Electronic voting is a general term used to describe a variety of practices and technologies that can facilitate voting, recording and counting. Each of these is described below:

• Voting — Any system where the elector casts their vote using an online system, such as the internet, touch-tone phone voting using interactive voice recognition, mobile telephone SMS text facility, or interactive digital television. Once recorded, the elector’s vote is despatched in real time to a secure electronic vote store, where it is held prior to counting;
• Recording — Any system where the elector casts their vote on a voting machine (punch card, push button, touch screen). Once recorded, the elector’s vote is stored in the machine. After voting has concluded, data is transferred from each machine to a counting system; and
• Counting — Any system where votes are loaded into a computerised counting system, which then tallies the votes and performs subsequent actions required by the particular method of voting being used, such as eliminating unsuccessful candidates and distributing their preferences or striking quotas and transferring the surpluses of successful candidates, thereby determining the successful candidate(s). The loading of votes can be undertaken in a variety of forms, such as keying ballot papers, scanning ballot papers using optical mark recognition or optical character recognition readers, downloading data from voting machines, or downloading data from an electronic vote store.¹

In its 2004 election report, the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters included recommendations for a trial of assisted electronic voting for blind and vision impaired electors and a trial of remote electronic voting for Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel serving overseas, Australian Federal Police serving overseas and for Australians living in the Antarctic.²

The government response to the committee’s report in August 2006 supported the recommendations to establish a trial of assisted electronic voting for blind and vision impaired electors.³ The government noted that:

Consultation between the AEC and appropriate organisations is well advanced to allow the AEC to develop appropriate trial arrangements for electronically assisted voting for blind and visually impaired voters to cast a secret printed paper ballot at the next federal election. It is proposed that the trial would be available to eligible electors at 30 pre-poll locations across Australia. The consultations will also inform the AEC’s decision on the proposed location of the trial sites and the degree to which the trial could be extended to electors with a print disability.⁴

While the government also indicated its support for a remote electronic voting trial for selected personnel serving overseas, the scope of the trial was narrowed to exclude Australian Federal Police and people working in the Antarctic:

The AEC will arrange a trial of remote electronic voting for overseas Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel, subject to satisfactory resolution by the AEC and the Department of Defence of systems and associated security issues. The results of this trial will enable the AEC to inform the development of the broader proposal on remote electronic voting as recommended by the JSCEM. The AEC will keep the Special Minister of State informed on progress and outcomes of the trial and the development of the proposal for the JSCEM.

The Government may consider the extension of remote electronic voting to overseas Australian Federal Police personnel and Australians living in the Antarctic, subject to the outcomes of the ADF trial.⁵

Electronic voting, particularly electronically assisted voting for electors who are blind or have low vision, has been provided on a restricted basis for a number of state and territory elections. Only in the ACT is electronically assisted voting offered as a voting alternative to the entire community.

Electronically assisted voting, which allows people to complete a ballot paper in private, has been a feature of elections in three states and territories in recent years.

Remote electronic voting, whether by telephone, internet or email, is replacing attendance or postal voting for a range of elections in the community including industrial elections and elections for boards of management.

Apart from the remote electronic voting trial for selected Australian Defence Force personnel serving overseas (examined in chapter 4), there is no remote electronic voting in Australia for state or local government elections. The ACT Electoral Commission has noted that:

Security concerns and the difficulty of providing electors with unique on-line identifiers are still seen as obstacles that have not yet been overcome. Therefore the Commission continues to hold the view that electronic voting should only be provided in a controlled environment at polling centres.¹⁵

The committee is mindful of the need to balance the demands for convenient and accessible forms of voting with maintaining trust in the integrity of elections. Experiences and perceptions of electronic voting, both overseas and in response to the 2007 election electronic voting trials, provide important context to assessing the desirability of electronic voting at future federal elections.

While making it clear that they did not endorse any particular voting method and acknowledging that there may be a number of flaws, NSW Young Labor told the committee that electronic voting could increase participation by young people in elections:

We are simply saying that technology has come a long way and, since there is a lack of participation or a reduction in participation by young people in the system, we think we should be looking at things like maybe online voting or SMS voting—taking that technology that is now available to us and looking at ways that we can incorporate that to improve people’s participation in the Australian political system.¹⁷

Everyone Counts, a provider of electronic voting services, told the committee about the benefits of remote electronic voting to electors, particularly those in remote areas:

Internet voting is in broad active use and so far has had quite a high success rate, reaching remote voters in perhaps tens of thousands of elections… ranging from popular voting such as for sporting awards right up to binding elections at the national government level in several countries.

