On Thursday, a by-law to set up electronic voting for advanced polls for the October 17 Inverness County election was passed following a public hearing. Although no members of the public signed up to the online hearing, council voted in favor of the by-law with full consensus.

The bylaw would give electors a 10-day period to vote online from October 6 to the 15th. On October 17, people will only be able to vote in person at the polls. “That’s been probably the whole premise of our quest to do electronic voting because of COVID-19,” Returning Officer Dernie Gillis said. “To give people the option if they want to stay home or come out.”

Now the by-law will have to go through a second reading in council before being officially approved, but according to Gillis, it will likely be approved.

In preparation for this year’s election, the Returning Officer said he researched other municipalities that will be conducting their elections electronically. Halifax for example, is using a combination of paper ballots and digital voting, while the Cape Breton Regional Municipality has gone completely electronic.

Gillis said he sees digital voting, even if partial, as the way elections will be held in the future. “When we sat down to talk about it the first time, I’ve been with the county since 2008 and in 2012, the buzz was on about electronic voting. And I didn’t think we were ready for it because our geography is just do huge. We go all the way from Marble Mountain to Meat Cove. … We had the gaps in our communication system and I really didn’t think we were ready in 2012 and also in 2016. Now, we’re kind of being pushed into it. But I consider that to be a good thing. I think this will solve some of those problems and if we have gaps in our communication, this will highlight it and maybe it will result in it being taken care of and fixed. So, at some point, we had to do it. … It’s a good test run. We’ll get to see how it operates, the people will get to experience it, and I think in 4 years’ time, it will just be part of the system.”

Despite broadband connectivity issues across the county, the municipality never considered mail-in voting. “This was available. It’s proven, it’s tested,” Gillis said. While a decrease in the number of voters is possible, he said the risk is worth taking. “That may be the cost of doing it electronically in a district this huge, this big, with those difficulties. But in an exceptional circumstance such as this, we may not have any choice. Usually, an average of 50 to 55% of eligible voters participate in Inverness County elections. “If we can get 40% of the eligible voters,” he said, “that’s still a quorum, that’s still a reasonable number of votes to elect council.”