Ontario moves election date to June 7, 2018
Early summer elections and vote-counting machines to speed results part of electoral reforms proposed in Ontario

TheStar.com
Oct. 19, 2016
Rob Ferguson

Ontario’s next election will be moved ahead to June 7, 2018 and ballots counted electronically to shorten nail-biting waits for winners under a proposed modernization of voting laws.

Moving the election date from the fall — when weather can be more unpredictable and darkness comes early — are aimed at improving voter turnout and eliminating overlap with municipal campaigns, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi said Wednesday.

The changes were recommended by Elections Ontario chief Greg Essensa but do not include other reforms he has advocated, such as holding elections on weekends or holidays to get more people to cast ballots.

Naqvi said the government has adopted “key” suggestions from Essensa and signalled online voting cannot be considered until it can be rendered foolproof, given recent high-profile incidents of hacking. But he did leave the door open for it to be tested in a byelection at some point.

“We’ve got to be very, very sure,” Naqvi told reporters at Harbord Collegiate Institute, where he chatted with students about new provisions allowing them to pre-register as voters in the two years before their 18th birthdays.

“People feel confidence when they do the paper ballot.”

Youth registration is intended to get voting on the radar of teens before they head off to college or university, given that turnout for the under-24 crowd was just 34 per cent in the 2014 election.

For the entire population, the rate was 51 per cent. While that was an improvement from 2011, it’s still too low given that participation had been steadily declining since 1990, Naqvi said.

He called voter turnout “a very real challenge.”

The declines are what prompted Essensa to call for a number of changes in his last two annual reports, which touted the need for more technology to streamline operations and reduce the number of election staff across the province.

It takes about 76,000 workers at about 8,000 polling stations and returning offices to conduct an election, including advance polls.

Electronic voting tabulators were used successfully in the Whitby-Oshawa byelection last winter, allowing for faster results.

Essensa has said previously that results can be tabulated within about 30 minutes of the polls closing by using machines, meaning winners can be announced as much as 45 minutes or an hour sooner than when ballots are counted by hand.

The changes in the Election Statute Law Amendment Act, which Naqvi introduced in the legislature after the news conference, would require approval by a majority of MPPs.

Naqvi’s long-promised bill amends previous reforms enacted by former premier Dalton McGuinty, who set fixed election dates every four years on the first Thursday in October.

Essensa has argued that weather conditions are better for campaigning and voting in the spring, recommending votes be held the first Thursday in June — which follows the first planting in agricultural areas and avoids the busy fall harvest time.

The bill would also give Essensa’s office the power to fine owners of apartment and condo buildings refusing to allow candidates and volunteers to canvass voters on the premises.

In the north, the province would establish a special electoral boundaries commission to review the remote and massive ridings of Kenora-Rainy River and Timmins-James Bay, recommending one or two new ridings in those areas for the 2018 election.