As I mentioned in various reports of the past, we are looking at online, or Internet, voting. We have started looking at what's going on around the world, how successful those initiatives have been.
Our concern, or our approach here, or our goal, is to improve accessibility and convenience to electors, especially those who in the current regime are put at a disadvantage. I'm thinking here of disabled electors who still cannot cast an independent and secret ballot, in most cases. I am talking also about Canadians residing abroad.
There is a regime right now, the special voting rule. The problem we have there is quite a number of ballots are returned late because it's dependent on postal systems around the world that are not as effective as ours.
We are also looking at the militaries. Again, they have challenges casting ballots, those who are stationed away.
That being said, online voting presents significant challenges. You mentioned a few in terms of integrity, independence of the vote, the secrecy of the vote, the auditability, and also that the process be reliable. And we are looking at these things.
We are planning to rely on the provision of the act, section 18.1, to come back to this committee over the next two years and propose a test of online voting to Canadians. That proposal will indicate, of course, all the parameters of the online voting and the security measures that will be attached to the process.
I will share with the committee right now, without taking too much time, one of the things we're struggling with. If you ask me, I don't have a solution at this point in time for online voting from any computer. I think there's an issue of authentication that has not been resolved. It's not likely to be resolved here in Canada in the immediate future, unless there is a commitment and the political will to establish digital identity. But we're far from that. So what we're looking at, aside from militaries and maybe a Canadian residing abroad, is kiosk voting, which means it would be supervised voting but an electronic voting. And that would provide, again, some flexibility and benefits to electors.
I look forward to have an opportunity to engage in more detail around these initiatives.