[LINK] New proposal for e-voting - Turnbull

[Jan Whitaker]

[We didn't hear a thing about it this time, even for disabled access. 
What happened to the 'next big thing'? I'd be interested in Linkers' 
view of the security of evoting now - have things changed or is 
Diebold still sus?]

http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/lets-ditch-the-paper-ballots-and-go-electric-malcolm-turnbull-20130910-2thiy.html

The man likely to be the new communications minister has suggested 
Australia should consider a switch to electronic voting at federal 
elections in order to cut down on informal and fraudulent voting.

Malcolm Turnbull told ABC TV on Tuesday that Australia needed to look 
at implementing electronic voting, pointing to the large number of 
informal votes that were cast in the 2013 election.

"I think this is a very, very big issue," he said. "The current 
system is fraught with errors".
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One of the highest ever rates of informal votes was recorded in 
Saturday's election. According to the Australian Electoral 
Commission, the informal vote in the lower house has risen from 
<http://vtr.aec.gov.au/HouseInformalByState-17496.htm>5.55 per cent 
in 2010 to 5.91 per cent this year. This is still down on the 6.34 
per cent of informal votes cast in the 1984 federal election.

Mr Turnbull said that while some informal votes are protest votes - 
"there are some people who write 'damn you all, down with 
politicians"' - the overwhelming majority of them were people making mistakes.

An AEC analysis of informal votes cast at the 2010 federal election 
found that 28.9 per cent were blank ballots and 16.9 per cent had 
scribbles, slogans or other protest marks.

The proportion of ballots that only had a '1' was 27.8 per cent, 11.8 
per cent had ticks and crosses and 9.2 per cent had non-sequential numbering.

Mr Turnbull, who was easily elected to his Sydney seat of Wentworth 
on Saturday, said he thought there was also a large number of people 
who voted fraudulently, "in the sense that they go to the polling 
place and say they're someone else".

He said he thought many people who did so were voting for a friend or 
relative who was away or sick - and that this was based on anecdotal 
evidence he had received since first running for Parliament in 2004.

Impersonating another voter in a polling place is a serious offence 
and carries a jail term of 6 months.

Mr Turnbull said that electronic voting could be done in a closed 
network in the polling booth so that it could not be hacked from the internet.

"I think we considerably overestimate the security of the current 
paper voting system, and we also overestimate the insecurity of 
electronic voting systems," he said.

He suggested that an electronic system could point out to voters if 
they were about to cast an informal vote and give them the 
opportunity to correct it.

Mr Turnbull stressed that his electronic voting suggestion was not 
Coalition policy, and noted that Australian federal elections are 
routinely reviewed by a parliamentary committee.

The AEC has been monitoring electronic voting technologies for more 
than 10 years. The 2007 federal election included electronic voting 
trials for vision-impaired voters and for ADF and AFP personnel who 
were overseas and the AEC is expected to soon release a discussion 
paper on internet voting, to help public debate on the issue.

If electronic voting - either in a localised or remote set up - was 
to be introduced at the federal level, a change to the Electoral Act 
would be required.

At the state and territory-level, electronic voting measures have 
also been trialled since the early 2000s.

For example, the ACT first used electronic voting in the 2001 
Assembly election. In the 2011 NSW state election, disabled, remote 
and interstate voters were able to vote via telephone and the internet.



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how 
do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
~Margaret Atwood, writer

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