Online voting not an option yet
Casting a vote via internet in provincial elections not allowed under Act
It's easy to vote by internet.
It's much more difficult to ascertain why the Nova Scotia electorate can't vote by internet in next month's provincial election.
“I can't speak to the intention of the Act, that would be a government question because we don't determine what's in the Act, but we have to administer the election,” said Naomi Shelton, director of policy and communications for Elections Nova Scotia.
Shelton referred to the Elections Act, which was amended when Bill 225 passed through the legislature and received royal assent in March 2020. The bill wasn't proclaimed until
May 6 of this year.
The elected member who guided the Bill 225 amendments through the House, former justice minister Mark Furey, then, would be the person to answer the question about why online voting was not included or considered for the 2021 election.
Furey, who has long since announced he will not seek re-election this time around, still has a constituency office in Bridgewater in the Lunenburg West riding but says he is not fielding any questions because he no longer holds public office.
What about the most recent justice minister responsible for the Elections Act, Randy Delorey, who is seeking another term in the riding of Antigonish? Delorey could not be reached for comment, either.
Then, there's the cabinetappointed Nova Scotia Election Commission established under the Elections Act to advise the chief electoral officer regarding the administrative conduct of elections.
The commission consists of chairman Vince Maclean, former MLA and leader of the Nova Scotia Liberal Party, and two people appointed by each of the leaders of the recognized parties as defined in the House of Assembly Act, that is the Liberals, the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats.
“It’s really the legislature that makes the decision,” Maclean said this week from his home in the Northside East Bay, about a 20-minute drive from Sydney.
“Most of what we recommend is accepted and most of what we reject is rejected but it’s the legislature that has the authority,” Maclean said of the election commission.
Maclean, who is in his seventh year as chairman, said online voting for the general electorate has not been recommended during his tenure. He didn’t want to say if online voting had even been discussed by the commission.
“We keep our discussions confidential because we have three political parties all equally weighted,” he said of commission work.
“That makes for very candid discussions, so we do things by consensus. A lot of topics come forward and (they) may have one support, maybe two support and it may even be unanimous. If there is no unanimity, it does not go forward.”
The issue did come up before Maclean’s time on the commission and garnered enough discussion to convince Michael Coyle, a Kentville lawyer and former chairman of the commission, to issue a three-page internet and telephone voting appendix in 2013 to the commission’s 2012-13 annual report.
“The commission members developed a unanimous position that it is premature to entertain either Internetbased or telephone voting options at this time,” the report stated.
The report concluded that despite arguments by those in favour of internet and telephone voting that it would improve levels of accessibility and increase voter turnout, “the basic questions of how to maintain the security, validity, and integrity of our elections has not yet, in our opinion, been satisfactorily answered.”
“Until credible answers to these questions are available, and until functioning, transparent Internet and telephone voting systems have been
demonstrated and proven, extreme caution and prudence is required,” the report stated.
Those questions apparently still have not been answered, although there was a provision for internet voting for members of the military stationed outside the province in the Bill 225 amendments. Shelton said since the bill was only proclaimed in May, there was not time to make that voting provision part of this election.
Many would argue that the Nova Scotia municipal elections of October 2020, in which 41 of the province’s municipalities used some form of electronic voting, verified the security and integrity of online voting.
For the electorate of the municipalities that used online voting, including Halifax and Cape Breton regional municipalities, instruction letters including a personal identification number (PIN), were mailed to eligible voters, who could then cast a vote on a cellphone or personal computer.
The vote in CBRM was entirely online, while in HRM, the electorate could vote electronically or by paper ballot.
Voter turnout in HRM in 2020 was the highest since 2004, when a referendum on Sunday shopping was on the ballot. More than 128,000 people voted in the October election, 40 per cent of those eligible and a significant jump from the 2016 election in which fewer than 30 per cent of HRM voters cast a ballot.
The majority of the 128,000 votes cast in HRM in 2020 came in electronically, with nearly 99,000 electors voting online, accounting for almost 77 per cent of all votes cast.
“Elections that utilize any technology have a requirement and go through an extensive security process before and after the election,” said Iain Maclean, municipal clerk at HRM.
Maclean said ensuring a secure process is a primary focus of HRM elections and that response to online voting was very positive.
Still, caution about voting integrity is warranted. In the 2016 Stewiacke municipal election, it was determined in a Nova Scotia Supreme Court case that votes were cast illegally. Then-mayor Wendy Robinson was re-elected in the Colchester County town of 1,400 by a 14-vote margin over challenger Pam Osborne in the 2016 election.
The six council seats were contested by 11 candidates. The seventh place candidate for council, David Leblanc, lost by a margin of 12 votes.
Judy Stoddard, the wife of Coun. Russell Stoddard, who was returned for a fourth term on council, cast six of the seven illegal votes and Janice Peterson cast the other.
According to a town bylaw, an elector can vote by telephone using a confidential personal identification number. Stoddart and Patterson cast votes using the PIN numbers of other electors but they were not entitled to do so and the returning officer did not verify that the electors met the criteria to appoint a friend voter.
Justice Michael Wood found in March 2017 that illegal votes had been cast and counted but he would not overturn the election results.