Electoral Reform committee  That's a great question. Thank you, Sebastian. I haven't considered that, but I know that in Switzerland there is a combination of voting systems. I think they have some type of PR, and they have lots of votes in Switzerland because of the nature of the referendums there. They'v

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for the question. You raise a good point. Typically, anywhere online voting is introduced, we see it mostly used among older, educated, wealthier people. It's a trend of convenience. People want to have convenience. We do see a lot of older people using it, the elderly

Electoral Reform committee  Do you mean dollars and cents cost?

Electoral Reform committee  I can't say exactly how much it would be. I know initially in Canada when municipalities were implementing it, there was a feeling that Internet voting was going to break the bank. What we have actually seen is that some municipalities have introduced it as a complementary method

Electoral Reform committee  Can I make one comment that I've been holding on to? I want to draw people's attention—I don't know if this has been mentioned—to P.E.I, which is actually hosting a plebiscite on electoral reform at the end of October, and they're going to be using online voting to do it. I thin

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, definitely we see that the turnout effect is lower in areas that require registration. Fewer people are using it, because they forget. You mentioned paper voters. A point I'd like to make is that one of the interesting findings from the Internet voting study published by th

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. Internet voting is used more in Canada at the municipal level than anywhere else. Ninety-seven municipalities in Ontario used it in 2014. There are a myriad of different approaches that they use, because they somewhat have autonomy over what they can do. Larger municipalitie

Electoral Reform committee  It was political considerations. Partially it was that turnout didn't increase necessarily, and a lot of political parties, particularly conservative parties—no offence meant—typically don't like online voting because they think it's going to encourage liberal supporters and a lo

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for the question. Estonia is a much smaller country. I'm a social scientist, so I can only speak to the security a little bit from what I've studied, but they have a really robust system in place in terms of authentication. Since 2013, they've been working on verifica

Electoral Reform committee  I would agree with Professor Macfarlane's comments.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. Professor Jansen's comments are correct when we look at who is the average Internet voter and who uses Internet voting the most. In Canada at the municipal level and also in other jurisdictions, it is typically people who are older, people who wealthier, and people who are

Electoral Reform committee  Okay. We have seen it improve access for special groups of electors, such as persons with disabilities. It's being used in many first nations communities, and hopefully I'll have the opportunity to speak to that.

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for the question. To start to respond, I'd like to say that electronic voting machines are very different from Internet voting. You typically see the two conflated. People point to the 2000 election and what happened there as an argument against Internet voting. I'm

Electoral Reform committee  In a lot of jurisdictions you'll see them start out with a pilot, and then they'll move up from there. Even in Estonia, for example, they started in local elections and then they moved up to national. In European parliamentary elections, in Switzerland, you saw the same trend. T

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for the question. Yes, security is certainly a major argument against online voting. Certainly a lot of jurisdictions that have looked at implementing it have delayed or stalled or not moved ahead with pilot projects because of concerns around security, but Internet vo