… Controversy and reported problems around real internet elections are infrequent. In contrast, calls for remote internet voting in the US press in the lead-up to the 4 November presidential elections are gaining in frequency and sonority. The most appropriate group of remote voters to be given a new electronic channel on which to vote is those voters that postal voting most struggles to reach.¹⁸

In the United States, where the use of electronically assisted voting machines (and voting machines generally) is widespread, there is much discussion and debate about the merits of electronic voting. While most of this discussion focuses on the closeness of the 2000 presidential election and concerns with voting machines at this election, debate has continued in recent years despite the replacement of many of the manual voting machines with electronic voting methods. The Institute of Governmental Studies Library of the University of California summarised the different views in the following way:

In sum, views about electronic voting fall into two basic camps. On one side are those who put a premium on accessibility and improving political participation. They welcome electronic voting on the grounds that its advantages outweigh security and reliability concerns — which in their view will always plague voting systems to some extent.

On the other side are those who put a premium on security and reliability and the need to maintain voter confidence in the electoral process. In their view, unless electronic voting is backed up with a verfiable record of some kind, the risks are too great — the potential for mishap and mischief looms large.¹⁹

It is not difficult to find analyses of electronic voting based on US experiences that appear to strongly support either of these two views.²⁰ It is easy to be persuaded about the relative merits of each side of these accounts. For example, a supporter of electronic voting in the United States noted that:

Voting fraud can take place with any kind of voting system, including paper ballots. In fact, mechanical voting machines were developed to prevent people from stuffing the ballot box. Electronic machines are even more secure than earlier systems due to sophisticated encryption software and increased physical security of the machines. Although it is true that any computer can be hacked by a dedicated attacker, it is not likely that a hacker would be successful in undermining an entire election. It is more likely that election problems will be the result of untrained poll workers.²¹

Similarly, it is easy to locate more sceptical views about the security of electronic voting. For example, one author with a background in computer engineering has noted that:

The use of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines makes U.S. elections highly vulnerable to attack at many points during the voting process. Computer experts have already demonstrated the ways that vote-stealing software could be built into the machines by dishonest programmers or introduced into unattended machines. They have also shown how DREs can be infected with viruses and how the central vote-tallying machines can be attacked. Any group capable of hacking an election and putting themselves into power could maintain that power forever; this is the greatest danger of electronic voting.²²

The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia noted that internet voting had been criticised in a number of countries where it had been used:

Although internet voting is still being used in some small and emerging democracies, and in Switzerland and Estonia, most advanced democracies that have trialled internet voting have abandoned it. The United States’ SERVE project, which was specifically for military personnel, was cancelled before deployment on the recommendation of the security experts commissioned to evaluate it. …

The government of the United Kingdom recently declared that there were no plans to run further trials of internet voting, stating "Serious concerns persist about the security and transparency of e‑voting systems and their vulnerability to organised fraud." A French trial of internet voting for overseas French citizens was widely criticised and its future is uncertain.

The concerns about security and transparency of electronic voting expressed by experts overseas apply in Australia too.²⁴

Similar concerns, and reassurances, about the security and transparency of the 2007 federal election electronic voting trials and the future of electronic voting in Australia were presented to the committee by providers of electronic voting services and others with technical expertise in computer programming and electronic voting. Where relevant, these are discussed in relation to each of the trials in the following chapters.

A cautious approach to the adoption of electronic voting was supported by Mr Wen:

Electronic elections certainly have considerable advantages, and there has been a positive response from participants in the electronic voting trials. But there must be more discussion about the trade-offs between the benefits and the risks. If Australia moves to adopt this new technology, we must exercise great care and caution to limit the risk of electoral fraud and avoid compromising the integrity of our elections.²⁶

Another electronic voting services provider, Registries, told the committee about the momentum that was developing for internet voting:

Other internet-based elections and pilot results contribute to the notion of a tipping point in the uptake of this technology. In February of 2008, EIC provided the online channel for Democrats Abroad. It was the first time in history that US voters living all over the world were able to remote-vote electronically in a Presidential Primary. Adding the online channel alone increased turnout seven-fold. Voters living in 164 countries, including US Antarctic Territory, were able to cast their votes and be counted. While these voters were given the option of voting by post, by fax, by internet or in person, more than 50% chose to vote online.²⁸

A more tempered view of electronic voting was offered by Computing Research and Education Australasia, which highlighted the trust that the voting public must place in voting systems:

Australians are rightly accustomed to trusting the AEC to handle paper ballots securely, but this trust follows from the transparency of the process: candidates and voters know that scrutineers representing their interests may be present at all stages of the count. Electronic voting requires much more trust, but in Australia has no scrutineers at all. Not only must the voter trust the programmers, the providers of the computers, and the auditors (none of whom are direct AEC employees) to act in good faith, but they must trust them not to make any serious mistakes. Writing secure software is notoriously difficult, as is checking it.²⁹