The province should test online voting with a pilot project during a byelection down the road, Elections Ontario recommends.

In a two-part, 271-page report to the legislature tabled Monday, Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa said it's time to embrace technological changes in order to encourage more people to vote.

"Voter participation in the electoral process is declining. In the 2011 general election, for the first time, voter participation dropped below 50 per cent, setting a record low for voter turnout, in Ontario," wrote Essensa.

"We need to identify and remove barriers in our processes and procedures that may discourage people from voting."

Essensa said his weighty study, "Alternative Voting Technologies Report," will serve as "the framework that we will employ as we move forward on our principled approach to innovation."

But there are security and technological challenges to online or telephone voting, he concluded after looking at experiences in Australia, Estonia, the U.S., the United Kingdom and various Canadian municipalities.

These include "identifying the need to overcome capacity challenges by building and supporting the infrastructure required to manage a system for the entire province" and understanding that there will be "significant costs associated with pilots and integrating network voting into a general election (more than $2 million per use of the system)."

As well, there is "the need for a two-step authentication process, given the lack of a government-issued ID card or digital authentication certificate."

The chief electoral officer said for a pilot project in a byelection, which would cost about $1.75 million, voters could use their driver's licence as identification.

"While verifying a user's identity using this form of identification is the best means currently available, it has a direct impact on voters who cannot obtain a driver's licence," he wrote. "While this compromise could be considered acceptable for the pilot, Elections Ontario would need to pursue a more universal form of identification or other personal data for future elections."

Although there will be at least four byelections in Ontario in the coming months - in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Ottawa South, London West and Windsor-Tecumseh - it's unlikely a pilot could be up and running that soon.

"It will take time and resources to modernize, and potentially introduce a new method of voting, but we have taken the first step by clarifying our approach and defining our implementation criteria," he wrote, suggesting a pilot could take place by 2017.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

"There is not yet a network voting solution that meets our criteria (so) we will continue to evaluate systems and approaches so that when it is warranted, we are prepared to recommend methods to modernize the voting process."

Despite the need for change, Essensa noted the city of Edmonton's examination of online voting found there is "no conclusive evidence that shows introducing internet voting will have a positive impact on turnout . . . internet voting will not fix the problem of voter turnout decline completely."