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SILICON
CHIP
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2 Silicon Chip
Publisher’s Letter
Electronic voting is not needed
As you read this, the Australian federal election will
have been resolved and the new government will be in
power. However, it is quite possible that some Senate seats
will still be in doubt due to the extremely complex ballot
for the upper house. The long delay in obtaining the Senate result has prompted some commentators to advocate
the introduction of electronic voting as a solution to this
and other aspects of our overly complex electoral system.
One of those proponents has been Malcolm Turnbull
who will probably be the Minister for Communications
in the new government. He has specifically advocated electronic voting because
it would reduce informal votes and also largely prevent electoral fraud whereby
people vote using other names or simply do it in many different booths. He is
particularly concerned about the level of informal voting which runs at about 6%
of the total vote, or about 670,000 in total.
Since I have been involved as a scrutineer at the last two elections in New South
Wales, I would caution against the introduction of electronic voting simply to fix
these two problems. In the booth where I recently scrutineered, the level of informal
voting was 6.5% but a good proportion of those votes were rejected simply because
people had only filled in one or two of the boxes.
Those people had clearly indicated which person they wanted to vote for. Their
votes would have been valid if optional preferential voting was allowed, as it is in
some state government elections. So in my experience, a majority of informal votes
could be made formal by a simple change to the electoral laws.
Optional preferential voting should be allowed in any case because most voters
do not understand how preferential voting works and even if they do, they would
not and could not know the labyrinthine ramifications of how the allocation of their
preferences will finally be “exhausted”, particularly in the Senate elections. If people
cannot understand the voting system then it clearly needs fixing. And of course,
preferential voting forces you to “prefer” candidates you may intensely dislike.
As to the question of electoral fraud, most of this could be fixed by simply asking people for identification before they are allowed to vote. Most people would
regard this as a simple and reasonable requirement.
So both of the above problems can be addressed by simple legislation rather than
the introduction of electronic voting. In any case, it seems likely any such voting
would not be via the internet but would still require people to attend polling booths,
as they do now. Partly this would be because many people are not computer-literate
or they may disabled or otherwise unable to do electronic voting without assistance.
But even if electronic voting was to be introduced at polling booths, I still have
doubts whether it would be a big advance and whether it could be done at reasonable cost. On the latter point, one only has to look at the Federal Government’s
costly and yet-to-be introduced e-health system to know that big system changes
based on computers can be fraught with problems.
Nor would electronic voting necessarily accelerate the count in elections. To give
the Australian Electoral Commission its due, the ultimate result in most seats in
the House of Representatives in the recent election was pretty much known within
a few hours after the close of polling. If we had optional preferential voting and
practical limitations on the numbers of crackpots who can nominate for the Senate,
the counting process could be done even more quickly. Overall, we should not look
to technology to solve what are really societal problems. Besides which, I would
rather use a pencil to fill in a few boxes rather than interact with some annoying
computer program in order to vote.
Leo Simpson
siliconchip.com.au
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