Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 19th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Ms. Romanado now, please.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My thanks to the witnesses as well.

Don't worry, I'm not going any place. I just wanted to thank you all for being here this evening.

Given that it is Women's History Month, and given what we've heard tonight, I just have to repeat a famous quote that well-behaved women seldom make history. You'll forgive my directness, because sometimes I'm not well-behaved.

That being said, my first question is for you, Mr. Poulos. You mentioned that in transmitting results, they are modemed in. Could you let me know what would be the impact for, I guess, polling stations in rural areas with broadband connectivity issues? Would this be an issue for the counting of the ballots?

[John Poulos]

No. This was the example that I mentioned with Mongolia, which is the absolute worst case in the globe, in my opinion, for connectivity.

There are three methods. There is the modeming in of the results, and these are all with unofficial results. The official results are the paper ballots. There are also redundant copies of memory in the machines. A copy of the results is modemed in to the central location, if there is a connection. It can be over satellite, broadband, or telephone.

In the cases where it doesn't work for whatever reason, and that happens, they are telephoned in, and that's the same as what we currently see in Canada. The returning officers phone in the results and they are entered into the computer, double-checked and double-called. Sometimes, and we know this happens at Elections Canada, there's a transcription error. That's why it's unofficial.

Then, of course, it's official when you reconcile the ballots with all of the audit logs from the polling location. That happens at some point after the election.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

We heard from a professor in Vancouver, Professor Simons, about Internet security in terms of online voting and so on. We've heard of multiple cases, even in the elections of our neighbours to the south, where there have been hacks and so on.

I think we've heard that there's no guarantee in terms of security, and that this would be something that would be difficult to sell to the Canadian public. What are your thoughts on Internet security? I love the idea of using technology to increase efficiencies, but in terms of security, it's one of the principles in our mandate that we cannot.... People have to feel that there's legitimacy and there's security behind the privacy and/or the security of the actual vote.

[John Poulos]

That's a great question. I'll keep it as objective as I can.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

I'm sorry, but I'm going to ask if you could keep it very brief, because I have a question for your colleagues.

[John Poulos]

Sure. I'm assuming your comments are centred around online voting.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Yes.

[John Poulos]

In online voting, perception is obviously very important, and it's linked back to the trust of the voters. In Canada—and I'm not sure if the committee knows it or not—we are exceedingly high in terms of the trust electors place in the elections such that when there are mistakes and wrong candidates get elected and then we fix it in the recounts, no one seems to care. We just understand that was probably an honest mistake by tired people counting ballots.

Perception is obviously something that you have to take into deep consideration with online voting. The hacks that you read about in the United States are in voter registration systems. There is no online voting in the United States. In terms of concrete experience, the fact of the matter is all online elections in Canada have been fairly small. In my experience of the systems we have run, I can tell you that they have not been hacked, and there have not been any attempts on hacking. I won't be subjective, if you will. That's objective.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you.

Ms. Ghose, you mentioned that changing the electoral system would assist in getting more women elected. We've heard multiple witnesses say multiple things that it's not the electoral system that will get the women elected, it's many other things.

I'm just going to preface my question with a comment. When someone applies for a job, usually they look at the job description, maybe the location of the job, the conditions of employment, what kind of tasks they do, and see if they want to apply for that job. Very rarely do they say, “Hmm, what's the interview process going to be? What kind of tests am I going to have to take?”

I'm not quite convinced that the decision for women to pursue public office has anything to do with the electoral system. There are two things. First is seeking the nomination. I understand you yourself have run for office. There's seeking the nomination, and then there's getting elected. Those are two different things.

I firmly believe the seeking of the nomination has everything to do with the actual job. Do I want to live in Ottawa? Do I want to transfer? Do I want to work the hours? Am I going to enjoy the tone? Am I going to like the personal attacks and so on? I don't think it's the actual electoral system. Perhaps, once they get the nomination, that could be a different story.

I'd like to get your opinion on that.

[Katie Ghose]

Sure. There are actually so many different factors at play, it's kind of hard to answer this in a nutshell.

I think it is important to say that some of the research that's taken place in the United Kingdom has looked at the obstacles that might disproportionately affect women, like finances, not having as much cash to run. That actually does affect the number of women who put themselves forward for selection. It's very expensive in the U.K. Then there's the election as well. I just think we need to acknowledge that, really, that there are a number of factors there.

Taking a step back to the very big picture, it is still right to say though that first past the post, the electoral system itself, is a block on women becoming elected. Certainly when we looked at the evidence recently in the United Kingdom, there were kind of seat blockers, basically male MPs who had been in the safe seats—coming back to the safe seat culture—for a very long time, and where you just have that single winner, of course you're much less likely for that to be freed up when you have the safe seat culture.

I completely acknowledge what you're saying. It's complex, isn't it? We would never say it's just the electoral system. There are a lot of factors there, but it is still right to say that the electoral system is one factor that is making it hard for parties to put balanced groups of people in winnable seats.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

In that line, would you agree then that it will take multiple tactics or initiatives for us to address that? As you said, if we have, I don't want to say spaces, but seats that have been held by members of Parliament for many years and so on, then perhaps a term, or a maximum limit, would prevent that.

Our current electoral laws help with day care expenses for women candidates or male candidates. Perhaps a family-friendly Parliament would assist in that regard. Perhaps the idea of travelling in a plane for 12 hours just to get to work would be an issue. All of these things, I think, we have to look at. It's not just going to be one factor that will impact on whether a woman decides to seek office.

