The Australian Electoral Commission, the organisation charged with administrating all Australian elections across 8000 polling stations, has been investigating the potential for electronically-enabled polling for some time, according to assistant commissioner, information and research, Brien Hallet.
While the prospect of Web-based voting is attractive to both the AEC and a relatively computer-literate Australian population, Hallet said that on many fronts, the Internet remains too insecure to allow online voting. Nevertheless, he said the Commission will keep a close eye on emerging security technologies with a view to allowing an increasing electronic involvement in local elections in coming years.
-That's something the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is very interested in. We've been keeping a watching brief for many years now. We have a number of people, both technical and operational, who are following the possibilities very closely," he said.
-Any voting system has to be transparent. People must have confidence that once their vote is registered it will be counted properly. There are certainly also issues to be addressed on security. The logistics of e-voting presents major challenges for a Federal election using current technology, although it's fair to say that it will be possible one day."
Although online elections continue to be little more than the subject of star gazing, computer technology is already playing a part in the ACT Legislative Assembly elections being held this Saturday.
Under the system, ten percent of the Territory's 80 polling stations are equipped with PC-based barcode scanners and a miniature keyboard. Voters who wish to cast their selection electronically are given a barcoded card which they scan, after which they use the keyboard to make their candidate selections. Once they are happy with their choice, the voter again scans the card, depositing the information into a central server.
Costing around AU$405,000, the system has already proven successful, according to ACT electoral commissioner Phillip Green, who said it has so far processed almost 5000 ballots at pre-poll voting centres. By the time the election rolls around this Saturday, roughly 20,000 of the Territory's 218,000 voters are expected to have used the system, he said.
Despite this initial success, Green agrees with his federal counterpart on the issue of Internet voting, especially when it comes to the security concerns that surround it.
-The voting system runs on a standard PC, so there's no reason its design wouldn't run on the Net from a tech point of view. From security point of view, I'm not satisfied that the Internet would be secure enough to run a parliamentary election on. We've looked at Net voting and decided that it's not reliable enough at this stage," Green said.
-Net voting is someway quite into the future because of the problem of scale. In the ACT we can do it because of the size of the Territory. The cost of the hardware-based solution wouldn't be cost-effective or cost achievable on an Australia-wide basis. It's certainly technically possible, but we'd also want to be satisfied that the Internet was more secure than it is now.
No computer-based voting system has yet addressed the issue of post vote auditing, except those that print voting slips. This makes them little more than glorified typewriters.
In the event that the computer system misrecords a vote due to bug, ilicit code, or whatever, any recount will yeild the same incorrect vote. But if you print voting slips because the software might not be reliable, you have to count the slips to be sure.
So you either have blind faith in the computer (MS Windows based, no doubt)or are back to counting voting slips - just like a manual ballot.
So where is the gain in computer based voting untill we can produce truely auditable software based systems at affordable prices. And all that is just about the computing platform, without even considering the Internet in the equation.
(refer www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html for some excellent academic references)