HANSARD
NOVA SCOTIA HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY
PARTICIPATION IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services
SELECT COMMITTEE ON
PARTICIPATION IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
Committee Membership
Mr. Michel Samson (Chairman)
Hon. Mark Parent (Vice-Chairman)
Mr. Patrick Dunn
Mr. Keith Bain
Ms. Maureen MacDonald (Vice-Chairman)
Mr. Graham Steele
Mr. Charles Parker
Mr. David Wilson (Glace Bay)
Mr. Harold Theriault
In Attendance:
Ms. Sherri Mitchell
Select Committee Clerk
Ms. Kim Leadley
Select Committee Clerk
Witnesses
Intelivote Systems Inc.
Mr. Dean Smith
President and Founder
Mr. Stephen Beamish
Vice-President of Business Development
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HALIFAX, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2008
SELECT COMMITTEE ON PARTICIPATION
IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
9:00 A.M.
CHAIRMAN
Mr. Michel Samson
MR. CHAIRMAN: Good morning and welcome to this meeting of the Select Committee on Participation in the Democratic Process. My name is Michel Samson, I'm the MLA for Richmond and the chairman of this committee. To start this morning, I would ask the members to introduce themselves.
[The members introduced themselves.]
MR. CHAIRMAN: Also here with us is Kim Leadley and Sherri Mitchell of the Committees Office, who have been accompanying us since this committee was started. We have some support staff here as well: Margaret Murphy from the Provincial Library and also our good Chief Electoral Officer is here as well - Christine, welcome - is here this morning. The purpose of this committee, as you may be aware - as we had noted in the last number of elections - the low voter turnout in Nova Scotia, which was of great concern to us. This committee was struck as a result of a resolution passed in the House of Assembly what would see the creation of an all-Party committee, which would seek to find recommendations as to how we could start changing the voter turnout in Nova Scotia.
Part of our mandate was to go around the province and hear directly from Nova Scotians. Following those meetings, we had the opportunity to receive a number of presentations which talked about the possibility of Internet voting. We finished up our meetings, ironically, in an area of the province that had actually tried Internet voting in the last municipal election. So we thought that it would be wise for us to hear exactly how the system works and whether it is something that we should consider adopting as part of our electoral system provincially.
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So I'm pleased to welcome here this morning Dean Smith, from Intelivote Systems Incorporated and Stephen Beamish, who is here with us as well. So gentlemen, the floor is yours. Committee members may have questions following your presentation.
MR. DEAN SMITH: Well one of the things I wanted to do is thank you very much Mr. Chairman and committee, for having the opportunity to meet with you. My name is Dean Smith and I'm the President and founder of Intelivote Systems. We're a Dartmouth, Nova Scotia-based company and it's interesting, as you travel around the world talking about voting technology - sometimes it's kind of nice to be from Nova Scotia. I think we hear it a lot because if you're not from Toronto, you're not from Vancouver, you're not from Montreal, people are more apt to sit down and listen to you, we found. In a lot of cases, we traveled internationally a fair amount and did some business internationally and Nova Scotia is always held in high regard.
One of the interesting things that we're starting to see is a level of credibility that the information technology business in Nova Scotia has always maintained. Both Steve and myself have extensive information technology backgrounds and telecommunications background.
I've been involved in the IT business for close to 35 years now and in the telecommunications business. I had a 20-year career with Aliant and went on to other information technology companies after that. I'm probably considered, currently, the foremost Canadian authority on electronic voting, having testified in front of the U.S. Congress, having made presentations around the world, having an opportunity to make presentations in places like Bahrain, where they're looking at using newer forms of technology. Intelivote was one of the few companies that was recently selected by the U.S. Government, in particular the State of Alabama, to try to put in place some form of technology that would allow their active service personnel an opportunity to vote electronically in their upcoming elections, in the mid-term elections starting in 2010. So we're fortunate to have an opportunity to start working with the U.S. Government and that's no small task and for a small Nova Scotia company, we think it's a great opportunity for us.
I'll speak on behalf of Steve, although I don't normally do that. Steve has been a senior Vice-President with CGI in past careers, as well as worked with xwave . Over the last several years when we've been doing elections, Steve's been the point with most of our clients, in terms of understanding the business needs and the electoral needs of those clients in meeting with them. During the course of events that we've actually run, Steve has been front and centre, usually with the client side of it. So he can understand and speak, rather eloquently, to all the details of what's involved, from the client side of it - what they need, what the voters are starting to see as well. We have a bunch of information that we provided to you today to chronicle some of that information.
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What we'd like to try to accomplish today - if it meets your needs - is to describe a little about who we are and what we do. Basically, how we actually manage to do what we say we do, what we've learned from doing the numerous events we've done across the world and what impact that's had on various aspects of democracy, and participation in particular.
The packages that we've passed out today have several things in it; obviously a copy of the presentation and some information, some marketing information, a little more about our company. We've also included statistical information on the most recent events we've done which are some Nova Scotia municipal elections. Those particular elections were in the Halifax Regional Municipality and the three other smaller towns - Berwick, Stewiacke and Windsor - all did electronic elections in October. So we've got a bunch of detailed information on what we can collect in terms of information, demographics and other forms of information about those type of events.
The last thing we included in there is something that we had worked with a U.S.- based company to do some elections in the United Kingdom. What you'll see is a report on what they call the convenience generation, or younger electors in the U.K. and some of the demographic information and the survey information they took on why they vote, why they don't vote. Issues around why they wouldn't come out to the polls, things as simple as bad weather influence that generation as to not turning out. The other question would be what would be an appropriate response to that and how we could put something in place that would encourage the convenience generation to actually get more involved.
So Intelivote is really an anywhere voting company solution. We hear a lot of press and a lot of PR about Internet voting. The other portion of voting that we do that, actually, a fair number of people make use of is telephone voting. So when we conduct an electronic event, both Internet and telephone voting are engaged to allow the voters to participate. So in that particular vein, in some elections we did in Ontario, almost 35 per cent of the voters actually voted using the telephone. The other 65 per cent, obviously, were on the Internet but here in HRM in the last election we did, I think it was closer to 12 per cent who used the phone. The more metropolitan the area, we find, more the less apt they are to use the telephone. There are also other factors including how many races are involved in a particular event as well.
We're Dartmouth, Nova Scotia- based as I mentioned and we are currently privately held. We have 70 investors. One of those investors ,by the way, is NSBI. So NSBI is an active investor in our company and we're very happy to say we're supported by the entity. We've conducted more electronic votes than any other Canadian company. There's not a lot of competition using electronic voting in Canada. There are lots of companies that use Internet voting simply, I mean you go into MuchMusic, you can click on your favourite video of the day, and stuff like that. So there are a lot of people who use the Internet simply to capture information. There's quite a difference between casual voting and voting in a legislated environment where the details of what you do and how you do have to be
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scrutinized in very detailed level. We also have factors and capability to allow recounts and audits within our application as well.
We're currently considered in probably - certainly in Canada, but in a lot of other commonwealth countries - the leading subject matter experts in a full range of things, including security in legislation. We're currently working with Bermuda to change legislative requirements in that country to allow electronic voting for them. So I'm actively working with the lawyers and the government folks there. We've also had requests from several other Canadian municipalities who are interested in working with us to rewrite bylaws or aspects of their legislation, including Alberta and British Columbia who currently allow forms of electronic voting. Some would argue that their legislation already exists but it's not clear enough to result in a contravened election. So what they basically do is they allow municipalities to set bylaws to allow them to, to enable them to use electronic voting.
So that's kind of who we are. What we do is, we basically integrate an electronic voting process with the standard traditional voting process. We would be naive to think that if you went out there and told everybody they have to vote electronically and you can only vote electronically, that everybody would be excited about it. In actual fact, there have been some Ontario communities in municipal elections that we've done - that's what they've done. To them it's less of an issue because prior to using all electronic voting they've done things like mail-in balloting. Where they didn't have any polling station, there was no place to go, you simply got mailed a ballot and you mailed the ballot back. That's fairly common in Ontario. About 25 per cent of all the municipalities in Ontario for municipal elections currently use mail-in balloting and basically they mail the ballot out and somebody mails it back. They get a declaration with it to say who mailed it back but, unfortunately, in 20 per cent of the cases that never comes back. So those are deemed spoiled ballots in a lot of cases.
It's an interesting way of doing it. It's not without its problems - it has almost a five times incidence of voter information not coming back complete, resulting in a spoiled or non-countable ballot.
What we do is, we integrate with the electronic voting process of going to the polls process. So, as an example, in Stewiacke and Berwick and Windsor, all three of those municipalities had electronic voting up to and including election day. Here in the HRM - I'll go into more details later on this, but just to clarify on it - HRM had an advance poll so for three days, on October 4th, 5th, and 6th , you could vote almost two weeks in advance of the regular election and for advance poll only. What we did after that - we created a struck-off list for the municipality that they took to the polls. As people walked in, if they had already voted, their name would already be struck off the list because they had participated electronically prior to the election day or the advance polling days.
In the other three municipalities, they decided they would allow people to come to the polling station and vote manually if they wanted to, or they could stay at home and vote
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electronically. Obviously the question is, how do you prevent people from voting at home electronically, then walking down to the polling station and voting there?
[9:15 a.m.]
We have a simple solution to that. The polling stations are set up and electronically there's simply a PC sitting there and the status of each voter is reflected on their PC that's networked to our system. That was done all over Ontario, it's done all through the U.K. and we did the elections there and it was done in the three municipalities here. It's a very straightforward process of ensuring somebody can't vote twice. It works fairly well.
So, basically, we integrate our traditional polling station voting with the electronic version of polling station voting as well. And it's easy to say to do that - what I'm going to do is show you a brief demonstration using Halifax as an example - but basically the telephone and the Internet work virtually the same way in terms of what our system processes behind the scenes.
If you want to look in your kits, there's a copy of a letter that went out to HRM residents. In most cases, it's the information you see. On the front page, the front side of it gives the information. It has a PIN, it has instructions, and on the back it has the candidate information. Everybody in HRM who was participating in the election would have gotten the list of their particular councillors and the mayoralty candidates and the school board representatives on the back - that was set up so that each one of them would know specifically who they would be voting for.
If you moved and your mail was forwarded to you and that was incorrect, there was an opportunity to simply call a 1-800 number and they would change what is called a "category" associated with you as a voter and then you would go on-line and the correct candidates would be then presented to you. (Interruption) Beg your pardon?
MR. STEPHEN BEAMISH: Or if you were missing your voting credentials.
MR. SMITH: Oh, that's right, too. If for some reason there's a line across the middle you can see, in a very small percentage of the cases the date of birth of the voter was not on the official electors' list, and what you were required to do - it required two pieces of information, the PIN that was sent to you and you had to know the date of birth as well. Those two pieces were the key things that you used in order to be able to cast your ballot electronically. So if your date of birth wasn't on the file, you would have seen that little note across the middle of the page, but only - I think, less than 5 per cent was the number of people who didn't have it on there. And there were quite a few that called in and registered their date of birth and that information was added to the file, allowing them to electronically vote.
