Australia: New Senate voting rules could be ready for July election, says electoral commission | The Guardian

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) says it could implement new Senate voting rules within 100 days, clearing the way for the system to be implemented in time for a July double-dissolution election. On Tuesday the AEC commissioner, Tom Rodgers, told a truncated inquiry into the voting overhaul the “three-month clock” would begin as soon as legislation was passed but “the AEC stands ready to deliver an election whenever the government call it with the legislation that’s in force at the time”. “If I get less time or resources, internally that’s not going to be a pretty look but we will deliver a successful election,” Rodgers told the joint select committee on electoral matters.

Australia: Former Australian Electoral Commission official says Senate voting change is ‘incoherent’ | The Conversation

A former official of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), Michael Maley, has attacked the government’s planned reform of Senate voting as internally inconsistent. Maley says the scheme proposed will create an anomaly never previously seen at Senate elections – identical preferences for candidates may produce a formal vote if the elector expresses them “above the line”, but an informal one if they are expressed “below the line” because the ballot paper would be insufficiently completed. Maley had a 30-year career at the AEC and was deeply involved in the 1983 drafting of the current provisions governing Senate elections. He was the recognised in-house expert on the Senate electoral system. He has lodged a submission for the brief inquiry into the government’s legislation, which is being done by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters.

Australia: Coalition amends Senate voting reform bill to ensure election night ballot count | The Guardian

The Turnbull government has moved to amend its electoral legislation two days after it was introduced to parliament, after concerns preliminary Senate results would no longer be available on election night. The Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese said the legislation had been rushed and the amendments “exposed how bad this dirty deal is”. The bill introduced to the lower house on Monday included new procedures for the scrutiny of Senate votes, with the assistant returning officer being required to count the number of ballot papers without inspecting them. “There will no longer be requirements to reject informal Senate ballot papers or count first preference votes prior to transmission to the Australian electoral officer,” the government’s original explanatory memorandum said.

Australia: Malcolm Turnbull moves to overhaul Senate voting system before election | The Guardian

Malcolm Turnbull is moving quickly to overhaul the Senate voting system before this year’s election, declaring the end of secretive preference deals that have allowed backroom operators to “game” the system. The prime minister said the legislation – introduced to the parliament on Monday with the backing of the Greens and the independent senator Nick Xenophon – would empower voters to decide how their preferences flowed in upper house elections. The bill has been referred to the joint standing committee on electoral matters with a reporting deadline of 2 March, paving the way for a debate and decision in the Senate before parliament rises for the pre-budget break.

Australia: Flux Party seeks to be the bitcoin of Australian politics | Reuters

A new Australian political party is using the virtual currency bitcoin as a model to replace what they say is an outdated political system – representative democracy – with a streamlined new polity for the information age. The Flux Party says its goal is to elect six senators. They will propose no policies and will not follow their consciences, but will support or block legislation at the direction of their members, who can swap or trade their votes on every bill online. “If they didn’t have to be senators, if they could just be software or robots they would be, because their only purpose is to do what the people want them to do,” Flux Party co-founder Max Kaye told Reuters in an interview. Australia is set to hold an election in September or October after a period of turmoil that brought five prime ministers in as many years.

Australia: Labor, independents unhappy with new voting rules for Northern Territory | ABC

Controversial changes to voting rules in the Northern Territory have passed Parliament, less than six months before Territorians head to the polls. The changes, which the Opposition Labor Party says are a ploy by the ruling Country Liberals Party (CLP) to remain in power, have seen the introduction of optional preferential voting. Optional preferential voting means voters can number as few as a single box when voting, instead of filling out all preferences. Chief Minister Adam Giles told Parliament this would help combat the high rate of informal votes in remote areas.

