Psephologists are adamant that the uncertainty triggered by last Saturday’s electoral stalemate will not precipitate a move to nation-wide computerised voting, even though the outcome of the count looks like it won’t be known until next week.
According to the ABC, three seats are still in doubt after Saturday’s poll, with Corangamite, Hasluck and Brisbane waiting on postal votes and pre-poll votes to decide an outcome. Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard are sweating on the results of those seats, as they look to negotiate with the independent and Green MPs who will hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives.
But ABC psephologist Antony Green said that the idea of implementing electronic voting for a general election was “fanciful” and that it could only be done by holding a poll over a number of days.
“If people think the sheer complexity of paper voting is huge, then imagine the cost of setting up a nation-wide network for computerised voting,” Green told Crikey. “There is no way you could justify the cost of electronic voting on a single day.”
Crikey electoral expert Charles Richardson agreed, saying that the sluggish return of electoral results was no reason to move to federal e-voting. He also described the speed of computerised counting as a “great red herring”.
“The reason counting slow is because we need to wait for postal votes,” Richardson told Crikey. “Computerised voting isn’t going to do much about that unless you install computers in every embassy around the world, which is wildly impractical.”
But Antony Green said that one way to cut down in the delay of results could be to computerise postal votes and pre-poll votes. According to the AEC, around 12% of votes cast in the federal election are declaration votes.
“All paper votes cast on the day have been counted, the reason we are waiting is because of absent votes and postal votes,” said Green. “Some of those votes could be counted more quickly. It’s the paperwork that is the issue, verifying declaration votes at both ends.”
Green pointed to recent ACT elections as an example of where electronic voting systems have been used successfully at pre-poll locations. More than 40,000 votes were cast at the 2008 election using the electronic system, accounting for around 20% of all voters.
“If you could computerise voting in polling centres overseas, then you could cut down the paperwork and time taken to count votes,” said Green. “The amount of paperwork involved in voting in London or Kazakhstan is enormous, they have to have enough ballot paper for every senate ballot and every electorate in the country.”
Green also said that pre-poll voting in big town hall centres in Melbourne or Sydney could be made electronic, which would help to reduce any hold-up.
Despite the delay in the results, Charles Richardson said the AEC had done an “excellent job” and that Australia had one of the “greatest systems of electoral administration in the world”.
“If you compare Australia with Britain earlier in the year, they saw a tremendous amount of queuing and delay,” said Richardson. “Not to mention the chaos we have witnessed in the United States in recent times.”
Any voting system needs to be verifiable – this is one of the problems with many electronic voting systems in use. The best systems print a paper ballot for each electronic vote cast, which can (and should) be counted to verify the electronic total. There are too many reports of poor security with the machines in use in the US and elsewhere to risk doing it any other way.
Fairly short term and limited thinking from the election experts above. I’ve long thought e-voting or phone voting is a definite proposition that should be explored. A few reasons for this :-
1. The cost argument against e-voting is a bit of a misnomer as the infrastructure only needs to be built once (expensive) and then modified for each election (cheaper). I’m sure the end result would be cheaper over 4 election cycles than the million dollar paper based system used in each election.
2. With an e-vote system, it would almost reduce the need for postal votes or out of the electorate voting as you would be able to lodge your vote from any location (including overseas)
3. As for identification and paperwork, I figure a registration process would be required which could be done months before an election. This would give you a user ID and password that would enable you to vote in your electorate. The user ID would not be linked to a name or address however (to ensure confidentiality).
4. For the sustainability people out there, think of the trees saved from no ballot papers. Also no delays and no annoying people thrusting paper “How to vote cards” at you.
We can lodge our tax returns via the web with no issues in regards to identity or security. Surely we can do the same for our votes.
Scott,
Your #3 point assumes that people won’t lose or mislay that registration ID and password. People are more stupid than you imagine, give them credit.
Your final sentence overlooks the fact that there is no power game up for grabs when lodging one’s tax return – there’s nothing worthwhile in it to corrupt because it’s only between you and the Assistant Commissioner of Taxation. Politics and individual taxation returns are not comparable.
On a practical level, what happens of there’s a major electrical failure in a city (Sydney seems to lead the pack for this) on election day? I see chaos and temper-testing delays with queues stretching around the block a couple times and booth closing times suddenly being extended to catch up with the backlog. Or could they be extended in such circumstances? Would many voters miss out because the legislation dictates booths compulsorily close at 6pm regardless of acts of God, earthquakes etc?
And finally, does anyone recall the days when you could drop into the local hardware store for a box of tacks, hand over a few sheckels, get a receipt immediately and be on your way? Try doing a quick transaction these days: cashiers enter codes which don’t work, code bars refuse to scan properly, credit cards are rejected for no reason etc. Machines don’t necessarily make life easy.
Would that “electronic vote” be per an NBN?
There are enough “hacks” in the media, doing what they do, let alone what others could do with “e-voting”?
There are certainly proposed electronic systems that are indeed verifiable short of printing out the paper ballot – see wikipedia
I’ve also seen electronic systems proposed in order to make alternative / better voting systems practical. Things like ranked pair / condorcet systems that would minimise strategic voting but be painful to implement for any race where there are more than a couple of candidates.