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So about a week before the event, everybody got one of those in the mail. Basically the idea was, after that, anywhere there was Internet connectivity or anywhere that you had phone service, you could call a 1-800 number or you could get on the Web. We had Canadian soldiers on active duty off the coast of Somalia from onboard ship voting; we had Coast Guard personnel voting from 200 miles off the limit; we had students from all the major universities in Atlantic Canada voting, and some out West; and we had individuals from over 20 U.S. states and over 25 different countries of the world participating in the election. And that's not unusual, we had that in Ontario and we had that in the U.K.
In the U.K., it was one of the themes. One of the areas that we did an election in the U.K. in an area called Rushmoor - the largest military base in the U.K. They had active deployment of military personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone, and the PINs were sent to those individuals and they voted from the field as well, so it was a great story for us in terms of engaging those military personnel and allowing them to take part in the elections. It didn't matter where they were in the world. My daughter goes to school in Texas, she voted from Texas; my nephew goes to school in the U.K., he voted from London so it's a really great story, I think, from that point of view.
Absentee voting is one of the single most significant issues that we hear in talking to a lot of different folks, primarily because a lot of elections for municipal level elections happen in the Fall - in Ontario, for example, they're all in November. There are an awful lot of "snowbirds" who leave in November and go south, and registration and getting ballot information is a very difficult thing. There are three major times when people leave the country - after Thanksgiving about 15 per cent, according to the Canadian Snowbird Association, of the people leave the country, after November 1st it's another 40 per cent, and the remainder go after Christmas. So what you do is when you have an election like Canada had on January 23, 2006, a federal election, there were over 600,000 Canadians out of the country, and when you look at the opportunity that electronic voting presents - British Columbia is a province, for example, very interesting. They had over 40,000 people looking for absentee ballots who were going to be out of the country for their provincial election, the last one they were in.
So basically what happens is anybody from anywhere in the world can participate, and here's basically what they see: They get a typical screen like this - and this is reflective of the HRM election, at least part of it - but as in all security laden systems now, you get a cryptic message at the front that says please make sure you can read these things and just basically make sure it's not a robotic attempt by another computer to lob votes into the system. This requires a human to see this and do it, so what you simply do is fill in that information.
It's interesting what you learn. It says to type this exactly as you see it, and if you look on the screen there you see that there's a bit of a space between the A and the 6. We always took for granted that nobody would put a space in but, in actual fact, there are a lot
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of people who go A, space, and then key in whatever they see because you tell them to do exactly how you did it, so we changed the system to just throw away spaces. What you see is a lot of different things happen and we learn a lot every time we do an event and we continually evolve and perfect the system. So basically, you put that information in.
What you see on the screen is a series of operational instruction buttons - that's pretty straightforward. In this particular case, you just click on "Continue" and then it asks you to put your voter credentials in. Once again, in this case it was your date of birth and the PIN number, so whatever came on your sheet of paper in your instructions, you put that in. And again, once you've entered those two pieces of information, you hit the Continue button. What you're then presented with is a list of races that you're eligible to vote in, based on your credentials.
So I live in Cole Harbour, for example - I would get the information for the mayor, the council, and the school board. If you happened to be in one of the districts where the councillors won by acclamation - and there were four of them during the event - you wouldn't see a note that says you're going to see the councillor race. So basically it has the intelligence to understand - you're only given the particular information for the races you're going to be voting. Once you go on there, what you see is pretty much and very much a straightforward ballot that resembles the paper ballot that everybody is used to seeing when they go into a polling station.
In this particular case, you're given basic instructions about how many people you can vote for. In Windsor, Stewiacke, and Berwick, they had open wards so they had to vote for multiple councillors. So when you get to the councillor election, you say vote for four from a list of six - so instructions like preferential voting, or you can order your candidate.
We're actively working with three political Parties in Canada that are in the process of developing leadership events to be able to allow their voters to vote electronically, and some of those are dealing with preferential balloting - before you go to the convention, if you want to vote, you vote preferentially and once you get to the convention, you vote serially.
So in this particular case, you would mark the candidate of your choice simply by clicking the box and it would put an X there. You then go down and look and see there's a "Submit" or "Decline to Vote." In this particular case, I'm going to click on the Submit and you get a confirmation. So this is analogous to marking the ballot, kind of holding it up in front of yourself and saying, okay, I've marked this one. If you made a mistake, you could go back and return to the ballot - and you see this is down here - or you could simply vote now. So in this particular case I've decided who I want to vote for - Obama - and I say yes and this is the confirmation that comes up. This is analogous to you dropping the ballot into the ballot box and saying that you voted. So at this point in time you can't go back and vote that race.
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If for some reason your phone became disconnected, or somebody knocked on the door and you left your Internet session for more than five minutes, the system would time out. What you've done is, you voted the first race but what about the second race - the councillors and the school board race? Our system has the capability to allow you to come back in at a future time - whether it's a day or a week later, as long as the voting period is still open. It's kind of interesting, looking at the statistics of the event - there were a small percentage of the people who voted in one race and then went on and did something else and came back later and voted in the second and third races in the particular election here in HRM.
A lot of that's attributed to some people going and researching candidates. They see who comes up and they actually use the Internet and surf over to the Web sites. I think almost every candidate in HRM, as an example, had a Web site up and a lot of them were linked to the voting site from their Web site. It's an interesting thing. What we're starting to see and we certainly see it in the electronic voting world - candidates are moving to become more sophisticated in their communications capabilities. One of the other reasons is that some of the tools we provide in our system affords candidates the opportunity to get the vote out. We can talk about those later.
What you have is you voted for Obama and you're presented then with the next sequential race - the same thing happens here. In this particular case, I'm going to decline to vote. You'd say, why would somebody do that? In a lot of countries that we've dealt with, it's legislated that you have to offer an opportunity to spoil a ballot. In Nova Scotia and a lot of the legislation that we deal with, a spoiled ballot is a result of doing something incorrectly. But in some countries, you have to be able to afford the opportunity to create what's called a blank or white or spoiled ballot.
In a lot of legislation that we've looked at, there's a requirement to actually allow somebody to go to the polls, but do nothing but spoil their ballots. Our electronic system is designed not to allow you to spoil a ballot. In particular, we had this happen in HRM in district 23; it was a 42 vote spread between the two candidates who finished first and second. The candidate that finished second wanted a recount. In the electronic world, a spoiled, declined to vote - which is what this particular person is about to do, it's a conscious decision to not cast a ballot. It's a spoiled ballot by definition because a ballot cast that can't be counted, is actually a rejected ballot.
In this particular case, we actively are going to spoil the ballot. Interestingly enough, in HRM, in the three districts that had non-incumbents or didn't have an incumbent running, the rate of spoiled ballots, electronically, was five times higher than those that went to the polls. So you ask yourself the question, why would somebody spoil a ballot? It's because they didn't know enough about the candidate information. They didn't understand or appreciate who the people running were enough to be able to feel like they should cast a vote.
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That's something we saw for the first time ever. It was very interesting. There were other areas where the number of votes - by the way, the paper voting rate in those particular ones averaged about 1 per cent, the electronic voting officially declined to vote, was close to 6 per cent.
What you see is voters who don't go to the polls tend to be more conscious about their choices is our conclusion. Other people can interpret it in different ways. What happens is, if you took the time, effort and energy to walk down to the polls and go to the paper voting, you're going to vote. I guess the question would be, do you feel maybe it's more informed, intelligent, energetic committed voters that go to the polls. I don't know, but it's an interesting piece of information that we've seen on the last election we ran.
In this particular case, I'm going to decline to vote and what happens is, you can't accidentally hit that, so purposely hitting that or hitting it by accident, you come up with this message that says, you're declining to vote, you're not going to get a chance to cast a vote in this particular office, are you sure this is what you want? And, you say, yes, that's exactly what I want and you click on that. Then the next race comes up, but a big message at the top of the screen says, by the way, you didn't vote for the last race, this is the current race that you're going to see.
The other interesting thing in HRM, or in municipal politics in Nova Scotia is, your right to ask for a ballot for a school board race is based on your simply asking for it. I don't look African-Nova Scotian, but I can ask for the African-Nova Scotian ballot and my declaration that I'm eligible for it is asking for it. So, in terms of what we had to do for the municipalities in Nova Scotia that had school board elections, we had to put a question on there that said, which of these ballots would you like, or would you wish not to vote in the school board election? There are a significant number of people who don't have kids in school who say they're not interested in voting in the school board election. Let's let the people's vote count with more significant weight for people who have kids in school and are more interested in the school board election. Statistically, there were quite a few people in Nova Scotia, in HRM, who did not vote in the school board elections as well.
So in this particular case, I say I want a regular member school board ballot, please, and I hit the submit button and it says, okay, are you sure that's what you want to do, and you say yes, okay, there's the ballot that you asked for. So in this particular case, we were presenting ballots. Last time in a municipal election in 2004 - I think somewhere on the South Shore - there was an error made by the returning officer and everybody who came in was given an African Nova Scotian ballot and a regular school board ballot. It was contested by one of the candidates who lost in the African Nova Scotian event and they had to do a recount, or had to rerun that part of the election. According to the information I've seen, it cost over $30,000 and I think they had 30 electors show up and vote.
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[9:30 a.m.]
So it's one of those things where ensuring that the information is correctly presented or the rules can be built into the process of voting. I know in our discussions with Elections Nova Scotia, Christine and her staff, we learned a lot by talking to those folks and understanding how behind-the-scenes things work. We've done that with virtually all of the election authorities across Canada in terms of understanding the nuances and the subtleties associated with their election law, and we have incorporated most of that capability into the system. In this particular case, I'm going to vote for Margaret and, once again, I'm submitting the vote and I'm saying "Vote Now". There's my confirmation that the vote was dropped into the ballot box. When you're finished voting, you come up with a message that simply says, thanks for playing our game and come back again.
Where we've done the elections, we've been fairly active. Our system was really turned into production in 2006. We started some very basic marketing in 2005, we found that the Ontario market, in 1996 legislative changes were made in the Province of Ontario to allow electronic voting, including telephone and Internet voting. In virtually every province in Canada alternative forms of voting are allowed. Certainly in Nova Scotia, here we can do Internet and telephone voting. In other places, it's specific to things like mail-in balloting or scanners, or things like that, but the largest area with eight million voters is Ontario.
We're already getting calls for the 2010 municipal election in Ontario. We're starting to get probably 20 major cities and our dilemma is going to be growing the company fast enough to be able to keep up with the demand for electronic voting in the Ontario market alone. In 2010 as well, Alberta has a commission almost exactly with the same mandate that you folks have here today that's looking at this technology and they've asked us to present information to them as well. There are several cities wanting to run a pilot there to allow for their municipal elections in 2010 to allow this type of technology.
The City of Winnipeg has approached us. They had some information that suggested that Elections Canada wanted somebody in Canada - a large metropolis if you will - to look at different forms of voting and Winnipeg is kind of a microcosm of Canada with lots of different ethnic backgrounds and our ability to be able to support multiple languages. In Yellowknife, in talking to them, they have 15 Inuit dialects that they want to be able to support. Our system has the capability to record voice in any language and as long as it can be graphically represented, we can run those languages on the Web side of it as well. So the flexibility, the capability to be able to incorporate all those requirements, is one of the things that's driving the success of this type of technology.
