Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good evening, panellists.
I'm grateful to Dr. Simons for making many of the points I was never going to be able to say in just two minutes.
I concur with Dr. Simon's conclusion that online voting shouldn't be embraced before it can be made secure, but I go still further and suggest that even if online voting could one day be made 100% secure, it could never be visibly and demonstrably secure in the way a properly scrutineered paper ballot can. Without a visibly secure process, rumours of secret fixes will abound, rumours that would surely increase cynicism about the electoral process and quite possibly cause a decrease in voter turnout.
Not every citizen can be a computer expert. The idea that everyone marks a paper and puts it in a box, and in front of representatives of each candidate the ballots are dumped out and counted is on a human scale. Any move to online or electronic voting is another level of “trust the experts”. This yields conspiracy speculation. Would such speculation be baseless? Perhaps. However, a conspiracy theory need not be well grounded to deter voter participation.
Gathering at a voting place to cast the ballot makes voting visible to the community. Voters are urged to bring their children with them to impress on them the importance of voting. Voting by mobile phone, by contrast, would to an onlooker be indistinguishable from ordering a pizza. As former B.C. Liberal leader Gordon Wilson said, there's simply no substitute for showing up at a physical polling station and having one's identity verified before being allowed to vote.
The push for online voting is essentially based on the supposition that it will increase voter turnout, but this notion assumes that a significant number of non-voters would vote if it were more convenient. The evidence, however, shows that non-voters are not deterred by the inconvenience of voting, but rather feel disengaged from the democratic process. Canada has changed from a largely rural to a largely urban nation over the past century, making voting much more convenient, but turnout has dropped in tandem.
Two British members of Parliament recently toured England speaking to voters and non-voters and reported that those who don't vote are as uninterested in politics as it is possible to be. We have work to do in re-engaging such citizens, but online voting is not the solution.