[LINK] Fwd: vip-l: The Australian: E-Voting follow-up article

[Tom Worthington]

At 07:28 AM 3/22/2006, Jan Whitaker wrote:
>>THE AUSTRALIAN TUESDAY 21 MARCH 2006, Page 37 IT -  Features
>>Title: Canberra needs vision to allow secret ballot for the blind Selina 
>>Mitchell
>>
>>BLIND and vision-impaired Australians are calling on the federal 
>>Government to allow them to vote electronically at the next election, 
>>saying it is their democratic right to cast a secret vote. ...

Perhaps blind citizens should take the Electoral Commission to court under 
section 24 of the Disability Discrimination Act. The court could decide if 
the technology is available and affordable to allow blind citizens to cast 
a secret ballot. If so, the citizens could ask for two billion dollars 
compensation for unlawful discrimination.

The Human rights commission awarded $20,000 to one person in the SOCOG case 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2000/bat.html>. There are about 300,000 blind or 
vision impaired people in Australia 
<http://www.abwa.asn.au/body_understandingblindness.html>. Assuming one 
third of them vote, that is $2,000M in total.

Also there was a protracted case about TTYs for the deaf, which discusses 
many of the same issues <http://www.tomw.net.au/uso/>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml