Today Puts Democracy to the Test But Will Technology Soon Change the Rules?

October 21, 2019 – Canada’s federal election, the 43rd in the country’s history, is taking place today. I just came back from voting using the old fashioned way of paper ballot marked and placed by me in a ballot box. Canada has been voting federally this way for a very long time. With over 37.2 million in this country, of which 27.4 million are eligible to vote, we have come a long way from the 3.4 million who were Canadians in 1867, and voting in public before the secret ballot first appeared in 1874.

In our election today, polling stations sprouted up on the street overnight, one to cover the north side, the other the south. Voter registration cards were mailed to most voters weeks ahead of the election date. Bringing the card and one other piece of identification, a driver’s license, or a piece of mail with your name and address, meant you could mark a ballot.

The system allows for advance voting which was done more than a week ago. Polling stations for the advanced vote were more remote. Absentee ballots were also distributed by mail to Canadians living overseas.

Because Canada is not a presidential system like the United States, the vote is not for the Prime Minister, but for the local Member of Parliament. So it is actually 338 elections all using the principle of first-past-the-post to declare the winner. In the United States, with only two main political parties, first-past-the-post is very simple to calculate. But Canada has six political parties vying for parliamentary seats. In many ridings, the winner doesn’t represent the majority of voting constituents.

Is There Something Better Than a Paper Ballot System?

For people with disabilities who cannot mark a ballot because they don’t have the use of their hands, the Canadian province of British Columbia is introducing assistive technologies to make it possible to cast a ballot without having to physically handle it. Similar efforts are being made to make those who are visually impaired capable of voting using audio technology. For non-native speakers, technology is being tested that can give a voter an option to choose a preferred language.

But more interesting and potentially more problematic is the initiative by The Northwest Territories (NWT) to introduce e-voting. An NWT website, Electorhood, was recently set up for the territorial election and is being used in this federal election. The site treats all eligible voters as absentee ballots requiring them to register on it before election day. Each voter receives a user ID and sets up a password. The NWT elections organization reports that doing voting this way reduces the cost per ballot to less than $10 CDN, versus $30 to $50 per the manual paper ballot. The justification in doing this is the nature of the NWT population, spread out over a vast territory measuring 1.144 million square kilometers (442,000 square miles) and terrain and weather that makes paper ballots a logistical nightmare.

To date, a number of countries (31 and counting) have tested e-voting with only one implementing it on a national scale. Estonia introduced the I-vote several years ago. It is a very small Baltic nation with a population of 1.3 million. It has e-government with a system of e-Identity, creating the ability for its people to use digital signatures for safe identification with ID-cards, Mobile-ID or Smart-ID capability. Its embrace of the Internet as the means to deliver government programs made the extension to e-voting seem pretty practical. embracing nation-wide Internet government programs and service delivery, adding I-voting to the list seems logical. It will be interesting to see if the NWT experiment follows in Estonia’s footsteps.

E-voting and e-government seem like a natural step in the evolution of democracy. But some experts have expressed considerable reservations. For example, computer scientists, David Jefferson, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and the Verified Voting Foundation, describes e-voting as “an insane thing to do….from a security point of view.” 

The problem is hacked balloting and cyber-meddling. Not all citizens are computer literate which means governments wanting to implement e-voting have more to teach citizens than just how to use a computer and online voting website. They need to understand how to protect their identity from the kind of fraud that appears to be on the increase across the Internet.

Jefferson, who has written extensively on the subject of e-voting  he argues that “no technology available today or in the reasonably foreseeable future…can adequately secure an online public election against all the potential threats it must be defended against.”

Why is this?

Because the privacy requirements of an e-voting system are far more stringent than an e-commerce system. Jefferson states, “election officials must always know exactly who is voting to verify eligibility and prevent double voting, but they must not be able to trace particular ballots to the individual voters that cast them.”

And then there is the question of cyberthreats. Jefferson notes that “anyone on the Internet can attack the elections remotely. A successful attack may never be detected, resulting in the wrong people being elected, but with no evidence, even forensic evidence, that anything was amiss.”

That’s why Jefferson argues for the paper ballot as the most secure voting method for use in elections. And that’s the process I went through today when I voted.