You've touched on two issues. One is vouching and one is the use of the voter information card as a form of ID. Let me address the latter first and the former second.
The voter information card draws its information from the national register of electors, on which one in six names has false information. It follows that one in six cards then is false. That allows for people to vote either more than once, or in places where they do not live. We saw an example of this in the Quebec television show Infoman, where two Montrealers received two voter information cards each. They each voted twice, and they called it the Elections Canada two-for-one special.
Canadians voted for many years without using the voter information card as a form of ID. It has been piloted in recent elections by Elections Canada. Due to the inaccuracy in the lists on which the card is based, we are ending the use of that card as ID. The card will still be available to inform electors of where they vote; they just won't be able to use it as ID. There will continue to be 39 pieces of acceptable identification that Canadians can use to identify their person and their address.
On vouching, I've regularly cited the statistic that in four ridings audited by the Neufeld review, there was a 25% rate of irregularities when vouching was used. If you look nationally, the same report found that there were irregularities in 42% of cases where vouching was used. Some 120,000 vouching incidents occurred in the last election, and there were 50,000 irregularities. It has been suggested more recently that these were small matters, a failure to dot the i's and cross the t's.
That in fact is absolutely false, and if you'll permit me, Chair, I'll quote directly from Elections Canada's own compliance review:
Errors that involve a failure to properly administer these procedures are serious. The courts refer to such serious errors as “irregularities” which can result in votes being declared invalid.
It goes on:
Too frequently, the errors are so serious that the courts would judge them to be “irregularities” that violate the legal provisions that establish an elector's entitlement to vote.
On page 10 it says:
Nonetheless, the case found that election officers made many serious errors in their duties on Election Day in the 2011 Etobicoke Centre election, and the Supreme Court made it clear that such errors in other circumstances could contribute to a court overturning an election.
I'll quote right from the Supreme Court:
In recognizing that mistakes are inevitable, this Court does not condone any relaxation of training and procedures. The Commissioner of Canada Elections appointed by the CEO has an obligation to ensure, as far as reasonably possible, that procedures are followed. Failure to live up to this mandate would shake the public's confidence in the election system as a whole and render it vulnerable to abuse and manipulation.
Those are very serious words from our Supreme Court directed at the CEO of Elections Canada in the aftermath of mass irregularities. We are going to end these irregularities by ending the use of vouching and voter identification cards to ID voters.