The elections we did in Ontario - and we've done several by-elections since then - the Ontario market is particularly good because there are lots and lots of municipalities, almost 200, that have done mail-in balloting. They get a room full of ballots - you know, they could get 80,000 or 100,000 mail-in ballots coming back - and they have to count them or
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scan them through scanners and do the counting. In some cases they have to determine whether the ballots are spoiled.
As I mentioned, there's a place in Ontario called Smiths Falls where almost 20 per cent of all returned ballots ended up being deemed spoiled because the information that was provided - inside an envelope goes your ballot, on the outside of the envelope you put another piece of paper, that's a declaration you sign, say your name, and you put those inside the envelope and mail it in. A lot people put the declaration inside with the ballot, which means you open it up and you can see who voted and how they voted. So it's deemed a spoiled ballot in those cases. They actually got a lot of them counted because they had two people - one would reach in and pull out one. If it was the ballot, the other person took the other thing and the separation of duties with the Chinese wall, they allowed a lot of the ballots to be processed, but that took a judge's order to allow that to happen.
So what we see in Ontario is a big demand for this and they haven't had polling stations in a lot of cases for a lot of years. So the ability to go in and magically, if you will, have all their votes counted electronically and 15 minutes after the election to be able to declare elected candidates is something that's of a significant benefit. Steve can speak to the costs a little later, but it basically is a very cost-effective thing and in some cases almost 40 per cent cheaper using this technology than mail-in balloting.
We did a series of what are called local authority elections in the U.K. in May 2007. The federal government in the U.K. had a pilot program and they looked internationally for companies that would be able to satisfy their demands for electronic voting. So there were five pilots set up. We won the right to deliver solutions to two of them. Those were in an area called South Bucks and Rushmoor. Those two regions had voters and what you had to do there is, you had to register in advance your desire to electronically vote. So six weeks prior to the election, you had to fill out a form and send it in to the government who would then register you to vote electronically and send you back a pin number.
One of the things you included, by the way, was a password that you were going to use when you voted. In one case they were doing just Internet voting, in the other case they were doing Internet and telephone. So obviously on the Internet telephone side of it, your password had to be all numbers and on the other one it could be a combination of letters and numbers.
It's not a good idea to do it that way, by the way, and the reason is - I don't know whether that's a "1" or an "l", or a "0" or an "O", like if somebody's transcribing what you sent in, and in some cases I can't even read your writing. Those are the types of problems they ran into which resulted in a lot of people calling the help line on election day or during the election voting period, saying, I know six weeks ago I sent something in but I can't really remember what I put in there, so can you help me out - there is the capability for the modular we have in order to be able to do that. So those elections were done in May 2007.
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There was a lot of scrutiny by organizations that think electronic voting is a really bad idea and what they did is they consciously said we're going to try to hack or disrupt the elections. So knowing that, we worked with a series of security companies there to ensure that our technology met the federal government standards and we did very well on that. We counted 28 probes into our system that were non-authorized probes, people trying to do something during the event. We didn't miss a heartbeat and actually it worked very well.
The other thing with that was we did a lot of tests for accessibilities in terms of disabled voters and what they typically want to see and use in terms of technology. Steve actually did a series of presentations with them to show our technology and we came away with some basic recommendations. Steve, maybe you could briefly speak to that.
MR. BEAMISH: We were very surprised and enjoyed, actually, the fact that being able to get to meet a lot of the folks on these accessibility groups within the municipalities. They're very, very strong accessibility groups to the point of having a lot of influence on the government on what policies they would actually implement.
We had the ability to meet with them and work with them. Anything on our system that actually needed to change. It was really interesting, the things we learned as well as what was the most important to them. For folks with reduced visibility, everything from minor vision issues to acute blindness, our system was able to do a lot of the things that would help them through that. From using screen readers so that someone with an acute vision problem was able to access the system, their system was able to read what was on the screen and we were fully compliant with the screen readers that were available to them.
As well, you may have noticed when Dean was going through the ballot, things like having buttons that are very, very clean, the ballots are very clear, there's nothing fancy about them. As well as doing things like printing white on black on buttons so that they're very easy to see for someone with reduced vision issues.
A lot of things we heard out of that were people with mobility issues. Again, in the U.K. they tend to run their elections in mid to late November or, sorry, on the other side, in the Spring where coming outside in the wet and cold and people that don't have to wait in line and that sort of thing, very interested in the ability for us to use the system in there.
MR. SMITH: It's interesting as we start going through this - the accessibility issues. Anecdotally what we're hearing when we finish elections and we see, like on CBC blog sites and things like that, people talking about the fact that we take for granted that we have a secret ballot, but visually impaired individuals who go to the polls and have to rely on a friend or somebody else to mark their ballots, it's interesting the number you hear from actually saying in that particularly case they vote over the phone, and from their point of view it's an easy thing for them to do to be able to finally have a secret ballot. Like I say, we do take a lot for granted if we're voters who have mobility. We had, anecdotally once again, in
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Colburg, Ontario, for example - quite a few people talk about the fact that they had missed the last several elections because they were housebound and they couldn't get out for mobility reasons. Being able to vote electronically presented them with an opportunity to vote for the first time in a long time.
We are also doing a lot of work with unions and associations, federal government unions. We've saved them a phenomenal amount of money. It's really quite amazing what the cost is of mailing out a kit to somebody and getting it mailed back, and typically they get return rates between 8 and 12 per cent on a good day and they've been getting, using our technologies, in some cases almost a 60 per cent return from what they're getting. It's just easy to use. The guarantee of voter anonymity and security - that's utmost. If you can't do that, you're not in business. If you can't guarantee voter anonymity and security of the ballot, then nobody will talk to you. We have the technology and the capability and the subject matter expertise to talk to them and their technical teams about how we accomplish that.
MR. BEAMISH: And in the case of one of those unions, I mean they're running a ratification vote with more than a 50 per cent participation rate, and if anybody has been involved in unions, you'll know that 50 per cent for a ratification vote is absolutely phenomenal. They'll tend to go with 10 per cent, 12 per cent - 20 per cent would be good.
MR. SMITH: On mail back.
MR. BEAMISH: On mail back.
MR. SMITH: It's expensive too. As I mentioned, we're currently working with three major political Parties in Canada who are dealing with leadership events that are going to happen next year as well.
We've also had the opportunity to work with CBC here in Atlantic Canada. There was an opportunity - this is the first time we've ever done what's called the PIN-less event where you didn't have to have a PIN, you just called in. It's kind of like Canadian Idol but in this particular case it allowed voters to use the Internet or the telephone and it was called the Short Film Faceoff and it ran over a series of five or six weeks, but it afforded filmmakers here in Nova Scotia an opportunity to sit in front of a panel of people, show their film and get a critique. They picked a winner each week for four weeks, and at the end of the fifth week they had the winners all come up and then they had voting.
We had 45,000 people vote. I didn't think that many people watched CBC on a regular basis - I hope there's no CBC folks here - but anyhow the long and the short of it, what was interesting about this is we had a lot of international voting. There was one film that was subtitled in English but it was all in Gaelic, and we had over 40 votes from Scotland. So how that word gets out through the Internet and people looking to vote and participate was kind of interesting.
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We chatted already about the municipal elections we did this past October in HRM, Berwick, Windsor, and Stewiacke as well. The other thing I wanted to mention about the Nova Scotia municipal elections - it's kind of interesting because Halifax started looking at this back in 2004, and it took them a long time to review the options and we were really thankful that they selected somebody in their backyard. It would have been difficult marketing-wise for us to have somebody else from somewhere else in the world provide HRM with their solutions. But it was a very onerous process that we had to go through, providing proof of concept and stuff like that. In fairness to them, they did an amazing job in terms of getting all the details together and it meant that some of our competitors actually couldn't compete in that space. So we're happy to have done that one.
I think the most significant thing that we have developed is learning - and we're able to go across the country, in a lot of cases internationally, and talk about what electronic voting has told us and what that translates back to in terms of tendencies amongst voters, certainly those who vote electronically. One of the more significant things that we've learned is that you cannot tell people you have to vote electronically. In areas where they've already done mail-in or remote voting, it's an easy sell. In areas where you have a lot of the population and tends to be more rural, they still want to go to the polling station - you present them with that opportunity and dovetail it in with our technology, you will find that that's something they like.
So in Ontario, in the rural areas, you know there was - almost 70 per cent of the people voted electronically given the choice, but 30 per cent of the people said, no, I'm going to the polls, as well. We know that voter participation in almost all the events has increased. In the case of Stewiacke, for example, they had a 71 per cent participation at the polls. From a percentage-wise, that was 20 per cent higher than they've ever had - they had 51 in the 2004 election when the Sunday shopping question was on the ballot. In Ontario, in various places we had there, anywhere from a 5 per cent to a 23 per cent.
We see it, there's only one instance where we didn't get increased participation. It was in a place called Addington Highlands in Ontario and they had virtually every race acclaimed except the school board race. In that school board race, however, that was voted, 62 per cent of people voted for the school board, I think probably because everybody was interested in trying the technology. They had a 15 per cent overall voter participation, but virtually every race was acclaimed. In every one we can say we've had a little bit of success - in Addington Highlands, certainly in the school board race.
The key issue we've heard from election authorities, when we go around and make presentations to potential clients, it isn't the voters we get to talk to. It's unfortunate. We do that, typically, through the media and some other mechanisms we have, but election officials make the decisions about the technology that's being used. So if the legislation enables them to do it, it's the election authorities - the clerks, the administrative officials responsible for making those decisions - that we sit down with.
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[9:45 a.m.]
They have specific issues associated with elections. Technology is interesting to them, but how are you going to deal with voters who aren't on the voters' lists, perhaps names that appear twice on the voters' list - different spellings, but the same person twice on the list - and things like that. How are you going to be able to audit this process? They want to do it and we want to supply the service - how do you ensure there's an independent third party that's sitting there and saying it worked and it worked as prescribed?
That's all built into our system. In the case of HRM, they used Ernst & Young. They had a recount here, as we mentioned, in District 23. The fact that you need a recount in electronic voting is not an issue - we've done it, it works well and it provides more concrete evidence that the voter's intent was easily interpreted. There's no misunderstanding what the voter intent was.
Absentee voters, the auditability, the voter anonymity and secrecy of the ballot - once again, if you can't address those issues, you probably won't be in business very long.
The cost effectiveness, Steve has a little more information on the average cost of events, but municipal, provincial and federal, I guess.
MR. BEAMISH: Municipally, across the country on an average, we're running somewhere between $4.50 and $6 per eligible voter. Provincially, you're running, on a very low end you'd be looking at Alberta with about $6 to $7 and on the high end, well, if you want to go extreme high end you look at Nunavut at about $78 per eligible voter, but it typically comes in around $9 provincially, once you include all the costs. Federally, if we look at the last federal election, you're at about $13.75 per eligible, if you translate that into actual votes cast, you're somewhere around $18 per vote cast. In the last one, just slightly over $300 million to put that in real dollars. That typically is the cost of running a full paper election.