Australia: Northern Territory Adopts Optional Preferential Voting and Bans Campaigning Near Polling Places | ABC Elections

The Northern Territory Parliament yesterday passed legislation that will dramatically change the face of elections in the Northern Territory. I outlined the provisions of the bill in a blog post in January (you can find the post here), but the two provisions with significant political consequences are a switch from full to optional preferential voting, and a ban on posters, how-to-votes, handbills and all forms of campaigning within 100 metres of a polling place. The original bill included a 500 metre ban, reduced to a more practical 100 metres by government amendment in the debate. The ban will remove what locals call ‘the gauntlet’, the tunnel of posters and party workers thrusting how-to-vote material at voters outside polling places. From my own personal observation, campaigning outside polling places is more vigorous in the Northern Territory than in any other Australian jurisdiction.

Australia: South Australia electoral reform a tough task | The Australian

For years, South Australia’s Liberal MPs have complained they would be in government if not for unfair electoral boundaries. But a special panel has been told there’s virtually nothing the state’s electoral commission can do to prevent voters being handed the “wrong” result. The Liberals have languished in opposition since 2002 despite winning a majority of the two-party preferred vote on three occasions. University of Adelaide political scientist Clem Macintyre has pinned the blame on factors beyond the electoral commission’s scope, such as conservative independent MPs siding with Labor.

Australia: Official says prime minister is considering an early election | Associated Press

Australia’s prime minister told government colleagues Tuesday that an early general election within weeks was “a live option,” an official said. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull alone decides the timing of the next election. He has maintained that he plans for his government to run a full three-year term which would make the election due around September. But he told his colleagues at their first meeting at Parliament House for the year that the election could be called much sooner, a government minister said. Turnbull said he could call a double dissolution election, so-called because both the House of Representatives and the Senate are dissolved.

Australia: Electoral Commission to close 1 in 10 polling booths | The Australian

The Australian Electoral Commission will abolish 730 polling booths — about one in 10 — at the next federal election, partly due to the rapid growth in early voting, which has more than doubled since 2007. Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers revealed to The Australian that he would scrap 253 polling places across NSW, 197 in Victoria, 133 in Queensland, 51 in South Australia, 44 in Western Australia, 38 in Tasmania, 10 in the ACT and four in the Northern Territory. Mr Rogers said the decision to close 730 of the 7697 polling booths used at the last election had come after an audit to make better use of staff and resources and also because the number of votes cast before election day has risen from 1.1 million in 2007 to 2.5 million in 2013.

Australia: Electoral Commission warned over failure to enrol 1.2m voters | The Guardian

Australia’s auditor general has warned the Australian Electoral Commission it failed to take “meaningful action” and follow a series of recommendations to more securely count votes in the lead-up to the 2013 election. On Wednesday the Australian National Audit Office released its third follow-up audit of the AEC after the 2013 federal election, in which 1,370 Western Australian Senate ballot papers were lost. The Senate election was required to be held again after a high court challenge and the AEC faced heavy criticism at the time. The latest audit found two years on the AEC has still not established procedures to fix a series of failings. The audit disclosed there are now 1.2 million Australians who are eligible to vote but have not been enrolled, and raised concerns over the AEC’s response to the electoral gaps. The report said “some useful work had been undertaken” to manage the electoral role, but there were “significant gaps in implementation action”.

Australia: E-voting: Why Australia isn’t voting electronically on election day | Daily Telegraph

We are the pioneers of the secret ballot electoral system, but when it comes to electronic voting, Australia has long been behind the pack. Kazakhstan, India, Brazil and Estonia are among the countries who long ago swapped pencil-and-paper ballots for e-voting at polling stations or over the internet. Meanwhile, in Australia, most of us continue to bemoan the chore of queuing for hours at the polling booth. … During the NSW state election in March, residents who were vision impaired, disabled or out of town on election day were able to cast their vote with the remote voting system, iVote, in what was the biggest-ever test of e-voting in the country. … But the success of iVote was marred by reports two security experts had exposed a major security hole that could potentially affect huge numbers of ballots and maybe even change the election outcome. University of Melbourne research fellow Vanessa Teague said she and Prof Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan found iVote had a vulnerability to what’s called a man-in-the-middle attack when they tested the system with a practice server in the lead-up to the election. “We could expose how the person intended to vote, we could manipulate that vote, and we could interfere with the return of the receipt number and thus prevent the person from logging into the verification server afterwards,” she told news.com.au.

