Online Voting in Ontario Municipalities: A Standards-Based Review

Abstract

Over two hundred municipalities now offer online voting in Ontario, Canada, representing one of the largest deployments of digital elections worldwide. Many have eliminated the paper ballot altogether. Despite this, no provincial or federal-level standards exist. This gap leaves local election officials to create and apply their own cybersecurity requirements with varying degrees of success. Until a standard can be developed and adopted, we turn to perhaps the most natural and immediate stand-in: The Council of Europe’s (CoE) standards for e-voting. We use this baseline to present the first standards-based analysis of online voting practices in Ontario. Our results find the province is broadly non-compliant, with only 14% of the CoE’s 49 standards and 93 implementation guidelines categorized as fully met. We summarize these differences and identify areas for improvement in the hope of underscoring the need for domestic e-voting standards.