MR. SMITH: We typically come in at about $3 per eligible elector, so when you look at the cost of using our service relative to most of the other ones, it usually averages in about $3 per eligible elector. So, if you have 100,000 people on your electors' list, it's a $300,000 event. We charge you whether anybody comes to the dance or not, so if it's all acclaimed, it's a little different that way, we only charge 25 per cent of the cost. The long and short of it is, if you have any race at all, it's per eligible elector on the list. We engineer the solution as if everybody's going to come to the poll.
MR. BEAMISH: Typically, in those areas where we've done events that have gone with both traditional paper as well as supplementing that choice with electronic, where they've gotten cost savings out of that is by reducing the polling stations; they reduce down the number of polling stations available. For interest sake, Coburg Ontario, approximately
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20,000 folks - they went from having eight polling stations down to two and still had a fairly significant increase in participation rates because everybody had the option of voting electronically for about a week before and they had no real issues with excessive line-ups at the polling station. I think the longest line-up they had was on the first day of advance vote where they had about 10 minutes total time from the time you reached the voting station until you were completed for anybody who was choosing to vote paper.
MR. SMITH: The timeliness and completeness of the results - basically 15 minutes after the event is over, the auditor and the chief electoral officer produce the election results. Those information sheets are compared and they declare the winner.
One of the interesting things that we've seen is the carbon emissions offset benefit of this. We were in British Columbia at a trade show, and opposite us was the Town of Whistler. They're mandated by 2010 to be carbon neutrals so if you want to go out and buy a new diesel bus, you have to offset that with some formula. And it was amazing, everybody from British Columbia who came up and talked to us - and we never even thought about it - gee, if you don't have 80,000 jumping in their cars driving to the poll, I mean you could probably figure out some carbon savings there.
So we worked a little with Dalhousie and some other consultants and we have a carbon emissions calculator, if you will, and in Reader's Digest form, on average, people travel five kilometres round trip. If they drive in a car and a car emits 143 grams per kilometre travelled, you take the carbon emissions and on average 1.5 people are in the car - go figure - well, if three people in every two cars is what it works out to be, and you work all that together, in Halifax it was almost 14 metric tons of CO2 that was saved from going into the air because people voted electronically. The rest of the equation would be, did it cost anything to run your computer? Most people leave them on all the time so it's not incremental, but the long and short of it is that it's an interesting discussion to have with people out West because they actually do find it very, very valuable in terms of what they're doing.
Demographically, who votes? This is interesting because what we're seeing is, there are an increased number of older Canadians who appreciate convenience in voting, and we - really this targets and skews more towards younger voters. Almost every place we've done, we see that the younger voters vote at the rate of - when they do vote and they vote electronically - they vote anywhere between 65 and 72 per cent of the time electronically. As you get up, most voters, I would say mid-aged, 30 to 59, in the ones we've done here, it's about 60 per cent of them use the electronic voting as an option.
The timeline that you would do it - give everybody a week. Halifax used three days - from our point of view, the city staff recommended a week and we recommended a week. City council decided to go three days, and two of those days being the weekend. If you give them a week, Sunday is the day that people will not vote. Percentage-wise, they just don't
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vote on Sunday. Monday, they vote a lot, and election day they vote a lot - almost 30 per cent of the people still wait until election day and vote on election day.
The other thing we talked about was the right or the opportunity to decline to vote and spoil them. You've got to educate the people and let them know that. We talked a little bit about it already, about the independence that disabled voters have. The other thing is the impact the media has on electronic voting and when to vote and how to do it. On Monday, October 6th, which was the last day of voting for HRM, CBC did a story at 6:08 p.m. on their CBC News at Six and our system lit up like a Christmas tree. All those people watching the news go, oh, gee, you know what I forgot to do? There were only two hours left to vote and the thing just - we almost tripled.
MR. BEAMISH: Less than an hour.
MR. SMITH: Yes, that's right, we almost tripled the number of calls per hour that we had.
Steve and I did a fair amount of media work in radio in Ontario when the events were going on there as well and in the newspaper, but the immediacy of radio and television in terms of a supporting mechanism - and the same thing is true, we saw in Berwick, Stewiacke, and Windsor, they were more conscientious of actually going out and saying we need to make sure everybody understands when they can vote and, as a result, the participation rate in those areas was higher.
One of the last things I wanted to mention is the candidate behaviour, we see changes there as well. One of the things that happens is if you have an extended period of time, especially leading up to the election day, one of the things that the election authorities do is provide, on a daily basis, information to the candidates on who has voted over the past 24 hours and they use that as a basis because the campaigning is still on. They know that if 80 per cent of the street has voted, they don't have to go down that street anymore. So they can get the information, sort it in any way they want, and the election authorities were providing them information about who has voted and who hasn't voted. So it's a mechanism to get the vote out. We have a module that we have to do that as well.
In summary, two things that we think are really important - choice and convenience - are kind of the basis of our marketing now. If you give them a choice and an opportunity to do something like this, you'll probably find that most people want to take you up on it. The question would be, are those the same people who would vote anyhow? Are you just offering convenience? So far, we've seen that there have been anywhere from marginal to significant participation increases because of it. A lot of it has to do with the geography, the demographics of the area.
Roman">[Page 18]
One of the interesting things you'll read in the document from the U.K. is if it's raining in the U.K., 8 per cent of the people won't go to the polls. If they have a social engagement, I think it's something like 13 per cent, like when somebody asks you if you can nip down to the pub for a beer. So you add those together and what they see is that on a rainy day when you get an opportunity to go for a drink, you'll probably find that the participation is down. They have a lot of different mechanisms in there and they talk about the details in that report, so it's interesting reading. We know that the voter participation does get impacted by having choice and convenience.
Voters outside the country - all you have to do is get your mail. If you get your mail forwarded or somebody calls you with your PIN number, which happens a lot - my mom, for example, goes to Florida, my brother picks up her mail, pays her bills and lets her know anything she needs in terms of urgency. To give an example, he would call down there and say, Mom, here's your PIN number if you want to vote - she lives in Florida in the wintertime. For absentee voters, there's no additional cost, as long as the information can get through to those particular people.
It's interesting, when there was a deployment of military personnel from Edmonton, we saw a notice in the paper last year when the Edmonton city elections were on, that the Chief Electoral Officer there said there's some concern that they won't be able to get the ballots to the military personnel because of when the candidate declaration cut-off time was - by the time they could prepare the ballots, get them mailed to them. So we called them and said that in our system you don't have to know the candidates, you can just send out the information. So we offered to do it for free, there was only about 200 or 300, I guess, who were deployed.
They were very appreciative of it and they figured out a way to do it. They chartered a jet and sent the ballots on the jet. I don't know what it cost them, but I mean that was a decision they made. Their rationale was - which was perfectly legitimate - they haven't done the subtleties of figuring out how to do electronic voting through the legislative requirements, which is fair.
The interesting thing there is that engaging absentee voters, using technology, is probably the single-biggest thing we hear from election authorities - how do I deal with people who are out of the country and what do I have to do? In this particular case, send them their mail. Now that's true in a lot of cases.
Disabled voters and increased independence - we've chatted about it a little. The other thing is, and I mention this anecdotally, we do hear from a lot of people who say, I couldn't vote and now I can vote again, so that's great.
The single other issue that we hear a lot about is youth. We know in the Halifax election, the number of kids who voted from university, they probably would never have
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taken the time to be involved in it. I coach a girls' soccer team and my players are anywhere between 18 and 22 years old. I've coached for 20 years. I told every one of them, I said you're all going to vote. I don't care if you vote electronically but you're going to vote. Unfortunately, half of them weren't on the voters' list, and that's a whole different issue that has to do with the cost of maintaining that and continually updating it. It's something that every election authority across the country has had problems with - how do you do that in a cost-effective way, how do you make sure they're Canadian, how do you make sure that when they turn the age of majority that you get them on the list, and stuff like that? Those are all key things.
We look at it, and I was kind of concerned when I saw the Halifax list, there were 776 18- and 19-year olds; 776 out of 280,000. I looked at that and I said, gee, something is wrong there. There's actually over 9,000 18- and 19-year olds in the city. They represent 3 per cent of the population; 8 per cent of them were on the list. It's no reflection on Elections Nova Scotia but how do you get the information through on a timely basis? The percentage of 20-year olds on the list was 90-some-odd per cent. So it reflects back on when you last had an opportunity to do enumeration and aged it. So it's a very expensive proposition to do enumeration and to do it right and to do it on a regular basis, it's the most expensive thing. They do it just before every election in Alberta and it's a very expensive proposition, but that's the only way they can do it because their population is changing.
I know Elections Nova Scotia is working through all kinds of mechanisms to try to ensure that their information is up to date more often. But if you look at that and you say, how come there was only that many who voted, participated? It's because a lot of them weren't on the list and didn't have an opportunity to get their name on the list - I shouldn't say that. They had the opportunity to get their name on the list, what they were supposed to do was get their name on the list. The question is, how do you incent an 18- or 19-year-old to do something - to vote when they're not even really that excited about voting, get them on the list?
Anyhow, those are kind of the basics of what we do, how we do it, where we've done it. I appreciate that I've taken a lot of your time.
MR. BEAMISH: I think just before we finish, it's probably important to note that what we showed you - which was the voting screens - is about the literal tip of the iceberg for what it is that we actually do with an election, during the election period. I mean, we have a whole series of support modules and tools that are there to help support the voters through the process and the election officials through the process. Everything from the Chief Electoral Officer having the ability to watch participation rates and so on, to the full help-desk piece that allows voters, if they're having a problem, to call in, meet a pre-determined set of protocol and be able to be added to a list, be able to have their PINs, their additional credentials fixed, if that was the issue.
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The last time around we saw - one of the things I make a commitment to is that during an actual election, I'll spend a fair bit of time in the call centre because that's where you learn. You're listening to people calling in, what are the problems they're having. We saw things like people putting their birth dates in wrong and so on. With a well-trained help desk and the tools which we provide them, they're actually able to walk them through a very set protocol that allows the help-desk person to help that person. So if a person has called in and they want to vote electronically, now we're going to give them some things to help them out.
[10:00 a.m.]
For example, if a person here happened to get their ballot and they looked at the first one - obviously everybody votes for the same mayor but they got down to the council race and they had just recently moved so they had changed wards, the help-desk person was actually able to help them through how they could change the ward on their ballot so that when they came back into the system, they had the proper list of candidates in front of them.
So it's a very powerful set of tools that we use as support, things on the audit pieces. There's a whole series of both external and internal audit pieces that are available during the election process and after, forensically. So we're really giving you the tip of the iceberg on the voting process and the experience side, there really is a deeper piece that is there to support all of the stakeholders in the election, from the voters to the election officials.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, thank you, Dean, thank you, Stephen. Members have some questions. I'd first like to recognize Mr. Bain.
MR. KEITH BAIN: Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much for your presentation this morning; it was quite interesting. I did have a concern about the security issue, if a person voted on-line and then went to the poll, and you've pretty much answered that.
I guess before I begin, I was just wondering how Homer Simpson did. (Laughter) The only security issue that I see, and you referenced your brother calling your mother in Florida - Mom, here's your PIN number. Well, your brother doesn't have to call her in Florida, he can vote for her because he knows her date of birth and whether it's going to be for the person she wants him to vote for or not, but that would be the only way to circumvent the whole system.