Australia: To defend iVote, the NSW electoral commission went to Switzerland | The Mandarin

Last month, the New South Wales Electoral Commission’s ongoing battle to defend the integrity of its online voting system took chief information officer Ian Brightwell all the way to Switzerland — the last bastion of modern direct democracy. After requests from commissioner Colin Barry were knocked back by two other academic conferences, Brightwell finally got his chance to explain the NSW experience of implementing iVote in direct response to a pair of crusading academics who have doggedly attacked the online voting platform both in Australia and abroad. The organisers of the VoteID 2015 conference, held last month in Bern, Switzerland, deemed the claims and counter-claims interesting enough to design a special session around them. By now, most people who’ve heard about online voting in NSW would have also heard the persistent warnings of Vanessa Teague, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, and J. Alex Halderman, an associate professor of computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan.

Australia: Malcolm Turnbull to be Australia’s new PM after ousting Tony Abbott in Liberal party vote | The Guardian

Malcolm Turnbull is set to become Australia’s new prime minister after beating Tony Abbott by 54 votes to 44 in a snap Liberal party ballot and promising the country a new, respectful, slogan-free leadership style. The Liberal party whip Scott Buchholz announced the results to waiting journalists about 30 minutes after the meeting of parliamentarians began. There was one informal vote. Julie Bishop remains deputy Liberal leader and a ministerial shakeup looms after the leadership upheaval. Liberal party votes 54-44 in favour of Malcolm Turnbull taking over from current prime minister Tony Abbott. Long-simmering leadership tensions exploded on Monday when Turnbull declared a challenge, arguing Abbott had shown himself unable to make the case for policy change or turn around the Coalition’s political fortunes.

Australia: Tony Abbott rules out same-sex marriage vote on election day | The Guardian

Voters will have to wait until after polling day to have their say on same-sex marriage after Tony Abbott definitively ruled out holding a people’s vote in conjunction with the next federal election. On Sunday, he ruled out holding a public poll at the same time as the federal election. “I think the people should be able to consider this in its own right,” Abbott told reporters in Brisbane. “Millions of people in our community have strong views one way or another on this and why shouldn’t we be able to debate this and decide this in its own right without being distracted by the sorts of arguments which you inevitably get during an election campaign?”

Australia: Tony Abbott lines up double-dissolution election over workplace relations | Australian Financial Review

The Abbott government plans to give itself the option of calling a double-dissolution election based on trade union corruption when Parliament resumes in mid-August. Banking on its Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption inflicting reputational damage on Labor leader Bill Shorten, the government will use the resumption of Parliament to put two bills before the Senate that seek to curb union excess. The bills would restore the powers of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, which were diluted by the previous Labor government, and subject corrupt officials of unions and employers’ groups to the same penalties that apply to corrupt business executives.

Australia: Sex party to ‘vigorously’ appeal against Electoral Commission deregistration | The Guardian

The Australian Sex party will appeal against a decision by Australian Electoral Commission to deregister the party because it does not have enough members. The decision comes just months after the Victorian branch of the party won its first seat in the state’s upper house in November. The co-founder, Robbie Swan, said in a statement that the party would “vigorously” appeal against the decision which means the party will not be able to put its name on ballot papers at federal elections or receive commonwealth funding available to registered parties.

Australia: Votes gone walkabout after Australian election voting flaw | SC Magazine UK

As many as 66,000 votes in the New South Wales state election 2015 could have been tampered with. The election was held on  28 March 2015 and is now closed. Voters used the iVote system which is described by its makers as “private, secure and verifiable” in its operation. Further, the Australian Electoral Commission insists that all Internet votes are and were “fully encrypted and safeguarded” at this time. The iVote system is a form of voting where eligible voters can vote over the Internet or telephone as an alternative to voting at a physical polling station. Security is provided using an 8-digit iVote number, a 6-digit PIN and a 12-digit receipt number for each individual. Australia is arguably a perfect test case for electronic voting with its vast distances that prevent some voters from getting to a polling location. A system like this also benefits the disabled and other less mobile voters. However, the system has been derided by non-profit digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), “The problem is that the system was not ready to be one of the biggest online voting experiments in the world.” EFF’s Farbod Faraji says that a FREAK flaw has been discovered in the Australian system by Michigan Computer Science Professor J Alex Halderman and University of Melbourne Research Fellow Vanessa Teague.

