Future federal elections should use electronic vote counting to improve the accuracy of results, the ACT Electoral Commission has said.

A joint parliamentary committee has been considering election methods after almost 1,400 votes went missing in Western Australia during the federal election.

The problems led to a fresh Senate poll being held in WA and the resignation of Australian electoral commissioner Ed Killesteyn.

ACT electoral commissioner Phil Green told the committee there were miscounts in every division in Western Australia.

"Hand counting and hand sorting by using humans alone is an error-prone thing," he said.

"I think if you look at the result of the recount in Western Australia you can see that hand counting even a single first preference on a ballot paper is something that human beings aren't very good at, but computers are very good at it."

The ACT was forced to hold an expensive and time-consuming recount after the 1998 territory election and began exploring electronic options that could tally votes according to the territory's Hare-Clark electoral system.

The commission now scans all paper-based votes to help speed up the counting process and ensure accuracy after elections.

An intelligent character recognition system is used to check the preferences and the results are compared to the manual count.

Mr Green said the outcome of the election was important to get right.

"It is a very complex process and you have got to be extremely accurate when you have got margins which are as tight as three votes one way, or five votes another way," he said.

"I would be stressing that electronic voting is only part of the solution. It is the electronic counting that in some ways makes a bigger difference to the process of making sure you've got the right result, which is ultimately what you are wanting."

At the previous ACT election in October 2012, a total of 59,200 voters placed their vote electronically through a computer terminal at polling places, about 25 per cent of all ACT voters.

Mr Green believes electronic voting at terminals would be difficult to coordinate at a national election, but said scanning of ballot papers was far superior to a hand count.

The next ACT election will be held on Saturday, October 15, 2016.