Green light for e-voting again in Australia
Green light for e-voting again in Australia
The Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commission is going to involve e-voting again at the next elections due later this year in October, after the success of its 2001 campaign.
The Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commission is going to involve e-voting again at the next elections due later this year in October, after the success of its 2001 campaign.
This comes in the light of recent criticism of Amercia's ATM-like electronic machines that at least 50 million voters will use to cast their ballots in November this year.
The touchscreen machines have been criticised for being less reliable than home computers, that can crash and fall victim to hackers and viruses.
During a presidential primary last month in San Diego, a technical glitch caused malfunctions in the machines which meant that prevented an unknown number of votes from being cast.
Alison Purvis, the Deputy Electorial Commission at ACT, said that the problem also with this system is that many of the American e-voting systems do not use open source software. Instead they use proprietary software, so that voter does not have the opportunity to look at the source and check that the code is trustworthy.
She added. "Our systems of e-voting is very secure. People vote via a PC at a polling station, because we are not yet at the level where we think it is safe for people to vote from home. If somebody does not trust the system, they have a freedom to read the software and audit, whereas this is currently not possible in the U.S.
"The system we used in October 2001 worked really well because it saved it automatically counted all of the votes, so this saved a lot of time for staff dealing with paperwork. It also allowed visually impaired people to vote for the first time, we could allow people to vote in 12 different community languages and we found it to be very reliable and secure.
"I am not sure if it is ready to be spread out nationally as a voting mechanism, just because it is quite expensive to set up the hardware in different locations, and because most voting poll stations are in schools, it would take a lot of effort to set the systems up. This is the only example of it being used in parliament elections in Australia, but we did on quite a small scale, so it would take a lot more planning to spread it nationally."
Out of 220,000 voters, 17,000 voters used the eVACS (electronic voting and counting system) e-voting system, provided by Software Improvements, in eight polling places. If they had rolled it out to 81 of their polling places, then it would have cost too much. However, Alison expects the e-voting to go as smoothly this time as it did in the last election, and this could pave the way forward for more e-voting across Australia eventually, if the costs can come down and the practicalities of setting up the systems can be improved.
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