Thank you, Madam Chair.
I just want to say, as well, that I do recognize that circumstances change. There may well be difficult circumstances that make it hard to administer a vote, but I don't think conceptually, in the context of free and fair democratic elections, you can separate witnesses' and the candidates' right to observe the voting process from the vote. Either you can have a vote, which includes the idea of participants being able to monitor the conduct of the vote, or you can't.
While we are discussing a bill that would give expanded powers to the CEO to be able to make decisions to adapt to the pandemic, the question for legislators is this: What will be the scope of those expanded powers? I think it's perfectly reasonable for us as a legislature to say that the CEO does have a broadened range of powers, including an existing power to cancel a vote altogether, but that an authority that he does not have is to separate out the idea of the vote as the idea of marking the ballot from the idea of a free and fair process where there's the ability for participants to observe the conduct of the election. Those things have to go together to have free and fair elections.
That's something that we recognize in other jurisdictions when we send observers for elections to see that the process is conducted properly. We don't want our CEO inadvertently—because I'm sure he wouldn't do it on purpose—creating a circumstance where those two things are separated out and then we have the ability of certain political actors to call into question the legitimacy of an outcome because they were denied a right to observe the process. That would be very damaging for democracy.
As I've been maintaining consistently throughout the process, our goal is not just to protect public health—it is very much that—but also, equally important, to protect democracy. The challenge, the reason this is hard, is that we have to do both.
Of course, the safest thing is to not have an election at all. If we really want to protect public health, we wouldn't have an election. The whole thing is that somebody may well call an election anyway, and then we have to figure out how to protect our democracy and our public health at the same time. If public health was really the priority, we wouldn't be talking about having an election until the pandemic is over. However, we're clearly talking about it, so let's make sure that the process continues to be fair.