Do you agree?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Briefly, yes or no.

[Katie Ghose]

Yes, I do, but the electoral system is key, as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Mr. Nater.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you to our witnesses for joining us today.

I want to start with my questions for the good folks from Dominion Voting Systems. I have to admit that my home municipality used your services for online voting for the last municipal election. I was on the municipal council leading up to that election. I unfortunately was probably the only one on council who actually voted against going in that direction. You were administering an election. My wife commented on how much she appreciated the online voting because she was able to vote at three in the morning while feeding our then three-month-old daughter, so she does appreciate that.

I'm not going to start with online voting. I'm going to talk a little about your experience in the New Brunswick election, and I appreciate your response to Ms. May to clarify some of those issues. There was another concern that was raised with that election and that was the concept of spoiled ballots. There was some concern, and one of the professors from UBC who presented to this committee, Professor Moscrop, suggested that there is some form of challenge with feeding the ballot into the voting machine and making it beep as a form of intimidation, I guess, for lack of a better word, with it beeping and poll clerks saying, “Did you need to spoil your ballot?”

Would you mind commenting on that and on your experience, and what suggestions you would make on that?

[John Poulos]

Sure.

When a ballot goes through a paper ballot scanner, the election administrator has the ability to configure it however they wish. The “no change”, if you will, setting would be the complete analogy to our current federal process where the ballot is scanned and drops in the box, pure and simple, and whatever happens, happens.

The concept of second chance voting is that if you wish, you can take advantage of the capability of the machine to warn the voter somehow that they are about to make a mistake. There are some common ones out there, and we see them with Elections Canada all the time. There are good stats on how many ballots are spoiled. A common one would be to mark an x for someone and then realize, oh no, you meant to vote for somebody else. Then you scratch that out and mark another x. Then we get into the whole question of voter intent. With a voting machine we can warn the voter. Another common issue is circling your name. That's not an x and that's not putting a mark in, so should that count or not?

How you configure the machine, what kind of message to display on the machine, what language, and does the machine make an audible noise or not is completely up to the discretion of the election administrator. There are several considerations. If there's a beep, am I going to be embarrassed that I've made a mistake on my ballot? There's a reality to this. If we wish to warn voters while still maintaining privacy and secrecy, then that is a question, and that's a compromise that you have to look at. If the machine makes a beep, and somebody sees that John Doe went from the machine, took his ballot, asked for a new one, and then put it back, and now we know that he made a mistake, then is that intimidating?

These are questions that we won't comment on. We provide the tools and say it was in the realm of possibility.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

A situation like that would have been consistent across New Brunswick. That would have been a decision made by Elections New Brunswick across the board. It wouldn't be individual polling stations.

[John Poulos]

Correct. When you use automated technology to tabulate ballots, one of the advantages is that every mark across every location, regardless of who happens to be counting the ballots, is counted against the same thresholds, and those thresholds are defined by the electoral agency, in this case Elections New Brunswick.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

You used the example of the Philippines, with 82,500 polls give or take with a 22-inch document for the ballot itself. I assume there was an audit process undertaken to compare the results. How extensive would that audit process have been? What percentage of ballots might have been compared? How would that be undertaken? Can you walk us through that a bit in how you would ensure the integrity of an example like that with such an extensive ballot?

[John Poulos]

The judicial recounts were limited to any district where there was a contention, but 100% of the ballots and their audit mark were available to anybody who wished to look at them. One party chose to look at them all, and they were able to filter results, for example, to show the ballots where one party got a valid vote and their party did not.

You can use your own subjective interpretation because you're politically motivated—you lost or you won—to compare it against the objective interpretation of the system. The system doesn't really know candidates or parties or politics; it just integrates the number of pixels against the voting marks.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

In examples where you've done online voting for a municipality, for example, over a number of elections, more than one election, have you noticed an uptick in voter turnout after the first online voting? In the second example of using online voting, was there any change in voter turnout, from your experience?

[John Poulos]

I'll speak specifically to my experience and the systems that we've run first-hand. There has not been an appreciable increase.

From my own anecdote, I classify voters in three categories: those who always vote no matter how bad the weather is and how boring the election is; those who will never vote, even if they got to cast a deciding ballot; and the third group are those who swing, depending on if the election matters. We look at elections all over the world where there's a galvanizing issue, and sometimes it's as simple as the local community wanting to spend $100,000 on lighting up the football field and that draws in unprecedented numbers.

So the answer is no. I know that there are studies out there that quote percentage increases. I would submit that the sample data is not very good. It's smaller municipalities. It hasn't been run very often, and certainly hasn't been run around the world very extensively. One thing that we do know from our surveys, and this is from our customer side, the administrators, is that the first group I mentioned, likely your wife who always votes, appreciated the convenience.

Another one we see very often as number one on that list is, “I get the choice to vote near my office because I have a busy day and I can't get to the local community centre or at the local hockey rink because my son is playing hockey.” The vote anywhere concept, where I can get my ballot and it goes back to my riding, is at the top of the list in terms of voter satisfaction.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Aldag now, please.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Thanks to our witnesses.

Ms. Ghose, you talked about a number of systems that have ended up within the electoral systems within the U.K.

Can you give us an idea of time frames? My question is around how rapidly change can happen as opposed to thoughts on a more incremental approach. I assume that this probably evolved over time with different systems coming in. Would U.K. residents have been ready to throw it all out and bring in a new system all at once or was it kind of the evolution of new systems? Can you make any comment on that?