In retrospect, despite the demographic shift on council after the last election, I thought that putting an internet option in the mix for the 2026 municipal election would have been a harder sell. Certainly, the staff report worked overtime to sell it as option that should be ignored.
I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about my own evolution on this issue, because I was once proudly among the four councillors that voted against internet voting this week. Security concerns were the only concerns, and while I’m young enough to have grown up with computers readily available at school, I’m old enough to have not had a computer at home until I was in high school, and the internet was never really a habit till I entered university.
In other words, I’ve never entirely trusted computers and the digital space even though I’ve appreciated their raw power and potential. I also appreciate that the generations under me are almost pure digital creatures; my nephew was not even one-year-old before he understood the difference between the real TV remote and the old dummy one that he was given to play with.
We’re also in the middle of a massive shift in information, people are moving away from traditional TV and radio, newspapers are slowly dying out, and in their place is a confusing mix of newsletters, social media channels and podcasts, many of them proverbial one-man bands like me, all competing for the same number or eyes and creating a more fractured and fractious electorate.
Now imagine taking that group of people into an election and making it as easy to vote as calling up a ballot on your phone. It’s scary but being scared of change is no reason not to try and mitigate the disadvantages so that others can embrace it.
I think Tuesday’s meeting accidentally set up a choice to either have internet voting or not have it, but that’s an overly simple analysis of the situation from my point of view. According to my observations, the Accessibility Advisory Committee has tried to make a case for the last year-and-a-half to have as many voting options as possible while appreciating that such a request requires almost bottomless resources.
Having said that, internet voting is the one option that captures the most people, whether you have an environmental allergy or you need an assistive device in order to read or mark a ballot. To be able to say that we’re making polling locations free of environmental sensitivities or that the city can send someone to your house to mark your ballot for you is not the win that we the privileged think it is, because it’s about independence.
In a fundamental way, independence is a privilege that so many of us take for granted even if we’re not aware of the privilege. Maybe we depend on a kind landlord or an understanding boss, or maybe it’s when we can just run down the street and catch the bus whenever we feel like it because we don’t have to worry about booking a last-minute ride on the mobile bus using an app that tells us there’s no rides available.
In the end, it really is about the little things.
And what is voting in a municipal election if it’s not about the little things. If we say that every vote counts, then every vote counts, and if there are people in the community that want to vote but they can’t without having to overcome 10 different barriers then the city is leaving votes on the ground just waiting to be collected.
So why is this such a hard sell? I hate to say it, but Guelph is not the leader it thinks it is on democracy. You might remember a couple of years ago when consultants brought back a report – twice – recommending that Guelph move to one full-time councillor for each of eight wards, and it was decided that what’s essentially the same system that’s been in place for 30 years is good enough. It’s the same thing with voting methods.
What makes us think that we know something about the deployment of online voting that 217 other municipalities in Ontario don’t? Are we really that much smarter? I don’t think we are, but I do think that there are a lot of really loud people in this city that are very technophobic, always looking backwards at the halcyon days before computers and the era of newspapers, phones with chords, and appearing at places in-person.
And if online voting, again a service already offered by half the municipalities in this province, is such a slippery slope when it comes to the violation of our cybersecurity, then we should pull all the plugs at city hall: All councillors should be at the chambers in-person, the clerks need to prepare paper copies of agendas, and staff should only take policy feedback if they can see the whites of your eyes as you’re giving it.
Now that’s not to say that there’s no cybersecurity risk because of course there is. Two major public library systems in Ontario were victims of cyber attacks last fall, and its hard to imagine anything more anarchic than knocking a major non-profit information hub that caters to the underprivileged offline, but one doesn’t spend a life endlessly avoiding risk, because that’s impossible. Instead, we try to manage it.
With online voting, our city staff is being asked to manage the risk, the same risks they manage every day because cyber criminals are not waiting for that one sweet window that only opens evert four years. We’ve been told that living in fear is letting the bad guys win, and in this case the cost for fear isn’t just our sense of self, it’s the hope and faith of marginalized members of our community who are only asking, at the end of the day, to be treated like everyone else.
