GuelphToday received the following letter from Susan Watson regarding Internet voting.
Internet voting was probably the most contentious issue to land at city hall in the last term of council. When a group of citizens raised concerns about the integrity and security of Internet voting, mayor Guthrie and councillor Gibson waged social media campaigns accusing them of vote suppression.
Internet voting and other alternate methods of casting a ballot will land back at council at a special meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 17. Why are we revisiting the issue? Every term of council, each Ontario municipality is required to make a decision as to the voting methods that will be used for the next election: paper, mail-in ballots, telephone or Internet voting.
What’s happened in the intervening four years that should influence this council’s decision on Feb. 17?
Let’s start by looking at election night 2018. Guelph is a customer of Dominion Voting Systems (yes, the same Dominion Voting Systems tweeted about by Donald Trump). We use their optical scanners to read our ballots. If we had chosen Internet voting for 2018, Dominion would have provided it.
At 6 p.m. on the evening of Oct. 22, 2018, a dramatic online slowdown occurred in 43 municipalities which were Dominion clients. Voting websites became inaccessible, or timed out after two minutes. Some one million voters were impacted. If accessibility is the gold standard, online voting became completely inaccessible. City clerks in the affected municipalities declared emergencies to extend the election.
Our current council needs to take the facts of this event into account in evaluating the many risks of Internet voting.
Cybersecurity expert, Prof. Aleksander Essex, published a paper in October, 2020: Online Voting in Ontario’s Municipal Elections: A Conflict of Legal Principles and Technology? Although Essex shared a copy with our city clerk, it was not made available to citizens as background information for our online consultation on Internet voting. The only academic paper provided was by Dr. Nicole Goodman, a pro-internet voting social sciences professor.
What came across loud and clear in the 2017 Internet voting debate is that advocates for people with disabilities want better accessibility. And this this is not just a matter of wheelchair ramps at polling stations. Council needs to take a hard look at how voter accessibility can be improved.
Federal and provincial governments don’t offer Internet voting because of cybersecurity concerns, yet they still uphold a commitment to accessibility. What are their best practices? In specific circumstances, Elections Ontario will send returning officers to people’s homes or hospital bedsides. This adaption maintains the important principle of a supervised voting environment and mitigates against ballot theft or coercion of vulnerable people.
Phone and email the mayor and your city councillors to advocate for increased accessibility, without compromising the security and integrity of our local elections:
The deadline to register to delegate to council and to have correspondence included in the agenda is Friday, Feb. 12 at 10 a.m.
Susan Watson
