The UK Context: A Useful Comparator

In May 2001, the United Kingdom’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) published an edition of POSTnote [PDF] about online voting. The UK is a useful comparator in that, like Canada, British electors still cast their votes on paper ballots which are hand-counted.

One of the factors POST takes into account in their assessment of online voting is “respecting political culture.” This, in particular, makes the UK a useful comparator to Canada:

People have confidence in elections at present: they know what is likely to happen when and expect a stable outcome. The current system is visible, easily understood and followed. Some of the elements of online voting could be disruptive to voting customs, such as going to the polling station or watching the votes being counted. If online voting is introduced the public must feel full confidence in the new arrangements, and be convinced that a vote sent online is as secure as on marked on paper¹.

POST cited three factors for considering changes to the way votes are cast in the UK (in spite of high public confidence in the integrity of the voting process): declining turnout (especially in local elections), constitutional innovations (allowing local authorities to experiment with new ways of voting, not all of which are electronic) and new technologies (specifically, the “dramatic impact of the internet”)². The report goes on to list the advantages of and concerns about online voting explored above.

Unlike the US, the UK possesses much the same motivation as Canada for exploring the potential for electronic voting. It will be interesting to see how closely the two jurisdictions mirror one another as things progress.

Other International Experience

Elections Canada’s report on e-voting includes discussion of the reasons e-voting has been implemented in other countries. In many of these cases, the motivating factor for moving toward electronic voting is not present in Canada. For example, in Bosnia online voting was used “in an effort to alleviate the tension that would result from voters returning to land occupied by former enemies on election day,” and in Brazil, electronic voting was introduced “as a means of reducing fraud and increasing the speed of the vote count (from 30 days to approximately six hours)”³.

¹Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. POSTnote. May 2001, Number 155 [POSTnote] at p. 4.
²Ibid. at p. 1.
³Elections Canada Report, supra. at pp. 26-9.