Thank you for the question. You raise a good point.
Typically, anywhere online voting is introduced, we see it mostly used among older, educated, wealthier people. It's a trend of convenience. People want to have convenience. We do see a lot of older people using it, the elderly and people in nursing homes. Some of them used the Internet for the first time. I was out in Nova Scotia and I observed some of the elections there, and they were voting online for the very first time.
It certainly can enable access. The general trend is for older people to use online voting. We do find that some groups of infrequent voters, people who have voted some of the time in past elections but not all of the time, or non-voters, people who have been eligible to vote previously but have never voted, are brought into the election process, but it's just modest.
With respect to your point on turnout, that 3% effect was over time in Canadian local elections. There is no guarantee, if the voting reform were implemented federally, that we would see that same effect because, if we look at voting by mail, which is another remote voting reform, we see that the effect is actually greater at the local level than it is in general elections. The same could be true for online voting. We don't know, because we don't have the data.
The problem in looking at countries like Estonia, for example, is that Estonia only allows online voting in the advance portion of the election and not for the full election. It's difficult to make claims about how a voting reform is impacting overall turnout when it's only offered in the advance portion of the election.