Make Your Vote Count

The Electoral Process

What are the future trends for voting in the Australian electoral system?

Two ways in which voting sytems could be computerised are:

1. the elector casts his/her vote into a computer, either directly into a computer or indirectly via a punch card or other machine readable format
2. enter the details of ballot papers cast in the normal manner onto a computer after the election

With the first option, direct elector input would not be very practicable considering today's technology. Our preferential voting system would make it difficult for devising a direct input method whereby electors could cast any number of preferences. In the United States, direct input systems are based on first-past-the-post electoral systems where the elector votes once only for each ballot. Very sophisticated and reliable computing equipment would be needed to record everyone's preferences and many people particularly older voters, find computers quite daunting.

Direct input would require computing facilities at all polling booths. The costs and the problems which might arise in installing and maintaining the computer faciilities in polling booths make this option unlikely.

The second option would mean that computing facilities would not be necessary in polling booths but is still a problem. After electors had completed machine readable ballot papers, they could be sent to a control point for processing. However, there are similar difficulties to this idea again relating to the Australian preferential voting system.

Another problem with computerised voting is the dependability of the computers themselves. Computers and their operators are not infallible. There can be programming problems and 'crashes' which could bring the legitimacy of elections numbers into question and cause serious disruptions on polling day.

The question of security is also a very serious impediment to computerised voting. There could be instances of vote rigging if the computer software was made public. Similarly, if the voting software is kept secret, it would be impossible to guarantee the security of such a system, despite extensive audit trails which may have been built into it. Programmers could rig the software and do a lot of damage to the electoral system.

Similar issues could be raised for requests for telephone voting including the voting system itself, technology costs, security. It seems that while we have preferential voting, then there is little chance of computerised or telephone voting.

See Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform, First Report, September 1983 for further information on computerised voting.

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