[LINK] New proposal for e-voting - Turnbull

[Richard]

My take, with a correction:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/10/turnbull_floats_evote_compulsory_id/

I was given the context lecture by a Turnbull staffer, which is typical 
spinner behaviour. God knows what rope political staffers have around 
gallery journalists' necks, that they will fall for it.

RC

On 10/09/13 4:28 PM, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> [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".
> Advertisement
>
> 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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