For all the talk of Australia being an agile, innovative country, few things are as backwards and inefficient as our physical voting system. In a world where almost every Australian has an online bank account, trillions of dollars of shares are traded without a scrap of paper and where the majority of us submit taxes over the internet, more than 15 million people have to wait in line before writing on a piece of paper to be hand counted by a casual workforce over a period of weeks.
The raw cost of conducting the election was estimated by the AEC to be $110 million in 2013. However, that is simply the direct costs (and almost certainly an underestimate), and it doesn’t factor in the time taken by people to vote (which this year was upwards of an hour for many, even after the usual morning rush), nor does it factor in the time cost of volunteers handing out how-vote-cards, let alone the substantial waste of paper involved in the antiquated system. Cost and waste aside, if we had an electronic voting system, the election result would be known one minute after Perth polls closed, rather than waiting for weeks.
Like with any disruption, there would be critics, however. So let’s consider the most likely objections.
Voting online wouldn’t be safe
Ahem, almost every Australian banks and pays tax online. The average Australian has more than $35,000 sitting in their bank accounts. Not to mention most medical records are kept online in some form. Meanwhile, Australians spent more than $19 billion shopping online last year. So not only do we think online systems are safe, but the current system is highly prone to manipulation. There’s little that can be done to prevent someone from voting in every single booth in the electorate, and even worse, you could impersonate others as the AEC don’t require any identification (all that is required to vote is an address). If anything, online voting is far less prone to fraud than our current system (and to make it even safer, a fingerprint scan could be taken for anyone using a smartphone).
Not everyone would be able to vote online
Australia has the highest penetration of smartphones globally; more than 80% of us have one. Interestingly, the current participation rates of people registering to vote is 94%, which means that almost 1 million people aren’t enrolled to vote. Allowing digital voting (and cross-checking registration to things like Medicare, driver’s licence and Centrelink would most likely increase, rather than reduce participation). For the small minority who don’t have access to a computer or smartphone, a small number of physical booths would be needed — these could be digital, though, so the result would remain instantaneous.
It’s hard to hold a secret ballot online
This is probably the best reason to be critical of digital voting, however, given the advances in encryption, a full end-to-end encrypted and anonymous system of voting could be developed using existing technology. While voting preference is a personal matter, so too is how much money you have, how much tax you pay and your detailed medical history — all information we readily have online.
This year’s election showed that our current system is grossly inefficient and costly. If we want to be an agile, innovative nation, we can start with our voting mess.
Adam Schwab is the founder and CEO of the Lux Group, one of Australia’s largest ecommerce businesses
If the federal election cost ‘$110 million in 2013’ without factoring in the significant indirect costs mentioned just imagine what an unnecessary plebiscite on same sex marriage would cost the nation. The figure of $160M had been bandied around but one assumes that was merely a direct cost. So much for the budget-conscious LNP government & their concern about savings.
As I recall, some years ago voters in Florida were complaining that their votes were changed on the screen, despite their various attempts to correct them.
The software was commercial-in-confidence so it is not clear whether there were terminal or software problems.
Audits were effectively impossible.
While 80% of us might have a smart phone, what about the other 20%, in which the aged would be strongly represented. My late mother, who would now be 90, didn’t use a microwave oven, let alone a computer or a smartphone, and still did her banking with a paper bank book.
While what you propose as a technical solution might be feasible, it not only disenfranchises a significant proportion of the population, but also ignores the transparency which comes from the present system, including scrutiny of the counting process by candidates’ representatives.
Sometime the simple things are best. (and most secure)
Hard copy records, delivered via pencil and paper are bloody hard to hack.
Plus, if you think $110 million is a lot to stage an election, then just wait till you see this magnificent digital bridge I’ve got to sell you.
I have three objections to automated voting. This article doesn’t address any of them.
They do it in America, and dodgy things happen. The companies that build the voting machines turn out to have boards comprised of members of one political party; machines develop mysterious bugs that transfer a random 1% of the vote to a certain candidate; and so on. There are plausible explanations, and these things might have happened inadvertently, but they’re not on.
Secret ballots are about freedom, not about privacy. We don’t know how to build a computer system trustworthy enough that you could safely vote Green, then reassure the union heavies that you voted Labor.
An automated count would be very difficult and expensive to scrutinise, even if you trust your opponent’s scrutineers with access to the counting machines. If you don’t, it would be pretty well impossible to scrutinise.
I could be persuaded that a manual count is not worth the cost, but there is no way that an automated election could have the same integrity. It would take a very large conspiracy to rig an election in Australia, and they would almost certainly get caught. When you automate it, the smartest hacker in the AEC gets to choose the government.