ACT Electoral Commission delighted with e-voting
ACT Electoral Commission delighted with e-voting
The Australian Capitol Territory Electoral Commission has expressed its satisfaction with the e-voting systems used at the recent Australian General Election, despite concerns over there not being a verifiable audit trail available.
The Commission counted 6,000 votes in Tuggeranong with its e-voting table machine created by Entech and 22,000 votes were counted by PCs elsewhere in the Territory.
A report is due to made available to the ACT parliament within the next two months, and this could determine whether e-voting could be more widely used around Australia in the future.
Allison Purvis, the Deputy Commissioner of the ACT Electoral Commission is looking forward to filing a very positive report to the parliament.
"We are very pleased with the way the system worked on this occasion. We only had an informal rate of one percent, which is better than we usually receive from ordinary paper counting methods. The informal rate refers to the number of mistakes recorded through the system, so the e-voting system actually reduces the amount of mistakes that voters can make.
"E-voting for us has proved to be more accurate and much faster at colleting votes too."
Purvis added that there is not much to be learnt from the e-voting system that recently took place in the United States too, because the Commission is more than happy with its own system at the moment.
In the U.S., e-voting, touch screen machines were used in 29 states and the District of Columbia. Out of this, a total of 40 million people voted on 175,000 machines. There have been many fears over the security of these machines, the possibility of fraud and the lack of a paper trail.
Although Australia seems behind in the amount of people who use e-voting, Purvis believes that people should have every confidence in the Australian system.
"The concept is the same in the U.S. and Australia in terms of e-voting, but the technology used to record the votes are different. We use open source code, which is available on the Internet, so that people can analyse and verify the code. However, in the U.S., they use proprietary code, which of course makes it more difficult to look inside the system.
"There have been some complaints over about there not being a verifiable audit trail, but we shall look into this call for a print out of the vote to ensure that the machine recorded the right information. We are happy to look into all of these suggestions for improvements."
Purvis added that the Commission is overall happy with the audit trail already in place with the e-voting system, but she didn't rule out sensible modifications.
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