Happy 2024! Let’s talk about 2026!!
Well, let’s talk about the 2026 municipal election to be a bit more precise.
If you follow the Accessibility Advisory Committee like I do, then you know that this has been a pretty big conversation topic throughout 2023, and as we enter the new year, the issue will move on to the next level, a recommendation.
You needn’t have followed the debate at the committee level to know that there’s been a lot of discussion about just how accessible our local elections have been, especially since council opted to suspend the use of internet voting in 2017.
Over the course of the last two elections, members of our disabled community have tried to make a case that our elections are not accessible for everyone, first by trying to retain internet voting, and then in 2021 by making a case to allow a form of voting where disabled people would be able use their assistive devices, like screen readers, to mark their ballots and then print them off and mail them in.
At issue is something a lot of us take for granted every day: independence. What the AAC, and the people they represent, are looking for is an opportunity to be able to cast their ballots with the same relative security and non-interference that the rest of us get because nobody thinks a person without a disability requires the help of another person to cast our ballot.
This is where things like the Vote from Home pilot in the 2022 election failed. Yes, sending election staff to a voter’s home to give them a ballot and collect it again does offer secure voting, but it hardly promotes a sense of independence for the voter since they have to invite a stranger into their home just to exercise their right to vote.
This situation would be ideally solved with the reinstatement of internet voting. A tough sell because Guelph’s political class stays so consistently technophobic that the term “Luddite” is not completely inaccurate. It’s why for the last several years I’ve called on the City of Guelph to have a kind of town hall to lay out all the potential security concerns with internet voting and the possible ways to counteract them.
If internet voting is on the table, we will undoubtedly hear about “Robocalls”, the now 13-year-old scandal where Guelph voters were rerouted from their voting places by an automated phone message sent to thousands of people near simultaneously. Those scars still run deep, mostly because most of the scam’s architects remain unpunished.
But here's the thing, the Robocall scam was remarkably lo-fi meaning that if didn’t require any kind of tech savvy to pull it off. Nothing was hacked, and nobody got through the backdoor with a “rubber ducky” or a server farm in Eastern Europe. All it took was a prepaid credit card, a burner phone and the fakest fake name.
And yes, there is reason to suspect that malign actors might exploit an opportunity to attack a municipality in the midst of a partially internet enabled election. Do I think Russia is going to hack Guelph’s 2026 election? No, of course not. I’m more concerned about the proverbial guy in the basement that just wants to watch the world burn.
Having said that, what makes election day a better day than any other day to attack a city? Or a library for that matter? There were cyberattacks on two different municipal library systems in Ontario last fall, including Toronto, and you have to wonder what there’s to gain with such an attack. Reasons to screw with an election are fairly obvious, but hacking the library? Bit weird.
One of the biggest security hiccups should be addressed by the time that the 2026 election rolls around because local elections in Ontario should no longer be using the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) to provide the list of electors. Instead, we’ll use the Elections Ontario list, conveniently updated thanks to the regularly scheduled provincial election in spring 2026.
And if you’re interested in getting internet voting back on the table, then the political tides may be in your favour. There was a youthful injection in the last election that might get just enough votes to make internet voting a possibility again in 2026, but I do want to assign some caveats because as much as I’m in favour of the tool to help our disabled community, I’m concerned about it becoming a crutch.
What does that mean? I don’t want to even engage in the convenience argument because between vote by mail, advanced polls (usually over the Thanksgiving long weekend) and 12 hours on election day there’s no reason why the vast majority of people can’t vote, and even though I’ve personally warmed to the idea of internet voting, I still have concerns about the perception of choosing our local government like it’s just another internet poll.
But that’s a secondary concern to the accessibility question, which I want to get back to because I’ve enjoyed watching the drive and fiestiness of the AAC as they’ve pushed staff and the clerks’ office for greater accommodation. In the process they’ve done what all good advisory committees should do: Advocate hard for the interest group they represent in spite of staff advice.
On the staff side, the issue is that they only have limited time and resources, and that means that they can only offer many voting options. The AAC’s recommendation before Christmas was basically a request to staff to enact as many alternative voting methods as possible, but that’s no easy – or cheap – feat.
Ultimately, the clerks’ office will need to enact first the alternative voting method that will catch the most people, and inevitably that will be internet voting. At that point it will be up to the rest of us to either a) find a way to adapt that method to work within our security concerns, or b) reject it completely and slam the door on members of our community continually fighting for accommodation.
I know which option is representative of the caring and forward-thinking community that many Guelphites think we have, but is that even the reality? Hopefully, we have the time to do this right, and the wisdom to listen to our disabled community when they’re telling us what they need.
