Australia should embrace e-voting: AIIA

The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) is calling on the government to embrace electronic voting, noting that if such a system were in place, we’d already know the outcome of the federal election.

AIIA CEO Rob Fitzpatrick said electronic voting — which includes the possibility of having computer stations at polling booths, as well as voting online or via mobile phones — would be a cheaper and more efficient alternative to the current paper system.

“The process today is extraordinarily inefficient and expensive. With electronic voting in place, we would have known the results of our election minutes after the polls closed on Saturday and everyone could get on with their jobs. And the election itself would have cost a lot less money to run,” he said.

The AIIA noted that the federal election in 2013 cost $193 million, while the 2010 election cost $160 million. Any investment in a universal electronic voting system would accordingly return savings very quickly, the industry body said.

While an argument often made against the introduction of electronic voting is the possibility of election fraud via system tampering, Fitzpatrick said an electronic system could actually increase the integrity and security of the voting process.

“With today’s archaic system, votes can be miscounted, misread or even simply misplaced, as they were in the 2013 Western Australia Senate election,” he said.

Early examples of adoption of electronic voting in Australia — such as Victoria’s Electronically Assisted Voting (EAV) system for state elections and the remote electronic voting system iVote in NSW, which is used for voters with disabilities — show that electronic voting can work, Fitzpatrick said.

Other countries have also embraced electronic voting. “All Brazilian elections have been fully electronic since 2000, and countries like India and Estonia have electronic voting on a large scale, so we know it can be done,” Fitzpatrick said.

Image courtesy of Aaron Gustafson under CC