Paper Vote Canada

A reasonably comprehensive article from ITbusiness.ca
I'm going to quote almost all of it.

Canadian interest in electronic voting has been slower to take hold
federally and provincially, with political parties perhaps waiting for "the go-forward solution," said Jonathon Hollins, Canadian director of Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb.

Unlike the U.S. willingness to adopt the latest technology, Canada "is not quite there," explained Hollins, who's based in Pickering, Ont. "We don't put as much emphasis on voting technology. I think it becomes a bit of a cost issue. We don't have as frequent elections up in Canada."

Federal ballots are less complex than those at other government levels, generating less interest from Elections Canada to replace them with more costly electronic voting, suggested Adam Froman, president of Delvinia Interactive Inc. , a digital marketing and applied research agency in Toronto.

Voting on standalone touch-screen machines (Direct Recording Electronics), however, which also caters to the visually-impaired through an audio ballot, has been used in municipal elections held in Toronto, Edmonton, and the Ontario cities of Vaughan, Brantford, Oakville and Mississauga, said Hollins.

In Ontario, Markham and Prescott have also flirted with Internet voting, which allows people to vote at home, at work, in libraries or at the polling station. The city of Vancouver and the province of Ontario are also exploring online voting for their next elections, according to Froman.

"For municipal elections, they're very complicated –– the ballots," including candidates running for mayor, town council and school trustee, added Froman, whose agency conducted online and in-person surveys of Markham voters.

"From our point of view, there will always be risks with any form of electronic voting that have to be managed and monitored...but the demand is overwhelming from the voters themselves," said Froman.

(Delvina is not exactly objective, since they want to be involved with e-voting.)

"From the voters' point of view, (people) weren't concerned about security" of voting online, Froman said. Rather, he said, the administrators of Internet voting were worried that the real voter may in fact not be casting a ballot.

The town of Markham had a different take on the experiment, though. Although the systems are secure, said John Swan, client adviser in Markham's IT department, voters still take a skeptical view of the online voting process, specifically the accurate undertaking of a re-count or updating voter information.

"With e-everything these days, and hackers and security issues -- I think that's really what's holding people back," said Swan, adding that Markham's discussions with the province have also unearthed similar concerns.

Swan said one of the reasons Markham introduced this more sophisticated voting option was to capture the vote of tech-savvy youth. The democratic pilot project failed from this perspective, though. But it did work for those who were out of the country during the election but registered for the online option before leaving, he said.

Markham is uncertain whether it will repeat its online voting episode. Showcasing a solution from Election Systems & Software, the town's e-election cost $25,000, about four times less than what the price tag would be next time, said Swan.

"If we had to do it full-blown to attract that small segment of the marketplace, it becomes a very expensive option for the town."

Experts agreed that Canada is unlikely to focus strictly on electronic voting, but instead may adopt multi-channel voting, such as voting by phone, voting by mail, advanced voting or voting on election day.

ITbusiness.ca - 11/3/2004
Canada unlikely to imitate U.S. e-voting effort: experts by Fawzia Sheikh