One of the things that was suggested at the previous meeting of this committee by my colleague, Mr. Lukiwski—who isn't here today—is that instead of having a system in which voters assign a number to each candidate, we could achieve the same result by having a grid. On the X axis you would have the candidates listed; on the Y axis you would have, essentially, spots starting with number one through whatever the top number is. If you wanted to put Candidate Jones as your first candidate, you'd put an X into spot number one beside Candidate Jones' name, and so on for all the other candidates.
This would lead to something that I think would be quite easily machine readable. In terms of its physical size, it would be a large ballot for a large province, but I suspect it would not be any larger than a ballot in which numbers are listed off from one through to whatever, based on what I've seen of the Australian STV system for their Senate elections, and in larger states, such as New South Wales--which is, roughly speaking, the same size as Ontario.
I wonder if adopting the bill to allow for that would have the effect of making the process of coming up with machine-readable ballots easier and hence reduce the time constraints involved, from your perspective.