Ballot Box or Tinder Box? Examining Online Voting in Ontario Cities

• Title: Ballot Box or Tinder Box? Examining Online Voting in Ontario Cities 
• Speaker: Dr. Aleksander Essex Professor of software engineering | Western University
• Date: Thursday, Sept 25, 2025
• Time: 4:00 PM
• Room: Mathematics Boardroom

Summary

Municipalities in Canada have broad discretion to manage their local elections. This legislative discretion has led to the widespread adoption of remote, internet-based voting, where municipalities are responsible for making cybersecurity decisions in a largely unregulated environment without standards, certification, testing, or support from higher levels of government. However, online voting remains controversial for many complex, technical, and democratic reasons.

In this talk, we will discuss recent Ontario municipal elections in which hundreds of cities (representing millions of voters) not only offered online voting, but also, in many instances, eliminated paper ballots entirely. Drawing on our research-based findings about what the technology is (and isn’t doing), we will examine the considerable cyber and democratic risks of this approach, and conclude with an open-ended discussion about what Ontario should do about it.

Biography

Aleksander Essex is an associate professor of software engineering at Western University. His research specializes in cybersecurity and cryptography, with a focus on evidence-based election technology and the unique cyber risks associated with online voting. He initiated and helped draft the first national voluntary standard for online voting in Canada, published in 2024. He has advised numerous election agencies in Canada and abroad on the technical and democratic implications of adopting election technology.