Australia: Commonwealth considers voter ID as Queensland looks to dump it | Business Times

The federal government could look to bring voter identification in across the nation, just as Queensland seeks to strike it from its books. The state Labor government hopes to remove the requirement for identification at polling booths as one of its first acts, as well as lower the donation declaration threshold back to $1000, from the federal indexed rate of $12,800. While most submissions to the parliamentary committee reviewing the state government’s legislation agree on lowering the declaration threshold, support for removing the need for voter ID has been mixed.

Australia: Missing Senate ballot boxes may have fallen off a truck, committee finds | ABC

The nearly 1,400 Senate ballot slips that disappeared in Western Australia during the last federal election may have literally fallen off the back of a truck, says a federal parliamentary committee. The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters lambasted the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) in its final report into the 2013 federal election, describing the incident as “disastrous”. The inquiry handed down 24 recommendations, including that voters be required to show identification and — for the first time in almost a century — vote using a pen.

Australia: NSW iVote ballot mistake put down to human error | ZDNet

New South Wales Electoral Commission (NSWEC) CIO Ian Brightwell has defended the state’s online iVote system for the second time in as many weeks, after concerns were raised that a ballot error could put the state’s Legislative Council results in question for some seats. In the first two days of voting for the NSW state election, which was held on March 28, an error on the electronic ballot paper used for the online iVote system saw voters unable to vote above the line for two parties. … Brightwell’s defence of the NSW iVote system comes just two weeks after he fended off claims by online security researchers that the system had been vulnerable to a range of potential attacks, including those using the FREAK vulnerability. At the time, Brightwell played down the findings of the two researchers, Michigan Computer Science professor J Alex Halderman and University of Melbourne research fellow Vanessa Teague, saying that the vulnerability claims had been “overstated”.

Australia: New South Wales Attacks Researchers Who Found Internet Voting Vulnerabilities | Electronic Frontier Foundation

A security flaw in New South Wales’ Internet voting system may have left as many as 66,000 votes vulnerable to interception and manipulation in a recent election, according to security researchers. Despite repeated assurances from the Electoral Commission that all Internet votes are “fully encrypted and safeguarded,” six days into online voting, Michigan Computer Science Professor J. Alex Halderman and University of Melbourne Research Fellow Vanessa Teague discovered a FREAK flaw that could allow an attacker to intercept votes and inject their own code to change those votes, all without leaving any trace of the manipulation. (FREAK stands for Factoring RSA Export Keys and refers to the exploitation of a weakness in the SSL/TLS protocol that allows attackers to force browsers to use weak encryption keys.) But instead of taking the researchers’ message to heart, officials instead attacked the messengers.

Australia: Could NSW be facing a second Legislative Council election? | ABC Elections

As the count for the NSW Legislative Council creeps to a conclusion, there remains an outside possibility that an error in the NSW Electoral Commission’s iVote system could put the result at risk. For the first two days of voting for the election, the electronic ballot paper used for iVoting contained an error. Two of the groups on the ballot paper, the Outdoor Recreation Party in Group B, and the Animal Justice Party in Group C, were shown on the ballot paper without an above the line voting square. Around 19,000 iVotes were cast before the error was spotted. The error did not prevent votes being cast for candidate of the two parties, but it made voting for the two parties above the line impossible.

Australia: NSW state election 2015: Legal challenge looms over upper house iVote error | Sydney Morning Herald

A micro-party that is gunning for the final spot in the NSW upper house is likely to mount a legal challenge if it loses, potentially sending voters back to the ballot box. The Animal Justice Party is battling it out with the No Land Tax Party, and the three major parties, for the last of 21 upper house seats being contested at Saturday’s election. However an early hiccup with the state’s electronic voting system, iVote, saw AJP and another party left off the “above the line” section of the ballot paper. About 19,000 votes were cast before iVote was suspended and the problem, which was due to human error, was fixed.

