Editorials: Why the rush? In defence of Australia’s slow election count | Ben Raue/The Guardian
Bill Shorten has expressed interest in moving to electronic voting to prevent delays in future Australian election results. Malcolm Turnbull agrees with this sentiment. Electronic voting would not actually speed up a very close result, and it carries the risk of undermining trust in our electoral system. Electronic voting in most cases is unnecessary, expensive and impractical. It also has numerous problems that shouldn’t be underestimated. Firstly, any voting system needs to be anonymous, secure and transparent – and this is difficult to do using an electronic system. There are numerous objections to the anonymity, security and transparency of electronic voting (in particular, voting over the internet) on technical grounds that I won’t go into here. The majority of voters cast a vote at a local polling place on election day. This system works pretty well – votes are counted quickly and the system is well understood. It would come at a tremendous cost to set up electronic voting facilities in every school and church hall across the country for a single day of voting. It would be more practical to introduce electronic pre-poll voting at booths in capital cities, as currently happens for Australian Capital Territory elections and New Zealand elections, but these votes are already counted on election night, so this wouldn’t do much to speed up a result.