Australia not ready for the electronic ballot: AEC - News - Communications

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Australia not ready for the electronic ballot: AEC

By Jeanne-Vida Douglas, ZDNet Australia
October 22, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Australia-not-ready-for-the-electronic-ballot-AEC/0,130061791,120261336,00.htm

Despite the apparent success of electronic voting in the ACT election on the weekend, the federal branch of the Australian Electoral Commission believes Australia is still a long way from digital voting.

Pointing to a series of technical and logistical difficulties, assistant commissioner for information and research at the AEC in Canberra Brian Hallett said, electronic voting would have to overcome some major hurdles before being introduced for Federal elections.

-It is definitely something we are very interested in, but it would need to win the support of the electorate and the parliament before being implemented at a federal level," Hallett said. -While a lot of our backend is already computerised, the logistics and costs associated with rolling out the appropriate technologies to over eight thousand polling places across Australia has to be considered."

Although Hallett is urging caution, he is also quick to point out the benefits of electronic voting systems, including a significantly shorter wait for votes to be counted and scrutinised.

According to Hallett the bar-code based technology used in the ACT election is only one of a number of different technologies being considered by the AEC.

However, it is not only the federal AEC taking the implementation of electronic voting slowly. The weekend's election saw only 9 percent of the electorate (or 19 000 voters) take advantage of the keyboard-and-screen system made available at pre-polling day electoral offices, according to a Computer Daily News report. While the technology showed some teething problems, with the wrist-flick needed to read the bar code a challenge for some voters, the locally developed software, and task-specific keyboards, may one day become a feature in polling booths across the country.