MR. SMITH: One of the things that we hear a lot, and that's a common question, whoever has the PIN can get to vote. In Ontario that was true, because basically they didn't require a date of birth. They're so used to just mailing out a ballot and having somebody mail it back, they said, no, from our point of view we're going to mail out a PIN, you guys got the PIN, you voted. So we thought it should be an issue, they didn't.
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One of the most interesting things we've heard is a quote from Elections Canada and they said that the integrity of Canadian elections is really based on the integrity of Canadians. If somebody wants to break the law, we really can't prevent it. So we've never heard of any instance where somebody "stole the vote" and I wouldn't expect to. It's not like you're going to run around saying to everybody, guess what I did?
Similarly, if somebody has their PIN pilfered by somebody, there's already legislation in place in every province in Canada, if you show up at the polling station and your name is struck off the list and you go, wait a minute, that wasn't me, there's a form you fill out, an affidavit you sign, and you're presented with another ballot. The similar is true in the electronic world. We can't take the ballot out - the person at the manual polling station can't reach in and figure out which ballot was put in by whom and take it out.
So it's raised as an issue in every one of them and what we do is, we deal with the fact that those would be people, typically, within families. The more common question we get along that line in the same way is, in some areas of the country there may be communities of people where the head of the household says what goes - I'll tell you how you're going to vote, I'll tell you this and I'll tell you that. In other words, it has more to do with everything from religion to geography. It depends on where you live and issues like that. The long and short of it here is that there are other ways of having an influence.
The interesting thing about this is, if you have your PIN and you happen to be anywhere in the world, you can vote. If you have your PIN and the head of the household is saying you're going to do this, they'd have to know the exact minute and a half you're doing it somewhere during the week at some location in the world, or, in the driveway if you want, to be able to influence what you're doing.
MR. BEAMISH: As well, to lead it down the other side of that is that in some jurisdictions in the country, British Columbia is a very good example of that - every municipality in British Columbia is an open ward system.
You can go to any polling station in your municipality and cast a ballot because you're on their paper polling list and they know that it's current. People will walk into the polling station on one side of town and say I'm Stephen Beamish, I'm here to vote and they'll hand me a ballot and no problem to walk across town to the next one and stop at every one on the way home from the grocery store and vote. They do not do a reconciliation.
In our system, once a person has cast a ballot, regardless of whether they've gone to a polling station or they've done it sitting along the side of the road in the car, because we know we can't drive, or on their Internet connection - the second they've completed their ballot, they can no longer vote in any of the other methods. We often get the question, someone says, well, what if you go into the polling station and you bring your cellphone with
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you and you register, they give you a ballot and you go behind the screen and you try it? The minute the election official hands you a ballot, you've been taken off the voters' list.
Or, if you're sitting in the car and you vote and run into the polling station and they look you up, you are off the list. One vote, one person and that's it.
MR. BAIN: So the initial investment would be for every polling station to have a computer? Each DRO is going to have to have a computer.
MR. BEAMISH: To take it down to its absolute basic level, as long as they have a phone connection of some form, even a cellular phone connection will allow them to check the voter when they come in the door in order to do that. That's a safety that we have in our system. Obviously, we always get the question, you're dependent upon the Internet connection being live - well, absolutely not. If, for some reason there has been an attack against the Internet connection, we can just go to the telephones.
Someone says, well I went to use the Internet but it didn't work - pick up your telephone. On the same side, the DRO sitting in the polling station, if their Internet connection went down -which actually happened to us in one municipality in Ontario. Two minutes after eight, everything was creeping along fine and all of a sudden, the Internet connection for the municipality went down. It was just seamless - they picked up the telephone and the next person in line that was coming into the municipality to vote, handed them their PIN and they checked to make sure they weren't on the list that they hadn't already participated, they marked them electronically that they were going to vote manually, handed them the ballot and it just kept the process going.
We can take it down to its basic level, which any form of connection into our system, even if that means getting to the point where someone came in and instead of carrying away a ballot box cut all the phone lines in the polling station -you can pick up a cellular phone and keep going from there. Now, if you came in and stole everybody's cellphone and the Internet connections went down and all the other things, well, then, we'll run a cellphone out to you, I guess.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Bain. Mr. Steele.
MR. GRAHAM STEELE: I first want to start by congratulating you on building a business out of Dartmouth - you've built a world leader in electronic voting and you should be congratulated for that. I know it's not something that started just yesterday. You've been working at this for years and years to bring it to the point where it is and I want to congratulate you on that. I also want to mention, as a resident of HRM, I was very interested in the voting experience in the most recent municipal elections so I made a point of using your system to vote in the latest HRM election.
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I was very impressed. It was quick, it was easy - it was a far better voter experience than I had expected. Your screens that come up are easy to read, they're well laid out, they're not cluttered, it uses simple language, the choices are very clear - you should be congratulated for that. Again, that's not something you just dreamed up yesterday, that's the result of years of experience.
However, I'm very, very concerned about a general move to electronic voting. Dean, I know that over the years you have heard every possible objection to electronic voting and you have an answer to them, but I want to go over what my main objection is. It really elaborates on what Keith Bain was just saying and that has to do with the fact that fundamentally, none of us knows who it is that's casting the ballot or under what circumstances they're casting the ballot. Now, in the traditional voting system it doesn't matter what is going on around a person - for 10 or 15 precious seconds, they are alone behind the voting screen and nobody but them knows what they put on the ballot - but when you do electronic voting, that's gone.
Let me just run over some of the scenarios that I know will happen, and have happened, and do happen. The first one - of course the most obvious one and the simplest one - is just outright theft of the card. This occurred to me when I was in my mother-in-law's apartment building and I saw all the undelivered envelopes lined up by her mailbox - my constituency has a lot of apartment buildings, so this always happens. I could have picked up hundreds, hundreds of voting cards. Now, it concerns me when you say that in Ontario there was one municipality that said that a PIN number was enough. I can't imagine why they think that's a good idea because if that had been the case in Halifax, I could have cast hundreds of votes - no problem at all.
The biggest deterrent to theft, of course, is that I don't know the birth date of most of those people, although I guess with a bit of work I could probably find out some of them, but okay, so I'll grant you that. That's why I'm not so concerned about outright theft, but the next category is people who are under some kind of social pressure to cast their ballot a certain way - abusive relationships where a dominant person in the family says, you're going to cast your ballot this way or else. So voting becomes just another way in which one person is dominated by another person and because you can't see and I can't see what's happening around a computer, we have no idea when it's happening.
There's all kinds of power relationships. I have all kinds of people in my constituency who are weak in some way. They are weak economically, socially, intellectually, and it's very easy for them to be dominated by other people and there are all kinds of those kind of power relationships where voting can become just another way in which one person exercises dominance over another.
There's the kind of organizational relationships we talk about. I mean typically we talk about things like fundamentalist churches - although I don't think that's particularly fair
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to fundamentalist churches - there are all kind of one-issue organizations out there who could throw voting parties, you know, and have a computer on a tabletop and call people in the group forward one by one to vote with everybody around cheering because they're voting for their candidate, the point being that it's all being done very much in public. So that's where somebody is casting their own ballot, but under a situation of social pressure.
Then you have the situation where someone else is casting the ballot in the elector's name. You can have it done without the elector's knowledge. For example in the news, in the HRM election, we had cases from people in the CBC newsroom - an ex-girlfriend whose envelope arrived, the person knows the date of birth and has the PIN number, and would have no trouble casting that person's ballot without the ex-girlfriend even knowing because she had moved out of the province. We had somebody who was recently deceased - again the CBC, just within the CBC newsroom - a father recently deceased. Of course, the son knows the father's date of birth and could easily have cast a ballot in the name. So those are the situations where the person casting the vote doesn't ask or care what the elector would have wanted.
Then there are other situations where they say, well, it's what they would have wanted. The typical case being an aged parent in a nursing home who's not in a position to cast their own ballot but the son or daughter knows that they always voted Liberal, for example, so they vote Liberal and they don't think they're doing anything wrong because they say that's what mum would have wanted. But there's nothing to prevent that from happening, and with an aging population that's a concern.
Then you have the ones where you're casting a ballot in somebody else's name, but with their permission. In a lot of cases that can be benign - somebody travelling some and they would say, well, you know how I want to vote, here's how I want you to vote - I guess a form of proxy vote - but then there's a situation where now the ballot has a value and can be sold. There are all kinds of people who would accept money or drugs, or a break on the rent, or anything, because now their ballot has a value. All you have to do is give somebody your card and your date of birth in exchange for something. It could be anything and there could now be a market in these ballots.
All of that stuff that I have talked about is prevented with the existing system where one person goes behind a screen and votes on their own. Now, the existing system doesn't prevent people accepting money or drugs, it doesn't prevent abusive relationships, none of that stuff, but at the end of the day there's only one person behind that screen and those are the reasons why I'm not sure that we're ready for electronic voting because all of that stuff could happen.
MR. SMITH: I have one question for you, it's kind of as a lead-in of it. If it's all right for the same person who's voting municipally, why isn't it okay for that same person voting provincially or federally? We hear your comments and your examples and, you're right, most
[Page 25]
of them sound like they're, you know, typical, like give me a couple scenarios and well thought out. So those are all issues and to your point, we've addressed them and most of them, some of them I guess came up in quite an article that The Coast did on the election as well - The Coast magazine - which sort of addressed a lot of them.
[10:15 a.m.]
In the U.S., it's kind of the same thing. There's a fear of what happens there. I know Steve has a lot of comments on this too but just to talk to a couple of them, voter cards appearing, I would suggest to you that if somebody wanted to "steal some votes", having a voter card in hand and walking into a polling station is all you need to do. I know this from experience - I walked in with my voter card at the last provincial election and I just gave my voter card and they looked me up, scratched me off the list, and gave me a ballot. I didn't have to say a thing. I didn't have to prove I was Dean Smith. I didn't have to do anything other than show up and give them a card.
So to suggest that I couldn't have had Steve's or anybody else's or found a bunch in a lobby or foyer - it's true. Would I be more apt to do it in person? Probably not. I would probably go, oh, gee, I'm going to get caught, you know, or somebody will say wait a minute, that's not Steve, but I didn't have to say a thing. I said hi, and gave them the card and they said, oh, there you are, and they talked amongst the folks and scratched me off and gave me a ballot and I voted.
So the real issue here in some of these things is the social pressure issue. There's no question that if I was going to force you to vote and if I was weak in constitution and somebody was telling me to do it, I might look at the opportunity to go behind a voting secrecy booth and use that as an opportunity to rebel or I might do exactly as I'm told. I don't know the answer to that. Yes, it would be easier for somebody else to say, I'm going to take your PIN. The other thing though, if I got the mail and I voted long before you were able to subject me to any type of pressure, it might be the equal rebellion - I know I can get away with it. I know I can just jump on the phone because I know you come home at five o'clock and, by George, I'm going to vote long before you get home. So we've seen the different spins around the very issue.
The association voting, groups of people getting together, it's done all the time in what we call the political leadership conventions. There are examples of voting that's done that way if you're predisposed to do it. It's also the union mentality that we've seen, why some unions do not want to use our technology. They want people to go to a place, raise their hand, and watch who did or didn't raise their hand and that's socially in some unions and in other unions that are existing we have an opportunity to use our technology with them.
