AS USUAL, THE TURNOUT at Monday's municipal elections in Dufferin was pretty

pathetic, particularly when you consider that this was the last chance voters have to express their opinions until November 2010.

Obviously, there is a need to find ways of improving the turnout, and just as obviously, one idea - the mail-in ballot - was only partially successful.

In Mono, for instance, the 2,392 ballots counted was up from just over 1,600 in 2003, yet the turnout was still just 39 per cent of those eligible.)

Perhaps one way to make the mail-in system more productive would be to make the rules more flexible, even permitting electors to put their ballots in the mail on election day. After all, with elections only once every 1,461 days, would it really matter all that much if the final results weren't available for two or three days?

Something else that ought to be examined locally is the potential use of the Internet as a voting tool. Obviously, security against fraud would be an important consideration, but it would seem that if each voter had a unique personal identification number and secure access to the municipality's website, the option would be particularly attractive to young voters.

We suspect that the jury's still out on mechanical tabulators, the option chosen by Orangeville for Monday's election. Although the fact it took nearly two hours for the results to be released has been explained away as merely a consequence of not having enough personnel, it seems to us that if the machines had worked the way they were supposed to, some results would have been available much sooner.

Finally, we think the new Orangeville council should consider carefully the option of a ward system, something the town once had when it was a community of about 3,000 (roughly one-tenth the size it's likely to be in 2010).

We suspect voter turnout might have been significantly higher if the voters hadn't been confronted by 17 men and women seeking five council seats.

In Orillia, which also happens to have a population of slightly under 30,000, voters chose a mayor plus eight councillors, two from each of four wards. Although there were 27 candidates for the eight seats, electors merely chose from lists of between four and nine candidates - a far simpler task than picking five names from a list of 17.