Accountability

PAPER BALLOT - ONTARIO HAS ALREADY EXPERIENCED A MAJOR ELECTRONIC ELECTION DISRUPTION

5 of 18 Series - ONTARIO MUST RESTORE THE PAPER BALLOT CHOICE, BEFORE THE 2026 MUNICIPAL ELECTION

Campaign Team·September 4, 2026

This is not theoretical either.

During Ontario's 2018 municipal elections, an electronic voting service experienced a major technical incident affecting dozens of municipalities.

Academic research describes an outage affecting 43 municipalities, forcing election administrators to take contingency measures.

Contemporary reporting put the number experiencing problems even higher.

The incident involved an unauthorized bandwidth restriction at an internet service provider that severely restricted incoming voting traffic. Voting hours had to be extended in numerous communities.

There is no evidence cited here that this incident deliberately changed vote totals.

But that is precisely the point.

An election does not have to be secretly hacked for technology dependency to become an election-integrity problem.

If legitimate voters cannot access the voting system, the democratic process has been disrupted.

A physical paper ballot provides something fundamentally different:

a vote that exists independently of the software, servers, databases, telecommunications networks and internet infrastructure used to process electronic votes.

"If physical, auditable paper ballots are considered appropriate for choosing Canada's Parliament and Ontario's Legislature, why should municipal voters not be entitled to the same tangible, independently recountable record?"

Sources:

The Effect of Exogenous Shocks on the Administration of Online Voting: Evidence from Ontario, Canada

Online Voting in Ontario Municipal Elections:

A Conflict of Legal Principles and Technology??