[LINK] Electronic Voting

[Chris Johnson]

On Sun, 10 Jul 2016 21:27:45 +1000, Stephen Loosley
<stephenloosley at outlook.com> wrote:

> The country has come to a political standstill

Hooray! it's not a problem.
Political systems are slow responsive, loosely coupled to the service
operations of government. It really does not matter for months if there
is a caretaker government with a pause in the continuous dribble of
attempts to fine tune systems through political reform. The country
still operates - the utilities run, taxes are collected, salaries and
contracts and welfare are all paid, hospitals keep running, defence
forces still stand ready, operations continue - you'll notice that the
Australian stock market, bond prices, exchange rates have barely
murmured in response to the chatter about delayed confirmation of tha
election result.
Electronic voting would be nice as an efficiency but is not a game
changer. I'm more concerned that the system should be an accurate
indicator of the voters' opinions: which is subverted by reporting early
counts before the polls close. Election reporting rules need to catche
up with the availability of electronic communications (since radio in
the 30s!). The early results from the first booths to close in the
eastern states should not be available until after the western states
close two hours later (better yet, not even be counted - to avoid danger
of leaks).
Otherwise - if we just want more efficiency, they could start counting
postal votes before election day, just not release the results. I would
object to this, as it makes even worse the same danger of leaked early
results perturbing the later voters.

-- 
Chris Johnson, Hon AsPro ANU