Thank you, Madam Chair.
Just as a point of clarification, for electors voting in their electoral districts by mail, one of the aspects that was in place was that they voted locally, in the sense that the mail was sent to the local returning officer so as to prevent that transit time from wherever they are to Ottawa. It is only out-of-district electors who vote and send their ballots nationally.
I did indicate in my remarks a range of measures that we put in place to reduce the number of late ballots. I'm not going to repeat them. Obviously, any late ballot is unfortunate. These are people who wanted to cast a ballot and who cast a ballot, but we were not able to count them.
I had recommended a longer election period. If you look at the results from table 4 in the report, it shows that there was a much lower percentage of late ballots with just a few days. Now, that's not the only factor. I had also recommended that ballots received one day after close of the polls be counted, and this was indeed part of Bill C-19. This is something that we may want to look at in the future.
I think we delayed on our side to look at our communications strategy: Was it aggressive enough? I know that in Canada at the federal level electors who vote by mail or by special ballot must write in the name of the candidate. They cannot vote by writing in the name of the party. That is not so in some of the provinces, so this means that people who apply early have to wait until the close of nominations to see the full slate of candidates. Again, that is something that we could look at to change the rules so that voting by party would be acceptable, such that we could promote voting by mail much more aggressively in the early stages of the campaign.
We have never had such a large-scale vote-by-mail operation, and we're looking at every angle to see how it can be improved in the future.