As municipalities across B.C. look to boost voter turnout for their Nov.15 local government elections, there’s one option they won’t have — sending voters online to fill out their ballots.
While 2.4-million voters in last month’s Ontario municipal elections had the option to vote via the Internet, the B.C. government has yet to bring in legislation allowing e-voting.
In 2013, Elections B.C. released a report arguing Internet voting presents too many security risks to be embraced for municipal and provincial elections at this time.
The report also cast doubt on whether voters are any more likely to vote when presented with an online option.
But, Nicole Goodman, a researcher with the Canadian Centre for e-Democracy, said it’s too early for B.C. to dismiss Internet voting as a possible method for increasing participation.
“Internet voting is a fairly novel technology being used in elections,” said Goodman, who is in the midst of a major research project focused on the October 2014 Ontario municipal election, where a quarter of the population had the option to vote via the Internet.
Goodman said studies on Internet voting have produced mixed results, with some showing increased voter turnout and others showing negligible effects, but the results appear to vary by country and no study has looked at the technology over a long period of time.
She believes her work, which will study Internet voting from 2003 up to present day, could offer more definitive answers about how technology impacts elections for voters, city administrators and candidates themselves.
While she’s still parsing 2014 data, Goodman said when Ontario communities offered online voting in 2010, it produced a 3.5 per cent increase in turnout, with numbers controlled for other variables such as charismatic candidates and hot local issues.
Goodman said the modest increase suggests internet voting isn’t a “cure-all” for low voter turnout.
But, she believes it’s a tool that will keep some voters who otherwise might not have time to get to the polls from opting to not cast a ballot at all.
Goodman said that beyond technological concerns, education and communication are vital to improving turnout.
“When we see communities or countries implementing Internet voting, those who communicate with citizens and voters and communicate with candidates have better success with their implementation of internet voting, or any type of new voting approach,” she said.
While she sees potential in online voting, there’s another process common in Ontario and Nova Scotia Goodman is less fond of: telephone voting.
“A lot of people think telephone voting would be better for seniors because they’re familiar with telephones,” she said.
“But the problem was, a lot of people couldn’t find the pound key, and a lot of seniors would hit the wrong button and it would change the langue being spoke from English to French and they couldn’t understand it.”
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