The question about whether selling something, you know, like I assume people sell and buy votes all the time. I don't know it for sure but this way I guarantee it, the other way
[Page 26]
I'm not sure if you voted. So if the question is, is there honour amongst thieves, I'm not sure I concern myself about it. If you're going to sell your vote and you're going to buy your vote, then that's between you guys I guess - not you guys politicians, you guys in general - but the long and short of it is that can be done and is done. The question is, I can guarantee if I have your PIN and your birth date, I can get my money's worth. So, yes, you've done something illegally and you've got what you wanted illegally then, yes, you got a better deal I guess probably but the question really is, and we hear this a lot, you know, are you worried about honour amongst thieves, is what we typically say.
MR. STEELE: You know, it may be illegal to cast somebody else's vote or to exert pressure on them when they're voting but people will do it unless they fear detection and what's common among almost all the scenarios that I've laid out is that the chance of detection is zero. There is absolutely no chance that if I cast a ballot in the name of one of my family members, which I could have, that either I'm going to complain or the family member is going to complain. So there's a scenario for you. In order to test this out, there was one of my extended family that I said, are you going to vote? The person said no. I said, can I have your PIN? They said, sure, here it is, and of course I know that person's date of birth. If I had chosen to, I could have cast a ballot in that person's name and you don't know whether I did or not. It's illegal but since the chance of detection is zero - because I knew that person is not going to complain - I'm not going to complain . . .
MR. SMITH: But it was one person, one vote.
MR. STEELE: It was one person but then I could have done a lot more of them and only I would have known how many ballots I cast.
Now I agree with you that the existing system isn't perfect. There are ways of playing the existing system, but it's not simple. For example, I can't go into a voting booth now and pretend to be an 80-year-old woman - it's not going to wash, right? I can only pretend to be a certain kind of person. Also, I can't do repeated voting at the same polling station; I would have to move around polling stations.
In a lot of places, particularly outside of urban centres where everybody knows everybody, I can't impersonate anybody because everybody knows who I am. Even in my own polling station, in the last federal election, I walked in and people greeted me by name, but then they asked to see my driver's licence because that was the rule. So if somebody didn't ask you to verify who you were . . .
MR. BEAMISH: Provincially, there's no requirement.
MR. STEELE: Provincially maybe there's no requirement, okay, but you see there are ways of dealing with that. Just because the existing system isn't perfect, to me isn't a reason to adopt another imperfect system.
[Page 27]
Don't get me wrong, the technology behind what you're doing is phenomenal, it's amazing what you do electronically. The weakness is in the things you don't control, which is principally the quality of the voters' list and also the people who are actually casting ballots.
You see, the difficulty I have is that just fundamentally there seems too many opportunities for other people to influence or cast another person's vote.
MR. BEAMISH: I guess I'd probably like to address a couple of those things. A very, very good example of what you're talking about happened at Concordia University a number of years ago, where there's basically two ethnic groups at that university. Students, in general, happen to be very apathetic when it comes to voting for their student council, not realizing exactly how much power that student council may have. An election was run, one of those two ethnic groups decided to become very strong and organize all their folks and they got all the vote out - by the way, they voted by paper. Everybody went and took a piece of paper, they had to go to a specific place and drop it in a box. That one ethnic group won and put everybody on council and the first thing they did was outlaw any celebrations of the other ethnic group. There were riots in the university. So voter apathy and not going out to vote leads very quickly to those kinds of things.
One of the things we're saying is that yes, you may have the case where there may be some increased special interest voting and that becomes more and more influential when we're at the point where we are, where we're getting municipal and federal elections and provincial elections where 20 to 25 per cent of the voting population is going out to vote. So a very small group of people - or in the case that you're talking about, where you may go out and gather up four or five votes from your family and friends - becomes very important in that election. But if we can get that base back to where it should be - in 1946, in the 1940s, when all of our parents came back after the war and went through all those things that went on, people voted in the 85 per cent range. So if a few people got together and stole a couple of votes, it didn't matter that much.
We have to look at the point where, how do we get back to a point where we're getting better participation rates. Those things that you're talking about, a lot of the things that you're talking about - with special interest voting and ethnic voting or whatever the case happens to be - may lead very much into what you're talking about. That's more happening because of voter apathy and a lack of participation than it is on how they're casting their ballots.
MR. STEELE: I have few other questions but I want to give other members a turn, if there's anybody else on the list.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Sure, Mr. Parker.
[Page 28]
MR. CHARLES PARKER: Okay, Mr. Chairman, and thank you gentlemen, very interesting. Some of my questions have already been asked but I have a few wide-ranging thoughts here. I guess the first one is this - is there anywhere in the world where this system doesn't work? You mentioned that it can work anywhere on our planet but, because of geography or because of lack of technology, are there some areas of our planet where it wouldn't work?
MR. BEAMISH: Well, I would say if there's phone service and between satellite phone and cellphones and wireless devices, there's basically very few spots where you can't vote if you needed to. In terms of Internet availability, there's lots of places still. Canada has the highest penetration in the use of Internet virtually of any country in the world currently. It's growing at the younger age groups, as we all know, but the older population is embracing it more, because of the social engine that's associated with Facebook and some of the other things like that. But from an Internet voting point of view, where there's Internet capability you can get out, and where there's phone service you can use it as well.
MR. BEAMISH: Most of the developing world is moving, as you probably know, toward wireless devices in everything, from Africa to South America. There's no longer people who are putting in phone lines, those expensive poles that run all over the place. You're dropping in very cheap cell towers and exceptionally cheap cellular service, so the access is very good.
MR. PARKER: Okay, this question is maybe not directly related to your system but one of your statistics, over and over I saw where more women are voting than men - about 56 per cent to 44 per cent was the average I saw. I didn't know that before I read this information here. Maybe you can't give me an answer but why is that? Are there more women voters or is it that women are more likely to vote?
MR. SMITH: There are more women voters in HRM than there are male, if you use HRM as an example. A lot of people would suggest that they have busier schedules, too, so there's a high propensity for them to vote electronically as well, is what we've seen. Aside from that . . .
MR. PARKER: It's a fair difference.
MR. SMITH: Yes, it is. And it was consistent almost amongst all of them, but there was in most areas a 10 per cent increase, a 10 per cent difference across the age group in the HRM and actually there was a 4 to 1 relationship, when you get over 75 years age, in terms of the number of women alive versus men.
MR. PARKER: That might be based on the population, you know there are a lot more women in the population . . .
[Page 29]
MR. BEAMISH: They tend to live longer than we do, let's be honest.
MR. PARKER: That's it, okay, but it's an interesting statistic I saw in there that I didn't really know before.
I want to ask you about recounts on your electronic system. I guess there's a combination of paper ballots and electronic ballots and I'm not sure what an electronic ballot looks like but it's in there somewhere, in cyberspace. How do you go in, with the mix of the two, and get an accurate count? Could you explain that?
MR. SMITH: The recount capability that exists in the system really takes every elector who has officially gone to the polls electronically and there's a one-to-one relationship between the fact that there are 1,000 people who have come into the system and 1,000 ballots in a ballot box. Nobody knows how somebody cast a ballot. There are no spoiled ballots unless somebody declined to vote.
Lets say, for the sake of our example, there were 990 cast ballots and 10 spoiled ballots out of the 1,000. The 10 spoiled ballots will, for all intents and purposes, be that somebody has selected a candidate called "declined to vote" so they've actually voted and they've spoiled their ballot. Basically what you have is an electronic representation that if you count it one million times, it will count the same way. Interestingly enough, when the recount was asked for in District 23, Ernst & Young took the files that we extracted from the system on election night and they were put in the custodianship of Ernst & Young and the Chief Electoral Officer for the city.
When the judge was looking for the recount, Ernst & Young simply took the data off the system and the voters who had voted and basically said, this is how many ballots were cast and here is who they were cast for. It is electronically represented, so it's a file if you will. So if you wanted to, you could say let's create a process where we print out a ballot with an X next to the name and actually one of the other competing companies that we work against, sometimes in Canada, has the capability to print the ballot and then count the ballot later. We could do that as well, most people in the IT business would suggest to you that taking it and printing it out or looking at it on a screen or otherwise summing it up in a spreadsheet format is the same thing, so why would you kill the trees that print out a ballot that you know the results are going to be what they are?
MR. PARKER: So Ernst &Young took some data from a computer screen, or had a printout - one or the other - plus then they actually had the ballots and counted the physical ballots that were . . .
MR. SMITH: The paper ballots were counted by the judge. The electronic information was provided by Ernst & Young to the judge.
[Page 30]
MR. PARKER: The two were combined for the total?
MR. SMITH: That's right.
MR. PARKER: Okay. Another thing I noticed in here was a candidate module or the Chief Electoral Officer or other people have access to the information as it's happening, so the candidate or the Party would know how many of their supporters might have voted up to that particular point and, therefore, you can get your supporters out who haven't voted - that's the way the system works?
MR. SMITH: It's an option.
MR. PARKER: So is that available to the Party or to the candidate, or is there a fee or a charge to the Parties to get that? How does that work?
MR. BEAMISH: It's included as part of our service. We've provided that to whoever is running it, the election officials in this case. If they choose to make that available to their candidates, that's the choice of the election officials, that's not our choice to make. If the election official chooses to provide that to the candidates, it's there. It's a secure system that the candidate can use prior to the event. They can use it to identify their intended support, so they can electronically mark who they think is going to vote for them, and then during the actual event they're able to see who has participated.
Obviously, there's no way at all they can tell how they participated, only that they have, in fact, participated during the event. It's analogous to having somebody sitting at the polling station as a scrutineer, striking it off and handing it to a runner and running back to your campaign. We have a great photograph someone took down in Windsor where they had the agent's table at the site of the polling station and there was nobody there, because they were all actually on the telephones and using the computers. It's a very useful module for the areas that have been able to use it.
MR. PARKER: So it was available to candidates or Parties in other elections when you've run them?
MR. BEAMISH: The only one we haven't had it available to, actually, was in HRM. They chose not to do that.
MR. PARKER: I just have one final question. When there's a multi-choice for, say, municipal councillors, you vote for four out of however many are on the ballot - four out of nine - and if the person chooses to vote for one person or two people, was that a spoiled ballot or did they have that option?
[Page 31]
[10:30 a.m.]
MR. SMITH: What happens is, prior to the event we talk to the election officials and get them to determine whether or not they want to allow undervoting. It is legally counted as a ballot - in all cases the municipalities that we've done have allowed undervoting. It's a very common thing to do; it's not spoiled. You can't overvote it - you can overvote and spoil a paper ballot, obviously, that way, but you can't spoil a multi-select ballot. If you want to undervote it, when you press submit it comes up and says you have chosen two, you can choose up to four, are you sure you want to go ahead and do this? If you say yes, it just processes your ballot.
MR. PARKER: Is there something to prevent the person from voting for the same person three or four times?
MR. BEAMISH: The ballot looks like a ballot, so once you put the X on the ballot, it's only there once.
MR. PARKER: You could undervote, but you couldn't vote more than once for the same person?
MR. SMITH: That's correct, yes.
