Overview
Hello and welcome.
The Government has agreed to enable electronic elections as part of modernising the school board election framework. Currently, board elections can only happen using paper forms. Enabling electronic elections is one way to bring the elections into the 21st century, and meet the expectations of students, parents and school staff.
Schools will be able to choose to hold their elections using the current paper-based processes or by electronic processes with a paper-based alternative.
The key changes in the Regulations to enable electronic elections are:
- Setting technical and process standards to ensure electronic elections are safe and secure
- Establishing an accreditation scheme where the Ministry checks a provider’s ability to meet the standards, so schools don’t have to
- Requiring that accredited providers be used for parent and staff elections but not for student elections
- Requiring paper forms to still be available for voters, even where a school opts to run an election electronically
Other amendments:
Some other changes to the regulations will help board elections to run more smoothly. These are:
- Allowing the counting of votes in an electronic election to occur without scrutineers because a scrutineer can’t always watch a computer-based count
- Removing the long (83 day) election timetable as an option for board elections, as our consultation highlighted this period is too long. Schools on the long timetable would revert to the short (63 day) timetable
- Amending the short election timetable to give returning officers more time to prepare voting documents
- Introducing a shorter timetable (approximately 30 days) for student representative elections and staff by-elections to make it easier to fill these roles
Enabling electronic school board elections consultation guide.[PDF, 94 KB]
Read enabling electronic school board elections draft regulations.[PDF, 187 KB]
Thank you for your time.
To fill out the consultation click the link below. (English version)
Translations of the consultation guide are available in the following languages:
Consultation closes 18 March
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