In this era of the pandemic where anything has been proven possible for humanity in fighting COVID-19 virus including quck development of a vaccine, cooperation amongst all levels of government, mobilizing government to spend astronical amounts of money to support the economy and workers and developing a wide variety of strategies to battle vaccine-hesitancy amongst many others, Elections Canada appears not to have experienced this new revelationship.  Unlike banks and other areas of our digital society that use encrypted servers to send trillions around the world daily voting is still stuck in an anachronistic troglodyte paper ballot, a physical process that is extremely old, out-of-date, flawed, slow, expensive and non-representative (First-Past-The-Post). Forty percent of eligible voters don’t exercise their franchise. It is time that Elections Canada got with the plan instead of putting off the inevitable. When banks want E-Voting it will happen in an instant.

This is completely unacceptable during a pandemic when  everything else is being radically rethought and repurposed. We have just recently completed the E-Census that was online, secure and records the sensitive data of millions  of  Canadians with few apparent problems but the most important right that we have is not being upgraded to reflect the digital reality. Communications companies certainly would not tolerate such an outmoded system – why then are Canadians required to? The process for E-Voting is already in place and needs only slight modifications to be used in the same manner for  the rapidly approaching Vooting Day. An E-Voting system would be infinitely more suitable during a pandemic where a fourth or fifth waave could come at any time as new variants mutate and spread around the world. The Olympics is an excellent breeding site for such viruses. Add this pressing need to all the rest of the positive reasons for voting electronically.

Elections Canada, rather than poo-pooing E-Voting as being too unsecure (it isn’t) should be getting on with the job of building a workable system for Canada.  E-Voting  online would give everyone a vote who has a cell-phone or can get access to one. Every single Canadian who wishes to vote could do so in an instant 24 hours a day, seven days a week in their native language. Seniors, shut-ins, people in remote areas, rural and urban, essential workers, truckers could all vote when they wished and how they wished without any interruption to the economy or themselves. They would be fully empowered by a system that finally liberates them from scheduling a visit to a polling station. Identification cards could be sent out well in advance. This is the least that we could ask during a pandemic. No one would be disenfranchised or have any excuse not to vote. Add to this the ease of reporting voting results and the instant accuracy of the returns and the system is a winner. No more waiting for polling stations to report in late into the night to find out who won.

The entire Elections Canada office has been asleep at the wheel. Time to wake up and smell the coffee.