MR. PARKER: Okay, those are my questions. Thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Parker. Just before we go back to Mr. Steele, I'm curious about the experience here in Halifax. One of the questions we had was, were there actually more people who voted because of the electronic system made available, either by phone or Internet, or was it the same voters who just found a new means of casting their ballot? I'm wondering whether your data has any concrete evidence on that question.
MR. SMITH: I guess from our point of view the answer is, I don't know how we could discern that. One of the things that was interesting is, the advance poll, there was some muddling of the data, I'll say, because of the federal election happening on the 14th and the advance poll on the 14th. We saw in Windsor and places like that where you went upstairs in the community centre to vote federally and downstairs to vote municipally. So they got a great turnout, they liked the fact it was convenient for people to do that.
In the case of HRM, the almost 29,000 people who voted electronically at the advance poll, that was more than double what they ever had turn out in an advance poll before. I think it speaks somewhat to the convenience of the capability to do it. When the advance poll paper timeline came around, they had another 15,000 people vote, so almost half of the people who voted in the election voted in advance of election day.
[Page 32]
MR. BEAMISH: In 2004, there was 15,000.
MR. SMITH: Total, yes, in advance poll voting. In advance poll voting in this particular case, there were three times as many people who voted in advance of the election.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I'm curious, why did HRM decide only to go with the advance poll for allowing electronic voting? Do you know offhand why they didn't choose to also have it available on regular polling day?
MR. SMITH: The biggest reason - there was the requirement for having technology at each of the polling stations. The councillors decided that they wanted to go status quo with existing polling stations. They didn't want to, in their view, disenfranchise anybody by taking a polling station that was close by and convenient. As Steve mentioned, in virtually all of the other locations where we've done electronic voting, the biggest cost saving is the requirement not to staff polling stations or print ballots, or rent halls, and things like that. This was a pilot and they said this is the way we're going to implement it, everything stays status quo except what we're doing, and by staying status quo, it meant that they would have to equip 300-plus PCs at each of the polling stations, or phone service, or some sort. So they felt that would be a deterrent. It would be an additional cost which is reasonable from our point of view.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Were they able to identify how many of their existing polling stations would not have been compatible to this system?
MR. BEAMISH: We didn't really get to that point. They basically said that with the requirement to have them, there were just so many across the whole municipality that even for the advance vote, they staffed - I'm trying to remember the exact number.
MR. SMITH: Thirty?
MR. BEAMISH: Very high even for the advanced voting. We tried, the other side - we said, well, at least have it for the entire advance vote period and stop it, you know, two days before the full event but it was just, they felt that the way that the bylaw got passed and that status quo was to remain, that really doing anything but having an advanced advance vote and then having the regular advanced votes on the time period was the way that they had to go.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Did you receive any feedback, or did HRM report any feedback of electors saying if I had been able to vote electronically on voting day, I would have voted or was any of that data collected or was there any feedback?
MR. BEAMISH: It was probably the biggest complaint afterwards - how come we couldn't have voted? Unfortunately, because it was such a long period before, even the night
[Page 33]
of the leaders' debate was the last night of the electronic vote. I think the leaders' debate began at (Interruption) Sorry, the mayoralty debate. The mayoralty debate began at 7 p.m. and the electronic voting was over at 7 p.m. So there were a lot of folks who said, well, you know, I really wanted to hear that before I completed the ballot and, unfortunately, we would have supported that as well. I mean it was just a matter of being able to, and because of it being a pilot, it was a decision that set of elected officials chose. We've worked in many, many different, a variety of options on those things for different municipalities and we've worked everything from strictly what Dean was talking about with electronic and paper to in the U.K. where there was a consortium of five companies that provided varying forms of electronic voting right down to scanners, optical scanning and everything.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I'm curious, just offhand and I'm not sure if you gave this before - what was the total cost to HRM for using your services in the last election?
MR. SMITH: It was $471,000. It was about $1.71 per eligible elector, is what it was.
MR. BEAMISH: And just to be clear, that would have been the same cost if they had done an entire electronic event as it was if they had done a pilot. There was no difference in the cost.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So had they allowed voting on election day and everything else, it still would have been $471,000?
MR. BEAMISH: The cost was the cost. It would have been exactly the same if they had run it for the entire event or if they ran it as a pilot.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Now, I'm curious, you said $1.71 per elector, now, that's for a municipal election. I think I heard you say that for a provincial election it would be more than that?
MR. SMITH: Well, what they do is they took care of - you have to get the letter in the hands of the voter. So there's typically a cost for a mail-out and an election kit. So that's not part of our service. I mean we work with a supplier of that service and in actual fact, HRM had a contract with them to get that information. So that was our cost - $1.71. I think there's probably somewhere around, I'm guessing, I think somewhere between 92 cents and 95 cents to get that in the hands of the voter, so the cost of the stamp, the processing of the information inside through a supplier of that service.
MR. CHAIRMAN: And I'm just curious, have you worked out the numbers of what it would cost if the Province of Nova Scotia were to adopt your system and have it for the next provincial election for both advanced polling and for regular polling day? Do you have a rough figure of what that cost would be?
[Page 34]
MR. SMITH: Well, we could say the cost for our service would be about $3 an eligible elector which would include your mail-out. I know Christine's team and the requirement to continually have polling stations in some areas and stuff like that, but our service fee would be $3.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Per eligible elector?
MR. SMITH: Per eligible elector, yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Just before I recognize Mr. Steele - I know Mr. Steele raised some concerns about the potential of fraud in that. I'm curious - and Mr. Steele, maybe you can address this in your remarks - I'm not sure how different that is than our mail-in ballot system we have now of how easy it would be to exert influence on someone to vote a certain way by getting them to get a mail-in ballot. Once the mail-in ballot is there, there's no means of knowing who signed that ballot or how that ballot was voted and who did that voting prior to returning the ballot to the elections office. I'm just curious, Mr. Steele - because that's a possibility in our existing system of using that influence and of gathering these ballots and having groups voting those ballots - if that's any different than what we have now for the potential of exerting influence and even selling your vote through that mail-in ballot system. I leave that with you, Mr. Steele, with your next number of questions.
MR. STEELE: Thank you; it's a good point, actually. You're right - it's exactly the same issue with mail-in ballots or any form of absentee voting which is a very, very minor part of our voting system. I guess my point is not that the existing system is perfect, but if there are difficulties with any aspect of the existing system, that's not justification for saying, it's already a problem so let's not worry about it. You take mail-in ballots, which are a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall votes, then you say we'll take potentially the same system and make it available to 100 per cent of the electors. Once you make it that much bigger, I think you have to worry a lot more about the problem. But you're right - the same problem exists with mail-in ballots and that's the problem which we shouldn't overlook.
On the issue that I raised earlier, the only situation that I can think of where it would even come to the attention of the election authorities would be where somebody either stole the PIN, or somebody who knew the voter's date of birth, could cast a ballot without their knowledge - and there are all kinds of scenarios where that could happen. I would expect that in those limited circumstances, which are a very small portion of the overall situation where somebody could pressure you or cast another person's ballot, that you would get some complaints - not you, but the electoral officials would get some complaints.
The way it would come up is, somebody would go to the voting booth and be told that according to the city's records, they had already cast a vote and they would say, no, I didn't. Are you aware of how many of those kinds of complaints HRM received in the last election?
[Page 35]
MR. SMITH: That somebody . . .
MR. STEELE: Somebody who had apparently voted electronically, but went to the voting station and said that they had not, in fact, done so.
MR. SMITH: I know there were some people who went into the system, entered their credentials in the system and the result was that their name would be struck off the list, and they aborted, they decided not to continue and do it, their name would be struck off.
One of the things that we did is we realized, after we presented the struck-off list to them, that the criteria that had initially been set by the city was anybody who had done that should be struck off the list. In retrospect they decided that, no, it probably should have been somebody who actually cast their first vote and at that point in time they shouldn't be allowed to go to a manual polling station. I think there were like 100 people who had started the process, entered their PIN, their date of birth, and then either hung up or disconnected from the Web for some reason or other - got interrupted or had to go somewhere or just decided they didn't want to do it and said, I'm going to vote manually.
I know we heard of two instances where people showed up at the polls, saw their name was struck off and all they simply did was sign a declaration that currently exists and say I didn't vote, so they were allowed to vote.
MR. BEAMISH: So 0.2 of those 100.
MR. SMITH: Of those 100, yes, that we heard about.
MR. BEAMISH: Typically, we don't strike somebody off a list until they've actually cast at least one ballot in the . . .
MR. SMITH: Yes.
MR. BEAMISH: . . . in this case, again, because going to status quo, the belief was that if you showed up at a polling station, got to the point where you said, I'm here to vote, and they scratched your name off, and then you got to where you're going to get your ballots and you go, oh, I have an appointment, I have to go - you're off the list. The minute you leave the polling station you can no longer vote and the same held true as where they said what if somebody came in electronically, voted for the mayor and then wanted to go to the polling station and vote the other two races. The same held true. They believe if you go to a polling station today and they gave you three ballots and you said I'm just going to vote the mayor right now, vote the mayor and then I run out the door and come back and say, I'd like my other two ballots - that's interesting, but you're not going to get to do it.
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MR. STEELE: Now the only way of knowing for sure about the kind of effects that I've been talking about is to do some kind of post-election followup. Some kind of audit where somebody goes out and calls a representative sample of the voters list and said okay, the records show that you voted, did you vote? That's the only way we would find out, for example, if a vote had been cast in somebody else's name.
Are you aware of any of the votes you've been involved with where any kind of post-election study or audit has been done to try and detect these kinds of effects?
MR. BEAMISH: Not specifically on that.
MR. SMITH: The only thing that I know of is that in Rushmoor, in the U.K., when you finished voting, they drove a questionnaire after it. There was an electronic, online questionnaire that you could click and go to and enter the information about how did you like what you just did. Not surprisingly, if I just did it, I liked it. It was overwhelming in support of electronic voting.
MR. STEELE: Of course that wouldn't capture the kind of social pressure issues that I've been talking about, or somebody casting a vote in somebody else's name.
MR. BEAMISH: One of the things - just to kind of take this down and continue on this is that one of the things we have found is that - I just lost my thought, sorry about that. (Laughter)
MR. STEELE: I can ask another question.
MR. BEAMISH: It will come back, I'm sure. Yes, go ahead.
[10:45 a.m.]
MR. STEELE: Okay, let me talk about the effect on voter turnout because, of course, one of the issues that this committee is principally interested in is, how can we deal with the drop in voter turnout? If there are these kinds of social pressure issues, or people casting ballots in other people's names, it will show up as an increase in voter turnout, although, in fact, it's not. Are you aware of any studies, or any audits, or anything that has tried to detect this kind of impact on voter turnouts?
MR. SMITH: I guess the question is - I mean nobody is going to raise their hand and say, I forced somebody to vote a particular way. Because it's one person, one vote, you can't - every PIN that is registered in the system to vote once, gets to vote once and only once. The question is, how did you get your hands on more than one PIN? Somebody broke the law. Our system doesn't prevent people from doing things that are untoward. We can't control what happens in your household, so whether or not somebody says I'm holding onto the
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money that you owe me, so you go down and vote a particular way, and whether you ever vote that way or not, he'll never know. As a matter of fact, there's a real good chance that you'll go down there and say, I'll show him, I'll vote the other way, I'll vote a different way.