Australia: There’s a huge design flaw in the NSW online voting system which Labor wouldn’t be happy about | Business Insider

New South Wales goes to the polls today and despite incumbent Liberal Premier Mike Baird being the clear favourite there’s a huge design flaw on the online voting platform which could cost the Labor government votes. It’s all got to do with the user experience of the NSW Electoral Commission’s online iVote system which is clunky to start with. After registering to use the platform and figuring out how to commence the voting process the ballot paper for the lower house appears on the screen, all candidates can be viewed, you can scroll up and down, fine. The problem becomes apparent when voting above or below the line. Even when the paper is enlarged on a 24 inch monitor, it doesn’t render to fit so this is what voters see. However, to the right of that are all the other options (including the Labor party). And while there are big red arrows at the top, that’s not where a user usually focusses their attention, a user experience designer, who wished to not be named, told Business Insider.

Australia: NSW election result could be challenged over iVote security flaw | The Guardian

The result of the NSW election this Saturday is likely to be challenged after a security flaw was identified that could potentially have compromised 66,000 electronic votes. A number of parties, including the Greens, the National party and the Outdoor Recreation party have told Guardian Australia they would consider all of their options after the “major vulnerability” was revealed in the iVote system, an internet voting program being trialled for the first time this year. But a senior NSW Electoral Commission official said fears of vote tampering were overblown and the work of “well-funded, well-managed, anti-internet voting lobby groups”. While the iVote website itself is secure, Melbourne University security specialist Vanessa Teague discovered on Friday that it loaded javascript from a third-party website that was “vulnerable to an attack called the FREAK attack”. “The implication is that an attacker who controls some point through which the user’s traffic is passing could substitute that code for a code of the attackers’ choice,” she said. In layman’s terms, a hacker could intercept a vote for party A and turn it into a vote for party B without alerting the voter or the NSW Electoral Commission.

Australia: NSW iVote security flaw may have affected thousands of votes: Researchers | Computerworld

Thousands of NSW state election votes submitted to iVote may have been affected by a server vulnerability according to two security researchers who discovered the issue. University of Melbourne Department of Computing and Information Systems research fellow, Vanessa Teague, and Michigan Centre for Computer Security and Society director ,J.Alex Halderman, posted a blog with their findings on March 22. “The iVote voting website, cvs.ivote.nsw.gov.au, is served over HTTPS. While this server appears to use a safe SSL configuration, the site included additional JavaScript from an external server,” wrote the researchers.

Australia: International experts warn of the risks of Australian online voting tools | Sydney Morning Herald

Australia and other countries are a decade or longer away from safe methods of online voting in state and national elections and current tools pose a serious risk to democratic processes, people at a public lecture heard on Monday night. University of Michigan researcher J Alex Halderman and University of Melbourne research fellow Vanessa Teague said online voting in Saturday’s New South Wales election could have been seriously compromised through security weaknesses in the iVote system, being used in the upper house. The pair, in a a public lecture at the Australian National University, said that internet voting continued to raise some of the most difficult challenges in computer security and could not be considered completely safe. They reported faults in the NSW system to electoral authorities last week, ahead of as many as 250,000 voters using online systems to participate in the ballot.

Australia: NSW Electoral Commission downplays iVote flaw | CNET

The NSW Electoral Commission has responded to reports of a flaw in its iVote online voting portal, saying that although the risk of its website being compromised was low, it has taken action to fix the flaw. The Commission has also raised questions about the authors of the findings, noting that the two academics behind the research are also board members for a group that lobbies against online and electronic voting in the United States. According to the Chief Information Officer and Director of IT for the NSW Electoral Commission, Ian Brightwell, the flaw discovered in the iVote system required three or four preconditions in order to be exploited. While Brightwell said a hack was “unlikely,” he said the Commission moved swiftly to respond to the problem.