Electronic voting isn’t likely to replace voting at the ballot box anytime soon, according to identity and security experts, despite progress in NSW and Victoria and renewed interest in Queensland. A discussion paper [pdf] on electoral reform released last week by the Queensland Government asked whether electronically assisted voting (conducted online or by phone) should be introduced for all voters in the state. While Queensland Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie said the government must review rules and processes governing the electoral system to ensure they are “right for modern times”, experts say there is a lot standing in the way of electronic voting. “It’s easy to see the appeal and convenience of online voting, without being aware that the capacity for votes to be manipulated is much higher than with older or more clunky methods,” said Vanessa Teague, electronic voting researcher and honorary fellow in the department of computing and information systems at University of Melbourne. “It’s very difficult to construct valid mechanisms for proving that each person’s vote has been handled in the way they intended,” Teague said.
Internet voting is already available to citizens of Switzerland and Estonia. However Teague cited recent Estonian elections where the party that came second disputed the result. “There was no opportunity for observers to verify that the central count had been properly conducted,” Teague said.
This is one of the many challenges to electronic voting currently being considered by the Victorian Government, which is one year into a project that aims to deliver a new electronic voting system at the ballot box, replacing the one that was used in 2006 and 2010.
Once delivered the system will be the first end-to-end verifiable e-voting system in the world, said Craig Burton, manager of electronic voting at the Victorian Electoral Commission.
“Verifiable voting adds a layer on top of (traditional security) which provides mathematically strong proof that the system got your vote as you cast it and – once captured – it was passed through and decrypted as you cast it,” Burton said.
The VEC is considering internet voting, Burton said, but so far the Victorian Electoral Act doesn’t allow for it. New South Wales passed legislation to allow for electronic voting in 2010.
“We haven’t yet worked out what we would consider to be safe parameters to do it here. It must come with some form of independent verification,” Burton said.
He added that for online voting to be robust enough for use in public elections, a number of new innovations would be required.
“The current voting system has had 150 years of debugging and it’s pretty good…Internet voting introduces risks that just don’t exist in paper voting.”
Full Article: Long beta for Australia eVote – Security – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.