32/5- Freedom through discipline

Two-thirds of Ontario is voting on a server nobody can audit and ballots are already going to the wrong people In 87 Ontario towns, a person with a pencil counts your vote while scrutineers watch, but in the other 272, a company does it on a server, with no paper trail and no way to check the result. Roughly 66% of municipalities voting this month are going online, up from 217 (or just 52%) four years ago. As internet voting expands, mail-in ballots are declining, increasingly pushed aside by the shift to digital voting. Yet in some municipalities, the problems started as early voting began. In North Bay, Linda Fuller received four voter letters: her husband’s, three for strangers, and none for herself. Carol Couture got four, including one for a relative who had died. Kevin Ferris was mailed a PIN for the man who sold him his house 17 years ago. “If somebody wanted to use somebody else’s ballot,” Ferris said, “it doesn’t seem very complicated.” There is no provincial standard preventing any of this because there is no provincial rule at all. A peer-reviewed study by researchers James Burnett and Alexander Essex found Ontario’s municipal elections carry some of the highest concentrations of online voting in the world, with no federal or provincial requirements for certification, testing or auditing. Cities adopt and procure the technology on their own, through deliberations that are largely non-public. Ottawa read the same literature as other municipalities and opted out of voting online, continuing with mail-in ballots. Its own staff told council that internet voting remains a significant and ongoing security concern, that no provincial certification standards exist, and that since none of the current systems produce a paper ballot, a recount would be impossible. Despite this, certain jurisdictions like Uxbridge went the other way. In April 2025, council voted to make the 2026 election an internet-only pilot project with a PIN that arrives in the mail. Voters enter it alongside their birthday and voila, done. When Councillor Pam Beach asked what happens to rural residents whose internet services drop, or to a senior who hits the wrong key and votes for the wrong person, she was promised a communication plan and “really good how-to guides.” At the September all-candidates forum, an Uxbridge resident named Henry put it more plainly: his bank and his CRA account warn him about online fraud every time he logs in, yet council handed 10 days of voting to software contractors with no feasible way for residents to audit the data. With Mayor Barton having delegated strong-mayor powers to the unelected CAO, he asked, who is actually running Uxbridge? “Is it election contractors? Is it the unelected CAO?,” he asked. The contractor Uxbridge is using is Intellivote Systems Inc. of Dartmouth, N.S. In 2015 it told the federal agency ACOA it was shutting down, then bid on and won Halifax’s election contract weeks later. In July 2022, three months before running internet voting in dozens of Ontario towns, it entered creditor protection in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court owing $1.7 million to the federal government and $5.4 million to Nova Scotia taxpayers. Under the court-approved plan, creditors were left to recover just pennies on the dollar, leaving taxpayers to absorb the bulk of the unpaid debt. That is the company Uxbridge’s deputy clerk assured council was “continually battle-testing” its software. Ontario has been here before. On election night in 2018, the Dominion Voting digital system used by 51 municipalities slowed to a crawl after a subcontracted internet provider throttled capacity to one-tenth of design. Towns from Sudbury to Kingston extended voting by an hour while places like Collingwood and Kawartha Lakes ended up adding a full day to make up for voters being unable to cast their ballots as scheduled. Eight years and two election cycles later, the number of towns going online has only grown, while the number of rules governing them is still zero. Towns argue that paper ballots cost more, and on a municipality-by-municipality basis, they often do, but a recount that cannot be meaningfully conducted comes at a cost, too. REPORT by @TamaraUgo: