Canadian parliament plans to launch virtual voting for MPs

Virtual voting to pass legislation may become a reality in Canada this September, if recommendations from a Parliamentary panel are accepted.

The House of Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee has asked the chamber’s administration to develop a secure platform that can be used by MPs to vote remotely, even as Canada’s Parliament is expected to return to regular sittings in the third week of September.

Canada has been holding sessions after the coronavirus outbreak but these have bene restricted to emergency measures related to the Covid-19 pandemic. It saw hybrid sittings, which allowed for a handful of members to be present in person while others joined in virtually.

The panel, chaired by Indo-Canadian MP Ruby Sahota, now wants this to be applied when the House returns to regular business. The panels report stated that “a remote voting solution be built by the House of Commons administration for before September for legislative voting during the Covid-19 pandemic” and that “during virtual or hybrid sittings, members of the House of Commons can automatically avail themselves of remote voting by electronic means.”

The panel said this ”dedicated secure” mechanism could be in the form of an app on the mobile devices used by MPs, and that it be integrated into the vote management system currently in use, feature end-to-end encryption and various methods of authentication and validation.

The panel recommended that this “secure virtual voting system include when members of the House of Commons should vote, what they are voting on, how much time they have to vote, how they can check their vote, and how they could correct a vote cast in error.”

While some Members of Parliament have been able to attend the limited sittings of Parliament during the crisis as they lived within the vicinity of the Canadian capital of Ottawa, the report noted that there may be “an increased health risk” to some MPs or their immediate family members who may be vulnerable to the disease, especially if members had to attend sittings in person and had to travel between the capital and their ridings, the term for constituencies in Canada.