Another election is winding up, so it’s time for the compulsory round of people complaining that the system is flawed and that technology would magically fix some of the problems. Quite a few are troubled by the pencils, including Clive Palmer, who listed pencils as part of his comprehensive spray against Australia’s “corrupt system”. He told AAP:
“There’s absolutely no way I will win based [on] voting irregularities and the security of the ballots. We think it’s a corrupt system. Until that’s sorted out Abbott won’t be getting any legislation through the Senate with our support.”
But the Australian Electoral Commission has good reasons for using pencils.
“The AEC has found from experience that pencils are the most reliable implements for marking ballot papers. Pencils are practical because they don’t run out and the polling staff check and sharpen pencils as necessary throughout election day. Pencils can be stored between elections, and they work better in tropical areas.”
Besides, if someone intent on defrauding the election broke into the room where the ballots were stored overnight, do you think the best mode of attack would be to erase votes one by one, in a way that couldn’t be detected?
Back here on our own planet, on Tuesday Coalition frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull told ABC News 24 that electronic voting could be a cure for what he sees as the high number of informal votes, around 6% of votes cast for the House of Representatives.
“You could vote in the polling booth, a closed network so it couldn’t be hacked over the internet. And if you misnumbered your boxes, the application would say, ‘you haven’t filled in your form correctly, it’s an informal vote. Do you wish to cast an informal vote?’ And if you said yes that would be your choice. But most people would go, ‘oh gosh’, and they would fill it in correctly.”
But would people really be more likely to understand how to fix their votes because the message would be on a computer screen rather than written on the ballot paper itself?
According to the UN’s Human Development Report 2009, 17% of Australians aged 16 to 65 are functionally illiterate — that is, they lack the reading and writing skills needed to perform daily tasks beyond a basic level. It seems reasonable to imagine that many informal votes are the result of functional illiteracy, and computers won’t fix that.
Nor would computers solve the Senate’s problem of massive ballot papers. Indeed, scrolling back and forth through lists of candidates would be likely to be more frustrating — as a usability expert once put it, like trying to read a newspaper through a keyhole.
Most worrying, though, are calls for a completely electronic voting system, all the way from casting votes to distributing preferences and the final count. That might have the potential to deliver the result quicker, but what’s the rush?
Full Article: Electronic internet voting a bad system for Australian elections | Crikey.