Study to look at electronic voting

Jeff Green | Aug 07, 2014

In 2006 about 20 municipalities in Ontario used an electronic voting system to elect their councils and mayor. In 2010 there were 44 electronic voting jurisdictions and this fall the number is set to jump to 97.
Over 2 million Ontarians, representing 23% of the population, will have access to electronic voting in the coming municipal election.
Many of the municipalities that use the system are similar to those in this region, a mostly rural landscape with a significant number of seasonal residents, but larger centres, such as Ajax, Burlington, Cambridge, Markham and Sudbury are using the system as well.
This year for the first time, all of the elections in the Frontenac News’ coverage area are employing the same electronic voting system, through contracts with Intellivote, a Nova Scotia-based company.
As electronic voting becomes more popular, it has become the subject of research. The Internet Voting Project is “the first effort in Canada to collect attitudinal data from various election stakeholders to learn about how the option of Internet voting impacts local elections,” according to the project’s founder and director, Nicole Goodman, an assistant professor at McMaster University and a research fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs.
This summer, project researchers have approached all of the 97 municipalities in Ontario who are using e-voting for at least some segment of their population and asked them to let their jurisdictions be the subjects of the study.
Thus far 47 have signed up, including North Frontenac, Addington Highlands and South Frontenac, and Central Frontenac will consider whether to do so at their meeting next week.
In 2010 the Frontenac News looked at the results in Tay Valley, South Frontenac and Addington Highlands, all jurisdictions who used e-voting, and we found that voter turnout was actually lower than it had been before they took on the new system.
Nicole Goodman said that in the studies she has seen, and based on an analysis she did of the 2010 election in Markham, for which she conducted a study, the net impact of e-voting is a 4% increase in turnout.
“Once you take into account acclamations and other factors, that’s what has been found,” she said, when interviewed over the phone this week.
Roughly 50% of the population does not vote, and Goodman said that of those people a slight majority attribute not voting to issues of access or convenience.
“They say they don’t have time to vote, they can’t get to vote because of distance or some disability, those kinds of reasons. This is different from the people who say they don’t vote because they aren’t interested or they don’t think it matters. Those people are not going to vote no matter what system is being used.”
Aside from the impact on overall voter turnout, the Internet Voting Project is also looking at other issues. It is also looking at the impact on different age groups, as preliminary studies have shown that older voters have taken to the system readily, and that many have found Internet voting easier than the telephone voting option.
Because e-voting stretches out voting over ten days, it has an impact on the way campaigns are conducted, putting more focus on the beginning of the campaign, so the study will look at that as well.
One of the key pieces of the study is a survey of voters. For those who use computers to vote, the option to participate in the survey will appear on the screen that comes up once the vote has been cast. The survey takes 3-5 minutes to complete, and according to Nicole Goodman the survey has been vetted to exclude confidential information from being disseminated.
“It asks about age, demographic data, voting history, whether voters consider themselves urban, suburban, or rural, those kinds of general things. It also asks about the experience of using e-voting,” she said.
Participating municipalities will receive a report based on the unique data from their own municipality as well as a report on the outcome of the survey on a provincial level.
Survey results and analysis will also be posted on the project's website internetvotingproject.com.
The project is Ontario-based, but it is being set up to easily co-ordinate with studies in other provinces to create useable data about voting across Canada, which is on the leading edge of e-voting worldwide.