How to enact remote voting for the Canadian House of Commons

The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) is meeting to study how to enact remote voting for the Canadian House of Commons.  Meetings can be viewed on video (ParlVU).

See List of Meetings below.

For details of the specific language of the request for the study, see later section Government Request.

With the disclaimer that I don’t read every single line of Hansard, I gather the Government’s request passed on May 26, 2020.

So the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, otherwise known as PROC, is charged to produce a report on enacting remote voting by June 23, 2020, which is very little time indeed to gather evidence and analyse it.

UPDATE 2020-06-18: PROC has requested that the deadline for the report be extended from June 23, 2020 to July 21, 2020.  END UPDATE

They have already produced a report recommending a “secure electronic voting system” by which they presumably mean Internet voting.  I examined some of the issues they will need to consider in detail in my previous blog post.

It’s not clear the extent to which they understand the amount of effort that will be needed, given the complexity of implementing a remote voting system with robust authentication in a Canadian context with the technology we actually have in place, as the discussion on the previous report included statements such as:

I think this section [on remote voting], given the recommendation, is really substantiated by the U.K. Parliament and how quickly it moved to implement an electronic remote voting procedure.

What’s interesting about the things that I think are really relevant is that Karen Bradley is quoted in that letter. I would recommend that this quote appear in our report. She said, “The Committee is satisfied with the assurances it has been given about the security of the system.”

Also, I did a bunch of Google searching—

The UK uses a completely different technology infrastructure than Canada, their Parliamentary votes are conducted differently, and they have a dedicated Parliamentary technology team, the Parliamentary Digital Service. The situations are not interchangeable.

As I’ve said in my previous post:

There really needs to be a separate, dedicated, technology-focused report just on electronic voting (Internet voting) for the House of Commons that gives more specific guidance including an assessment of risks and risk mitigations.

As I indicated in my post about the UK system, you have to consider a variety of complex issues when introducing a voting system.

Considerations for a voting system include the chain-of-custody, as multiple systems are most likely involved with the transmission and counting of the vote, concerns about auditability and concerns about security, as well as usability.

So it’s good that there will be a separate report, but there isn’t enough time to do much of an investigation.

At a minimum, PROC needs to consider:

  1. For every voting scenario, how remote voting would work, or if it would not be possible to replicate the attributes of the in-House voting scenario remotely.  (I link to all the different ways a vote can be conducted — Putting the Question as it is called — at the end of this post.)
  2. How to deal with authentication, to reduce the risk that someone other than the Member of Parliament is voting.
  3. Whether they want simultaneous voting, or traditional one-by-one voting.  One-by-one is highly preferable in terms of simplicity and ease of auditing and counting.
  4. How to make the system usable, including reducing the risk of Parliamentarians voting the opposite of the way they intend (it took all of a day for this to happen in the UK).  This can be done by avoiding most additional technology altogether, using the videoconference and having Parliamentarians raise their hands one-by-one to vote.
  5. If they decide they need a software system, considering how to implement the system using modern software development approaches, learning the lessons of previous failed IT systems.
  6. For voting beyond Putting the Question, how to handle other situations.  For example, the Speaker is elected by secret ballot.  This is not possible using online voting, because the anonymity of a secret ballot cannot be replicated online (this is why voting in a general election is not possible online).
  7. How to detect and deal with situations in which the Parliamentarian is voting under duress.

Hopefully their duress solution will be better than the April 2020 U.S. Senate staff report‘s idea:

Another option would be to provide senators with a code word that they could use to make clear to those in the chamber that they were voting under duress.

I would also note that that same staff report indicated:

that system will become a prime target for adversaries … wishing to disrupt the system to undermine confidence in the country’s institutions, or to alter the outcome of significant votes. Therefore, any system the Senate adopts must provide a level of security that would ensure confidence in the validity of senators’ identities and votes similar to that which exists on the Senate floor.

In conducting its analysis PROC will be continuing the Parliamentary Duties and the COVID-19 Pandemic work.

Keeping in mind that remote Parliamentary voting is not at all the same as voting in a general election, most notably because Parliamentary votes are public, with no anonymity and no secret ballot, here is information about Submitting a brief to a Committee:

Guide for submitting briefs to House of Commons Committees

The Clerk of PROC is Justin Vaive, and the email address is PROC@parl.gc.ca

Previous Posts

For more information see my previous posts:

List of Meetings

Government Request – How to Enact Remote Voting

As best I understand, the Government requested on May 25, 2020:

(f) the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs be instructed to review and make recommendations on how to modify the Standing Orders for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of an incremental approach beginning with hybrid sittings of the House as outlined by the report provided to the committee by the Speaker on Monday, May 11, 2020, including how to enact remote voting, provided that (i) the provisions applying to committees enumerated in paragraph (e) shall also apply to the committee, (ii) the committee be instructed to present a report no later than Tuesday, June 23, 2020, (iii) any report which is adopted pursuant to this paragraph may be submitted electronically at any time with the Clerk of the House, and shall be deemed to have been duly presented to the House on that date, (iv) following the presentation of any report pursuant to this paragraph, the House leaders of all four recognized parties may indicate to the Speaker that there is an agreement among the parties to implement one or several of the recommendations of the committee and the Speaker shall give effect to that agreement;

Putting the Question

As one might expect, Bosc and Gagnon provides a detailed explanation of the voting process in the House.

Chapter 12 – The Process of Debate – Decisions of the House – Putting the Question

You can read all the details there, but I have to include the marvelous Figure 12.3 Putting the Question. Law as code, if you will.

Figure 12.3 Putting the Question
Image depicting, in a series of boxes linked by lines, the steps required for the House to make a decision on a question. It begins with debate concluding, followed by the Speaker putting the question, then listing options for voice votes or recorded divisions. If necessary, the Speaker casts a deciding vote. At the end, the Speaker declares that the motion has been adopted or rejected.

(Above section copied from previous blog post.)

One thought on “How to enact remote voting for the Canadian House of Commons”

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