E-voting unlikely to spread through Australia
E-voting unlikely to spread through Australia
Feb 7, 2005: Despite the recent decision in the U.S. to use printed records to improve the credibility of electronic voting, it seems unlikely that electronic voting will be used widespread in Australia, according to a spokesperson for the Australian Electoral Commission.
Gartner believes that plans of Diebold Election Systems, which is a provider of electronic voting systems, to introduce a printer that will generate a paper record of votes, will provide a simple, understandable, auditable record of electronic vote counting that is not available in today's fully electronic systems.
However, Tim Evans, the director of elections systems & Policy for the Australian Electoral Commission, does not believe that widespread electronic voting will be useful in Australia, and even it was implemented, he also thinks that paper records would be a hindrance rather than a benefit.
"First of all, for electronic voting to spread throughout Australia, there would need to be an amendment to the Australian Commonwealth Elections Act. This will only happen if Parliament is persuaded that it would create advantages to voting, and the security of each vote would be maintained or improved.
"The only advantages we can see with electronic voting, is its use in remote areas, where people find it hard to get to a polling station, or people with disabilities find it difficult to register their votes. Only then, do we see electronic voting over the Internet, for instance being any use to Australians."
Despite electronic voting trials being successful in the Australian Capitol Territory, Evans, believes that this is only because the region is different to the rest of Australia.
"ACT experiences a very complicated voting system. Many people cannot access many of the 100 voting stations in the region, the system has been layers to it, so it takes a long time to count the votes. So electronic voting is useful for this region. However, there are over 8,000 polling stations in the rest of Australia, which are easy access of populations.
"It would take a much bigger effort to transform 8,000 polling station into electronic voting stations, than it took to build these systems in ACT. Even if and when we do start using electronic voting extensively, having a printed copy will cause more problems, because this involves using another piece of technology that might not work properly."
Evans believes that having a printed copy of a vote would be a waste of time and money, in addition to making the whole process much more complicated and likely to go wrong. But he does strongly believe that electronic voting would be useful to those who don't have easy access to a polling station.
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