It’s the question you’ve probably seen pop up a million times on your Facebook feed: why the hell doesn’t Australia have some kind of electronic voting system like they do elsewhere? The sausage sizzle is nice, but why can’t I vote from my phone? If we did all this nonsense electronically – with tech – wouldn’t it bloody be sorted out already?
It all makes sense, right? We entrust ATMs and internet banking with secure data, why not do it with voting? Sounds like a huge time and cost saver to me, a regular punter with no skin in the game.
Well, there are a handful of good reasons why we don’t do it, and why the Australian Electoral Commission is reluctant to introduce it.
It ain’t just about keeping things secure, but that’s a big part.
You might think the biggest concern is that any electronic or computer-based system, whether over the internet or in the form of an electronic booth at the polling place, is susceptible to tinkering by ne’er-do-wells.
Sure: that’s a definite concern. Internet voting via mobile or desktop, for example, is pretty difficult to control. Ever taken a look at your parents’ computer, bogged down by spyware, viruses and five million browser bars? It’s hard to know just how many citizens might be enacting their democratic will via an infected computer or an insecure browser.
Internet voting also introduces a really old-fashioned problem that probably doesn’t crop up much in polling places – someone literally intimidating you into voting a certain way. Sounds dumb, but it’s a possibility. What if you’re voting at the office, and Derek the office bully gives you a wedgie and forces you to vote One Nation?
As the AEC themselves point out, there is the “potential for coercion and intimidation when voting takes place outside the view of polling officials e.g. at home or in the workplace”.
Sure, requiring modern browsers or other security measures is one step to minimise issues. But how do you prove to the electorate that its secure? That’s a whole different ballgame altogether. Which leads us to the next point…
There’s very little transparency.
Paper voting might be a bore, and grappling with an enormous Senate ballot might be an intensely demeaning experience, but it has one key, rock-solid advantage: a paper trail. And that is the literal paper your vote is written on. Can’t beat it. It may be costly and slow, but at the end of the day you have a physical record you can verify.
A process of manual vote counting, aided by computers for calculation and overseen by party scrutineers, may be subject to human fallibility, but at the end of the day you have a physical basis to refer to if a recount is required.
The AEC claim that an entirely computerised voting system “could raise unacceptable risks, especially if the system was being introduced on a broad scale”.
There’s one way around that, and that is electronic scanning and verification of physical ballots (a.k.a. Optical Mark Recognition). Perfect! Except you’d still need to haul arse down to your nearest polling place and write in your votes, so it defeats the purpose of why the general public wants electronic voting anyway (they want to be able to vote on the toilet, obviously).
Our voting system is, if we’re honest, nightmarishly complex.
This isn’t a massive argument against electronic voting per se, but it’s definitely proves it’s not as easy as it is in the United States. Supporters of electronic voting tend to refer to the States, which has experimented with electronic and internet voting at different levels of government at different times.
The US electoral system is based on the principle of ‘first past the post’ – i.e. you vote for one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins. That system is actually very easy to turn into a user-friendly e-voting interface. Like so:
(Funnily enough, the above picture is from a big yarn in the U.S. about voting machines that allegedly registered votes for Barack Obama as votes for Mitt Romney thanks to a busted touchscreen. Something else to ponder.)
The Australian voting system, on the other hand, with its reliance on preferencing and vote allocation, is harder to translate into an easily accessible electronic interface. The problem with a lack of paper trail becomes even more pronounced when, for example, you’re dealing with a stack of voters who have voted below the line.
Maybe this isn’t a huge drama, though! As time goes on and the vast majority of voters become very fluid with the use of different electronic interfaces, then perhaps this will be less problematic.
Look. As the AEC say on their website, they “[do] not suggest that Australian electoral authorities should at this stage embark on a program to fully replace the easily understood, publicly and politically accepted efficient, transparent paper ballot system that currently exists.”
But that doesn’t mean that we won’t (or shouldn’t) investigate different, technological means of making voting more accessible – because more accessibility is more democracy. Ultimately, it’s hard to imagine Australia abandoning paper voting anytime soon.
Close Chrome and peel yourself out of your gaming chair, guys. You won’t be voting online anytime soon.
Source: AEC.
Photo: Little Britain.
