Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters rules out move to electronic voting in elections

Updated

The days of voters lining up to use a pencil and paper to cast their ballot will continue, with a federal parliamentary committee ruling out a move to electronic voting.

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has released an interim report which finds there are too many risks associated with the move.

It said shifting to electronic voting for federal elections was not feasible before the next election or in the near future without "catastrophically compromising electoral integrity".

The committee found machine electronic voting was vulnerable to hacking and measures to mitigate that risk would be costly and would still require voters to visit a polling booth.

The prospect of voters being able to cast their ballot on the internet also seems a long way off, with questions about privacy for individual voters, security and potential coercion of voters.

Committee chairman Tony Smith said: "In future it is likely, given the turbo-advances in technology, that a system of online electronic voting could be delivered with acceptable safety and security."

"But even when we reach that time, there should be considerations beyond the convenience it would offer."

Mr Smith said "technological convenience must be balanced against electoral integrity".

The committee report said the majority of countries continued to rely on paper-based voting and some that have invested in electronic voting had since abandoned it.

The United States was also moving away from electronic voting with about 70 per cent of voters in the recent mid-term elections casting a paper ballot.

The committee recommended some options for using more technology in the voting process, such as using an electronically interconnected roll to allow names to be simultaneously crossed off at all polling booths, and electronic scanning of ballot papers to allow an electronic count.

It found those measures would reduce the chance of people voting multiple times and would speed up the counting of votes.

Topics: elections, government-and-politics, australia

First posted