So what we do is - we hear concerns or issues regarding things that are illegal and untoward. We make a point of making people understand that we really can't control what happens behind the polling booth box on election day and we can't control what happens. Is the risk acceptable? In most places in Canada, for sure.
They're saying these are all issues but the benefits, from their point of view, the benefits so significantly outweigh the potential problems that it is starting to explode in terms of the number of people who are saying the problem of voter apathy is so much more significant than the issues associated with how many PINs can I get - how many crimes can I commit in order to throw another ballot in the box. I don't disagree that using electronic voting affords an opportunity to do that but I suggest to you that virtually every municipal government we've talked to, their biggest problem is a combination of cost, voter apathy, and it comes from the politicians as well. The politicians are saying, this isn't a good trend. There's risk and we're willing to accept it. One again, paper ballots are mailed out and mailed back in Ontario ad nauseam.
MR. STEELE: You know when you talk about a crime, people think well, okay, theft of PINs, but bear in mind that's only one small subset of what's possible out there. I'm thinking more of the person, as I said, voting for their aged mother who is in a nursing home and has always voted Liberal and they say, that's what Mom would have wanted. Mom is not aware of it, the person casting the ballot certainly doesn't think of it as a crime - they're doing what their mother would have wanted.
MR. BEAMISH: And I guess holding true on that, the same could be said that if they have the mother sign a proxy, they can vote that proxy any way they choose to vote the proxy, whether or not that's the way that the mother choose to do that. In this case, what we see is it actually going the other way, where the aged mother may say I'd like to vote this and the son or grandson brings them onto the computer and helps him go through the process to the point of letting them actually click the buttons and vote for who they want to vote for. In that case, they know the votes they've recorded have actually been who they're for.
MR. STEELE: It's because I've been in elections, I know how elections work and I know the pressures people are under. I'll give you another scenario - in the election where I was first elected, on March 6, 2001, it was the worst day of winter and blizzard conditions all day long. The voter turn-out was abysmal. I was out there with icicles hanging off my hair and trying to convince people to get out to vote and they just said no, I'm not voting, I'm not leaving my house today. I couldn't really blame them because it was awful. What if somebody, or five people, or 50 people had said to me, Graham I really like you, I really want
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you to get elected but I'm not leaving my house today. Here's my voting information, please cast my ballot for me, it's what I want.
So, you ask, is that a crime? Well, technically, yes, but the campaign worker - let's pretend it's not even me, it's just a campaign worker who believes strongly that they need their candidate to be elected. You can have Barack Obama versus John McCain or Al Gore versus George W. Bush - people have pretty strong feelings. You're relying on people to say no, even though you're offering me all the information that I need in order to cast your ballot, it is wrong to do so and I won't, even though George W. Bush might win this election.
MR. SMITH: But, here's the key. They're sitting in their home, they can do it. They don't have to give it to anybody. They have the phone and the Internet in their house. The whole idea here is that the issues you're talking about don't exist in electronic voting because it's convenient, it's opportunistic.
MR. STEELE: Okay. Maybe the scenario is wrong, where it's a stormy day and people are in their homes. But, there are all kinds of other situations where people say I'm not available to vote on voting day. I want you to vote for me. When you reclassify that as a crime, it's like nobody involved in that transaction thinks of it as a crime, which is not to say it's not. Nobody thinks of it that way.
MR. SMITH: It's virtually unheard - inconvenience goes off the map with electronic voting. I defy you to go anywhere in the world - to the point earlier - that you can't connect to this system on voting day and vote. By the way, inconvenience is one of the top four or five things we hear in terms of people saying, I can't vote because it's a bad day, I'm tired, I've got other appointments and stuff like that.
The basic issue that you're speaking to, in terms of people giving somebody something because they can't do it themselves, is virtually unheard of in electronic voting. It's simply not an issue.
MR. STEELE: But it's never been studied or audited, according to you.
MR. SMITH: No, but if your point is that it's inconvenient because I'm in my house and I can't go out, or I'm going to be away, you don't have to be - being in your house is the best place to be able to vote and you will using our technology and use your phone, use your cell phone, use the Internet.
MR. BEAMISH: The question came in Coburg, Ontario, in one of the public meetings that I gave there, a person from the constituency stood up and said, you're taking away eight of my polling stations. I said, no, ma'am, I'm giving you back 20,000 polling stations. Do it from your house, do it from your car, your boat, wherever you happen to be during that election period, that four, five or six days of an election period.
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Going back to your other point, as we know, the appetite of Canadians for any form of anything perceived as being illegal by the politicians, in the last five or tens years, has gone to zero. It's one of the things that - a good example is what happened in Alberta with one of the municipal elections there where a very well-meaning husband of a candidate found a way to get 100 mail ballots to a post office box, filled them all out for his wife and sent them in. It got caught. She won the election by more than 1,500 votes, but was told to leave council because her husband committed an illegal act to help her get elected.
One of the things we spend a lot of time on when we're going around meeting with both the election officials as well as everyone - we make it a point of meeting with everyone of the candidates in candidate sessions and they bring their agents in and we talk to them very strongly about this, that we know the politician is not the person who's going to do something illegal. It's your best friend who thinks, I really want to get you elected and I'm going out and anything I can do, and if I can get my grandmother and everybody at the old age home and if I can gather up those PINs. The first time that happens, it's going to get caught. The first time it happens and somebody sees it, everybody knows that the appetite for that is exceedingly low. We talk a lot with the candidates and their agents.
If somebody says to you on the doorstep, do you know what, I don't care, here's my pin, you say no and if they give it to you anyway, you bring it into the town hall and you give it back to the election officials, which is exactly what you're supposed to do. Instead of going on TV when the folks from CBC got those, they should have done what they would have done with every other piece of mail that had been delivered to their house that didn't belong to them - mark it as return to sender and drop it back in the box.
MR. STEELE: And there were a lot of them, I think there were over 6,000 that were sent back to HRM.
MR. BEAMISH: And, you know, people did their civic duty and what was legally right for them to do, and when they received an illegal piece of mail, marked it return to sender, dropped it back in the box and it got returned to the city.
MR. STEELE: If people have the opportunity to do something with zero chance of detection, they'll do it and I just think it's naive to think it's not going to happen because it's not supposed to happen.
MR. BEAMISH: Well, I guess I take a different view of humanity.
MR. STEELE: One last question, is it possible that there is a novelty effect with electronic voting, that the first time people do it, the voter turnout goes up and after that it just becomes normal and so voter turnout levels drop back to where they were before?
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MR. SMITH: I would say voter participation is driven by a lot of things. There are lots of elements in voter participation. The most significant are the issues and the candidates. We've seen elections in Perth, for example, in Ontario. They got amalgamated and the year they got amalgamated there was a very significant runoff between two very popular candidates for mayor. They had that election and it was just some 60-odd per cent participation. The next time the incumbent ran against somebody who they figured was a lame duck event, the mayoralty race there garnished less than 30 per cent participation. They then went electronically with it and the rates were up again. It was a little more attractive a rate so we don't know whether or not it was participation based on - it's neat and it's different.
The question is I guess, is an incentive to have people vote, and using electronic voting as an incentive, dealing with convenience? Is it necessarily a bad thing if you get people voting? Because the question would be - I don't want a bunch of uneducated, uninformed people going out there and voting, you know, candidates tend to know where their support is coming from. What we saw in Halifax is the voter who opted not to cast a ballot, as I mentioned before, was five times more likely to happen because they didn't know the information about the incumbent. There was no incumbent running, so it ranged from a 1 per cent to a 6 per cent difference in it. So the question then really is, are people prone to vote willy-nilly and for the novelty of it? I guess the question is, does it matter as long as they vote? That would be my question.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, I just have one final question. In the next provincial election if we decided to let's say pick 10 out of 52 ridings to try this as a pilot project, is that possible to do that?
MR. BEAMISH: You could do one.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We could do one, we could do 10.
MR. BEAMISH: We prefer you did . . . (Interruption)
MR. CHAIRMAN: But it's possible.
MR. SMITH: It's the norm really. In a lot of cases people want to put their foot in and try it. We had the opportunity to present to the Elections Nova Scotia team and Elections New Brunswick actually, and we're going to see them on January 20th, and their goal is to try to do a by-election, find an opportunity to trial the technology. In Ontario and a lot of places, by-elections are very common - here's a subset of the large population, we want to try it. So a pilot, somewhat less than 52, would be the norm.
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MR. BEAMISH: We just met with Elections Ontario and after their last provincial election they passed legislation that allows electronic voting for by-elections and now there's one, we were just up there last week.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Very interesting. Well, listen, Dean and Stephen, on behalf of the committee we certainly want to thank you for coming in today and, as has been said, we're certainly proud, as legislators, to see such a Made in Nova Scotia innovative technology and I can assure you that the information you have provided to us, and the information you've given today in your testimony, will all be part of our final recommendations that our committee will be putting together. I thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules today and we certainly wish you well. I'm sure that we'll probably have opportunity to discuss this matter further again in the future.
Committee members, we have upcoming meetings which you will see on the agenda. Thursday, December 4th, we have both the Honourable John Hamm and the Honourable Russell MacLellan who will be joining us to give us a report on their D250 activities. On Thursday, December 11th, we have the president of the Nova Scotia Teachers' Union who will be coming in; and as well, there is the French focus groups for adults on Saturday, December 6th; and a youth French focus group on Thursday, December 11th. Please advise either Sherri or Kim - if you're available to attend those focus groups as well, or if you have some of your colleagues in caucus who may be interested in attending those.
By now you should have all received the submissions that were sent to us either by fax, by e-mail, or on our Web site. I would encourage you to start reviewing those comments that we've received, and as we prepare I would also encourage members to start in their own minds, and even if you want to start putting on paper, what some of your observations have been and some possible recommendations that you would like to see be put forward as part of our final report. So I encourage you to take the next number of days and weeks to start reviewing that.
Ms. MacDonald.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Do you have a time frame for that?
MR. CHAIRMAN: That's up to the committee. We still have two meetings of the full committee and the focus groups coming up, and with the holidays approaching it's going to be a bit of a challenge. So I'm not sure what the committee's feelings are, whether it's reasonable to look at something in late December or should we be targeting for January as to when we'd be able to meet again, once all of our meetings are done and the holidays are finished, to review what each member has as possible recommendations. So that would be my suggestion, if that's agreeable.
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MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I'm wondering as well if we're going to have our chief electoral officer back at the end of this process to talk further about the work of that office and maybe give us an opportunity to raise some questions around some of the issues we've heard out and about with them.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think that's a great suggestion. May I suggest that we look to schedule, maybe the second week of January, a meeting that we would bring in the chief electoral officer and any other stakeholders involved in the process whom we might want to hear from. That would be our first meeting of 2009, as we prepare to wrap up our final report. I think that's a great suggestion.
So, if it's agreed, that's what we will aim for, and our next meeting will be on December 4th, but again please review the submissions that have been sent to us, as part of your own recommendations that you may wish to bring forward, or any recommendations from your caucus colleagues.
So, with that, thanks again.
[The committee adjourned at 11:01 a.m.]
