On June 13, Élections Québec announced the launch of a pilot project on internet voting in the 2025 municipal elections, 20 years after the electronic voting fiasco of 2005 and, once again, without public debate on this question of vitally important to our democracy.
Having personally experienced the 2005 municipal general elections in Quebec City as a candidate defeated by just over a hundred votes following a judicial recount before the Court of Quebec justified by a failure of the electronic voting systems two hours during the day of the vote, I was a leading player with the former mayor of Montreal, Pierre Bourque, at the origin of the complaint which gave rise to a vast investigation by Elections Quebec and which culminated in October 2006 with a damning report that led to a moratorium on electronic voting.
What was my surprise to see last week to what extent Elections Quebec, despite an exhaustive study that it itself conducted on alternative voting methods in 2020, had disregarded certain elements of this report and that it is about to repeat one of the fundamental errors observed, namely to carry out experiments in the complete absence of public debate on an issue as fundamental as the way to exercise our fundamental democratic right to vote and in the absence an adequate and guaranteed administrative, security and legislative framework.
The pilot project thus aims to launch Quebec once again into the adventure of electronic voting, internet voting, digital voting in general, under the pretext of wanting to improve accessibility to voting, a real mantra, identical to that which had justified the incredible adventure of municipal electronic voting in 2005. I would also like to quote an extract (page 219), among the many findings, from the voluminous report which would deserve a second reading among the supporters of the idea:
“The experience of the municipal elections of November 2005 shows that the legislative and administrative framework applying to the trials of new voting mechanisms carried out by Quebec municipalities is not sufficiently precise and exhaustive;
“The electronic voting systems used during the November 2005 elections, as well as those used over the past ten years in Quebec, were used without technical specifications, norms and security standards and reliability have been imposed. However, the checks carried out by the Chief Electoral Officer showed that considerations related to the security of electronic voting systems had not been taken into account. […] »
How is the situation so different today? What was noted in the previous excerpt is even more important in the context of 2023. The risk is certainly higher, as demonstrated by experiences elsewhere in the world.
Considering such extraordinary avenues as allowing remote voting via the Internet must be the subject of a solid legal framework and an open discussion which should be able to generate exchanges which would allow us, for example, to decide to what extent we we are ready to go for supposedly facilitating the exercise of the right to vote, as long as we come to the conclusion that this is ultimately the result that would be achieved with Internet voting.
It also raises a fundamental question that Elections Quebec seems to have already answered itself: why Internet voting?
Élections Québec claims to want to make it easier to exercise the right to vote in order to increase the turnout rate, as if it resulted from the outset and clearly from difficulties related to the fact of having to go to the polling station once every four years. ballot. There again, I believe that Élections Québec is on the wrong track. Variations in the rate of participation in elections generally stem from the interest that citizens take in the issues presented to them during the election campaign. Several political studies demonstrate this. A public debate would also make it possible to clarify this point.
As in 2005, the pilot project reveals relatively little about the methods of carrying out this experiment and the implications to be expected for the municipalities in terms of the resources to devote to it. Will the game really be worth the candle? Is this really what will bring absent voters back to the polls (electronic or physical)?
The 2006 report also identified numerous cybersecurity and technology reliability issues. In the initiative and documentation presented by Elections Quebec, there is no evidence that this aspect has been resolved since the fiasco of the municipal elections of 2005.
In the current context, with the emergence of artificial intelligence, the numerous attempts at foreign digital interference that have marked the world in recent years and the persistent difficulties in guaranteeing the reliability of the digital shift in provincial government services, the vote via the internet seems clearly premature to me. Above all, the implementation of the Élections Québec pilot project must not be done with general indifference, at the risk of repeating the failure of 2005 and once again shaking confidence in our democratic institutions.
Exercising the right to vote should be done in person, at the polling station or by mail, and we should put an end to the temptation to make it as trivial an exercise as an e-commerce transaction.