With the Australian election count dragging on, both the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, have come out in favour of some form of electronic voting, claiming it would have sped up the count and allow us to get out of caretaker mode and into the “business of government”.

I mean, on the outset it’s sexy: you log into some kind of portal, register your intent and come 9pm in the east, a computer groans and spits out the new makeup of government. Easy as, democracy from the comfort of your own iPhone. Pencils are outdated, writing things on paper is prehistoric (and probably leads to some kind of carpal tunnel); what we need is a new, modern, agile and innovative approach to democracy.

It’s a monumentally fatuous idea.

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First, we need to differentiate between two concepts: e-counting and e-voting. E-counting is using computers to automate the count so we can quickly figure out returns, e-voting is voting online so citizens don’t have to go to a polling place.

We already have some forms of e-counting – the AEC currently has a big black box they put Senate preferences into that punches out who wins. This system literally decides which bums get put on red leather, so you’d expect it to be freely available, transparent and easy for everyone to access, right? Not so – the AEC treats the code that comprises their EasyCount system as a secret and won’t let anybody access it.

Keep in mind this is a system that’s currently used to figure out who gets to go into the Senate and we have no oversight of it. Even if the AEC were to make the source code available, how can you guarantee that that’s the application that’s running to collate those votes? How do you know it’s not modified source code? Realistically, you can’t.

NSW already has an e-voting system called iVote, to replace the existing and insecure postal voting system, for citizens who were interested in giving it a spin. iVote had a rough start and even an issue where lodged votes could potentially be changed.

With e-voting, a user’s given a login and a pin to vote but even a well constructed IT system would have to have some link to a user and a ballot being cast. The secret ballot was originally called the Australian ballot and it’s secret for a reason – secrecy protects people from being swayed or compelled to vote in certain ways and from recriminations for how they voted. We already have a very well constructed system that guarantees the secure and secret ballots of citizens and guards against electoral fraud, most of you would have seen it in action on 2 July.

The primary argument made in support of e-counting and e-voting is speed and efficiency. The crux of it is: we shouldn’t have to wait days to find out who is forming the new government so horse-trading can begin at once.

Honestly though, who does that impact other than some politicians wondering whether they’ll keep their $200,000 a year job and some wonks who frankly get way too excited about elections.

The other argument is cost – the federal election costs about $250m to run in total every three years so it absolutely adds up. I know we’re in a cost-cutting and austere mode but really, $250m every three years is a pretty cheap price for one of the world’s best, fairest and most inclusive democratic systems. Anyone who thinks an online system would cost less is kidding themselves (and the taxpayers) – digital systems routinely go way over budget and (according to the 2012 Chaos report) up to 50% of IT projects fail.

To build an end-to-end e-voting system would be an absolute money pit with no tangible benefits over the existing system. We could not guarantee that it was built correctly, even with source code audits. We could not guarantee that it would be accessible to those who are vision impaired or from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. We could not guarantee that it would be even as secure as our current voting system and we couldn’t guarantee that people would trust it more than the current system.

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Until humans get better at building software (check back in 50 years), or the need for speed trumps everything –including the integrity and reliability of the democratic process – we should leave e-voting where it needs to be: on the trash-heap of bad ideas.

Let’s not trade in the sharp pencils and paper ballots for an unproven, untried and untested thought bubble when we have a system that works pretty damn fine and is the envy of the world. Sure, you might have to wait a few days for the answer but a few more days of caretaker government aren’t worth undermining our entire democratic project.

Heck, even if we did have a result right now, we’d still be waiting for the governor general to get back from France to swear them in, so let’s just kick back and relax and wait for the numbers to roll in.

Dan Nolan is a software engineer and the cofounder of Proxima, a startup based in Sydney, Australia.