Residents who vote online to be polled on satisfaction with e-voting

CAMBRIDGE — Online voters in Cambridge can take an anonymous and voluntary internet voting survey in the Oct. 22 municipal election.

How many questions will there be?

“Right now, there are 29,” said Nicole Goodman, associate professor of political science at Brock University, on Tuesday.

“But it’s going to be cut down a little bit.”

So expect 25 questions to pop up, the same number that were asked of 912 of Cambridge’s 5,171 internet voters in the 2014 municipal election.

Goodman, co-founder and director of the Centre for e-Democracy, doesn’t want an overly long list of questions to scare survey-takers away from taking part in her research study regarding internet voting usage.

The independent study, which she emphasizes is completely separate from the vote with data collection by an organization called AskingCanadians, is all about measuring satisfaction of online voters.

On behalf of municipalities, she’s trying to get an understanding of whether internet voters are happy or unhappy with the voting method.

That’s why one of the questions will be whether voters are satisfied or unsatisfied with the process.

Almost 100 per cent (97 per cent) of the 803 Cambridge online voters who answered that question in the survey four years ago were either fairly or very satisfied.

In the last municipal election, 20 per cent of Cambridge votes were cast online. There is no telephone voting in Cambridge for this coming election.

Online voting, which runs Oct. 9-22, returns next month.

Cambridge was one of 47 municipalities to take part in the internet voting study four years ago. There is no charge to the city for participating and gaining valuable user feedback in a bid to boost accessibility and voter turnout.

About 72 per cent of Cambridge online voters in 2014 chose that method mainly for the convenience, survey results said.

“Cambridge is just one municipality,” Goodman said.

“But there are a number of municipalities that are making changes. A lot of municipalities in Ontario are actually eliminating paper voting.”

In 2014, online voting was used by 97 of Ontario’s 444 municipalities, Goodman said. Fiftynine of those ditched paper ballots.

The trend, she says, may point to a future without paper ballots.

Goodman estimates 194 Ontario municipalities are using online voting next month. More than 100 of them, she figures, are getting rid of paper.

“Satisfaction rates are usually high,” Goodman said of internet voting.

“When we compare online and paper voters, we find that most people are actually more satisfied with online voting than with paper voting.”

In 2014, Goodman also did a survey of paper voters.

“A majority of paper voters actually want to see online voting because they want the option to vote online,” Goodman said.

“A lot of people say, in special circumstances — maybe in a future election the weather was really bad, maybe they had a broken leg, maybe they were out of the country vacationing or maybe they were away from work — it would enable their participation, in that respect.”

Regarding internet voting, security was a prime concern for 37 per cent of paper voters. But 32 per cent had no security concerns.

Still, Guelph is one municipality that tried online voting in 2014 and pulled the plug on the internet experiment for this election.

“We did a lot of work with Guelph,” Goodman said.

“But Guelph is not offering online voting this time.”

How Guelph voters feel after having internet voting taken away will be one of the topics for another electronic elections study, she said.

But when might internet voting trickle up to Canadian elections for higher levels of government?

“I think, provincially, we will see it within the next 10 years,” said Goodman, pointing to Ontario’s use of electronic vote tabulators in 2018. “We’ve seen a lot of movement already. We’ve seen Elections Ontario start to be more technical.”