One of the few areas where there seems to be bipartisan support is the belief that Australia should move towards an electronic voting system, which would allow a faster dissemination of results. From The ABC:
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten have endorsed electronic voting for future elections…
The Labor leader said he would write to Mr Turnbull to suggest a bipartisan push to embrace electronic voting, saying election results should not hang in the balance for so long.
He said he did not want to take away “from the professionalism of the Australian Electoral Commission, but it’s the 21st century”.
“We’re a grown-up democracy, it shouldn’t take eight days to find out who’s won,” he said.
Mr Turnbull said he supported Mr Shorten’s push for e-voting as he addressed the media to claim the Coalition’s election win.
I take an opposing view and would prefer that Australia’s existing paper-based system remain. This system, while slow, is virtually impossible to rig and has delivered robust results for more than 100-years. Why fix what doesn’t need fixing?
By comparison, an electronic voting system would be open to hacking and fraud. It would also be expensive to set-up given Australia’s exhaustive preferential/proportional voting systems, which are far more complicated than other nations where electronic voting systems exist (e.g. the USA).
In any event, a 2013 joint Parliamentary review of electronic voting recommended against change, citing the above concerns. Below are the key takeaways from this report:
After hearing from a range of experts, and surveying the international electoral landscapes it is clear to me that Australia is not in a position to introduce any large-scale system of electronic voting in the near future without catastrophically compromising our electoral integrity.
Machine electronic voting at a polling place is vulnerable to hacking to some degree. This can be mitigated by a system that not only records your vote electronically, but also produces a printed ballot for physical counting and later verification. In other words, a lot of expense to still visit the polling booth, queue up and complete your vote on a machine rather than a paper ballot.
For this reason, internet voting seems to be naturally the most attractive to many voters. As an election expert from the USA recently said to me: ‘when it comes to voting, folks would rather be online than in line.’
But the weight of evidence tells us that at present this is highly vulnerable to hacking. While internet voting occurs in Estonia, it does not mean that system cannot be hacked. With all the internet security architecture available, the academic experts swear they can, and have proved they can, hack such systems.
In future it is likely, given the turbo-advances in technology, that a system of online electronic voting could be delivered with acceptable safety and security. But even when we reach that time, there should be considerations beyond the convenience it would offer.
Given we complete so many transactions online, I am often asked why voting should be any different. My answer to that is that voting once every three years to determine our democratic destiny is not an everyday transaction.
Not only do we have the right to a ballot; we have rightly enshrined within our system the right to a secret vote. Voting at a booth in a polling place guarantees this; voting over the internet threatens this.
Internet voting would expose some voters to family and peer pressure by removing the individual isolation of voting at a secluded booth and replacing it with voting in a home, a workplace or a public place. It also potentially opens up a market for votes where disengaged or financially desperate voters could be offered money to vote a certain way, which could be verified in a way not possible at a polling place.
This is not to say that we should not be striving to make better use of modern technology, but it is to say that technological convenience must be balanced against electoral integrity.
That’s a compelling argument right there. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, just so we can determine an election result a little quicker.
