Proposed election changes a necessary, welcome step

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/01/2025 (258 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canada’s chief electoral officer is calling for legislative amendments to protect our national elections from a range of emerging threats. It is encouraging that the Manitoba government appears to share his concern and plans to take similar steps to protect the integrity of elections here in our province.

Two months ago, Stéphane Perrault, the nation’s chief electoral officer, released a report that contained several recommendations aimed at “addressing emerging threats arising from artificial intelligence and deepfakes.”

He warned that “AI images of people doing things they never did, audio of them saying things they never said or created videos can threaten democracy and make it difficult for a voter to know what is real and what is a deepfake.” He is concerned that “foreign state actors could leverage the power of technology to create deepfakes in order to influence or undermine the electoral process.”

Anybody who has seen artificial intelligence-generated “deepfake” videos on social media knows how real they can sound and appear. They are capable of manipulating voters into thinking that a candidate said or did something they didn’t say or do. If convincing enough and widely distributed, the manipulated image and/or sound could impact the outcome of an election.

In response to the growing threats, Perrault suggests that all paid and unpaid electoral communications — images, audio, video or text — that have been generated or manipulated by artificial intelligence and are distributed during an Elections Canada-regulated pre-election and election period, or during a contest, should include “a clear transparency marker” that tells the public when something that could influence their voting decision isn’t real, but rather is AI-generated.

He wants the Canada Elections Act’s control over “electoral communications” expanded to include not just all communications to the public made by or on behalf of a political entity (including a registered third party), but to also include communications by any other entity whose objective is to influence electors to vote or not to vote, or to vote for or against a candidate or party.

The expanded definition would also apply to nomination and leadership contests during the relevant contest period.

As we said several weeks ago, the changes proposed by Perrault are both reasonable and arguably overdue. They would enable Canada to catch up to enhanced election integrity measures that have already been implemented in democracies throughout North America and the world.

That could also soon be the case here in Manitoba, where legislation that would seek to protect provincial elections from foreign interference, forged images and videos, and other conduct that could unfairly and unethically affect voter intention could be introduced by the Kinew government as soon as a few weeks from now.

In his recent annual report, Manitoba’s chief electoral officer, Shipra Verma, recommended that the provincial Elections Act, which bans people from disseminating false information about candidates and impersonating election officials, should be expanded to also ban objectively false information about election officials, the electoral process, the equipment used in elections and during the period prior to an election.

He further suggested that false information about voter eligibility and voter registration processes should also be prohibited, as well as any forged material that falsely claims to be from a candidate, an election official or a political party.

The proposed amendments, which are currently being finalized by the government, would implement many of those suggestions, and could also include provisions similar to those recommended by Perrault.

That possibility was recently confirmed by Premier Wab Kinew, who says that “We’ve thought about foreign interference. We’ve also thought about artificial intelligence and deepfakes and all the content that’s floating out on the web now and how do we need to grapple with that.”

At a time when there is legitimate concern among citizens over the integrity of our electoral processes and, specifically, that the outcome of elections could be influenced or corrupted via technological manipulation, the introduction and eventual implementation of reasonable measures to protect the honesty and integrity of our electoral processes — at both the federal and provincial level — are both a necessary and welcome step.