City of Brantford Council unanimously endorsed the use of both online and in-person voting for the 2026 municipal election during the Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday, February 11, 2025.
Chris Gauthier, Brantford’s City Clerk, told councillors that online voting appears to be the preferred option for Brantford residents.
“In 2014 when we first implemented the online voting system, we had around 15 per cent of the electorate voting online,” said Gauthier. “In 2018 we had 37 per cent of the electorate voting online and in 2022, the past election, we had 57 per cent of the electorate voting online. This indicates that’s the preferred option for voting in Branford.”
To put the data into perspective, Gauthier’s report showed that of the 20,340 ballots cast in 2022, 11,584 of them were cast online while just 8,756 were submitted via a tabulator in-person.
The City clerk added that during the past election half of Ontario municipalities (222 of 444) also had online voting as an option as well.
“There’s there’s a lot of benefits with online voting: accessibility, ease of access, reduced costs for ballots, reduced staffing costs, and we’re not limited to the facilities that are available to us,” said Gauthier. “Also, it helps persons with mobility issues, working families, and students who don’t live at home.”
He said that with the benefits, comes concerns around security, primarily due to the absence of standardized provincial regulations.
With that being said, Gauthier told the Council that the Digital Governance Standards Institute (DGSI), led by the Digital Governance Council, has since developed a series of standards to implement online voting in Canada.
The standards will have vendors upping their cyber security through various revenues such as encryption, redundant firewalls, intrusion detection systems/intrusion prevention systems, verbose access logging with periodic backup, threat detection and prevention, to name a few.
As well, Gauthier said that for the next election, the City will be moving away from using the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) for the voters list. Instead, the corporation will be using Elections Ontario given that it will be more updated with the upcoming provincial election.
“The benefit of that is that the provincial elections are usually before the municipal elections, so we’ll have a more up to date voters list. In addition, they pull data from the Ministry of Transportation, from the Ministry of Health, from MPAC and a wide assortment of government agencies,” he said. “We’re pretty confident that we’re going to see less discrepancies with the voters list, so we’re optimistic about that. It’s going to reduce some of the frustrations that we had in the last elections with people getting voter information letters sent to their home when they didn’t live there anymore.”
Mayor Kevin Davis then asked how the City will guard against voter fraud for those who choose to submit their ballot online.
“What happens is you receive in the mail, your voter notice with a code number in it that you have to use to access the system and vote online,” he said. “Theoretically, that could be subject to some risk if someone gives away their voter letter to somebody else, or somebody goes down the street and scoops a bunch of these out of a mailbox. How do you guard against that? How do you prevent that type of crime?”
Gauthier agreed that it was a serious crime and said that staff intends to provide more public education, and will be looking into putting notices on the envelopes of the voter information letters letting people know the repercussions of such crimes.
“We’re hoping that by putting the infractions on the actual envelopes, it will help deter some of that as well,” he said.
Council then unanimously voted to continue online voting for the next municipal election. The item will be up for final approval during the next Council meeting on Tuesday, February 25, 2025.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
