There’s been a lot of talk lately about opening things, and getting back to normal, but is all this just wishful thinking, or are we really getting near the end of all this COVID craziness?
Scientifically speaking this situation may be far from over. Whether we get more cases when we’re not all sequestered at home anymore, or the virus comes roaring back later this year with cold and flu season, COVID-19 will only truly go away when we’ve got a cure, or a vaccine.
Despite occasional news items to the contrary, most scientists will tell you that a cure for COVID is between 12 and 18 months from being available. There’s no way that the economy will be shutdown that long, but it does give us a rather hard deadline in terms of when we might be able to escape the spectre of the novel coronavirus.
Speaking of hard deadlines, there’s one cooking at city hall, and it’s less than a year away.
By this time next year, the City of Guelph will have to submit their plan to execute the 2022 Municipal Election. The biggest piece of that is the review of council composition and compensation, which is a study of how many councillors the city needs, their employment status, and ward boundaries. But another question that will need to be answered by May 2021 is what are we going to do about internet voting?
Though highly popular in 2014, council decided to hit pause on continuing internet voting in 2018. The motion was passed by a thin margin, and out of an abundance of concern about internet security, especially following reports of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Election.
Most controversial issues tend to split people right down the middle, and the vote to end the internet voting experiment was no exception. Many lamented the loss of convenience, and others were disappointed because they have mobility issues or other concerns that make going to a physical poll more difficult.
The case was also made that in a world where you can do your banking on your phone, then why would online voting offer a unique security threat that would prohibit its use? It’s an understandable point of confusion, and one that any number of computer security experts can explain if they have the time.
That was the problem in a nutshell. The plan was produced at the beginning of the month at Committee of the Whole, and it was ratified at the end of the month at the regular council meeting. In between, everyone went to their corners. It was early adapters versus technophobes, and neither side understood the end point of view of the other.
The truth of the matter was that both sides had valuable points, and nothing was resolved to anyone’s satisfaction after only two meetings. After the vote, I mentioned in a Market Squared column at the time that after the election there should be a big, robust discussion on the subject so that there’s lots of time to hash it out before the next time the Provincial government needed a decision.
That was 18 months ago, now we have only 11 months left to have that big debate.
Now some pretty major stuff has been going on in Guelph lately, so it’s understandable that certain non-essential work may have been knocked off course, but the clock is running out, and a proper debate has to start soon because it’s not going to get any easier to find consensus.
In the last couple of years, internet voting should now be a greater cause for concern, and not because of the wacky, undemocratic antics of Vladimir Putin. In the last few years, we’ve seen more Ontario municipalities become the victims of cyber crim, and the motives were wonderfully simplistic like extortion, or using networked computers to mine cryptocurrency.
Like in real life, the majority of criminals are not masterminds, and even in the midst of a global pandemic we know that scammers can’t overcome their natural inclination to scam. Police have been warning us for the duration that there are people out there willing and able to take advantage of people’s fear.
Another thing that the pandemic has done is make us more comfortable with living online. The relative security of everyday interactions on your computer can also offer a false sense of confidence because not encountering a scammer today makes you feel more secure that you won’t encounter a scammer tomorrow. Except you can, and you might.
We know live in a world where you can get just about anything at home with a couple of swipes on your phone, and it’s going to be harder than ever to convince people that they have to be weary about cyber security, especially when it comes to something simple like voting. Setting that up safely though is not that simple, and we need to start making people understand why.
The issue of internet voting is more complex than people want to think, and if we’re going to have time to find a compromise for 2022, then we’re really going to have to start taking the time now before it runs out. Again.
