Electronic voting comes to Ontario in Whitby-Oshawa byelection

Some voters in Thursday'sWhitby-Oshawabyelectionwill not only be casting ballots for the candidate of their choice, they'll alsobe part of anexperiment that could lead tothe first real change in the wayOntarians vote in nearly100 years.

Elections Ontario is running a pilot projectusing electronic vote tabulator machines in 42 of the 70 polls in the riding.

"Clearly our job is to look at how we can modernize the electoral process by the same means ensuring that we maintain the integrity, transparency, those core pillars of our democracy while we invoke technology into the process,"Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa said.

"We are, in fact, piloting three initiatives in this byelection."

• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stumps for Whitby-Oshawa byelection candidate

• ANALYSISOntario PCs hold early lead in WhitbyOshawa by-election campaign, poll suggests

• Voters can pick 'none of the above' thanks to this Whitby-Oshawa byelection candidate

In addition to the voting machines, a scanning machine will be used to electronically check off names from the voting list.And, there will be a new staffing model. There will be fewer people but all of the staff will be able to help any of the voters from any poll.

The technology has been around for a long time. It has been used successfully for municipal elections in Toronto for more than a decade.

But any change has risk. New Brunswick introduced an electronic voting system for its last provincial election and there were major problems.

Essensa says he met with Elections New Brunswick officials and he'll have back-up plans and extra staff on hand to make sure everything goes smoothly.

"We are very confident in the protocols and practices that we have put in place to ensure that something like that could not happen here."

Elections officials across the country are finding it harder and harder to hire enough people to run an election. Essensa says there really is no choice but to modernize the process.

"Increasingly we are having a difficult time finding the upwards of 80,000 people that we need to service a general election".

An electronic voting system will cost more money in the short term, but Essensa says it will reduce the cost of elections in the future.

"If you look at this model it represents about a 30 per cent reduction of election day staff and staff represents the largest component of our election day budget. The ability to reduce staff over time will offset the capital investment we would need to make in the equipment," says Essensa.

Elections Ontario also expects the results from the 42 polls with the machines will be counted much faster than the old method of hand counting the ballots from a ballot box.

Once the byelection is complete, Elections Ontario will submit a report on the experiment to the Ontario legislature with the hope that the new technology could be used across the province in the 2018 election.