Democracy in the Digital Age: Enabling Electronic Voting and Counting in the Australian Capital Territory

Phillip Green
Electoral Commissioner 
ACT Electoral Commission

The process of marking and counting votes in Australia is still largely paper-based.  When most Australian voters go to vote at their local school or hall, they see their names crossed off a paper list.  They are given a paper ballot and go into a cardboard voting screen, where they mark their preferences with a pencil.
When they have marked their vote, they fold the paper ballot and put it into a cardboard ballot box.  That night, on their TV news, they will see footage of electoral officers opening the ballot boxes and beginning to laboriously count votes by hand.
There are several good reasons why it is hard to beat old-fashioned paper ballots.  They are a reliable, transparent way of recording the voting intentions of large numbers of people.  They can be kept secure, votes can be kept secret, and they can be recounted as many times as you like.
Paper ballots also have problems.  Many people have trouble completing them.  In a typical Australian election, there will be thousands of ballots set aside as “informal” because the voters haven’t been able or willing to complete a sequence of numbers.  Handwritten paper ballots are also sometimes hard to interpret.  Party scrutineers can have endless arguments about whether a number is a “1” or a “7”.
When you have a complex counting system, such as the Australian Capital Territory’s Hare-Clark multi-member electoral system, paper ballots can also be difficult to count by hand.  When an election result can hinge on margins of small numbers of votes, any errors in hand counts of paper ballots can see the wrong candidates elected.
At the 1998 ACT Legislative Assembly election, a full recount of over 75,000 ballot papers was conducted by hand, after it was found that only three votes separated two candidates at a crucial stage of counting.  The recount brought to light a small number of errors in the original count that were sufficient to change the final result.  The recount delayed the final result by 10 days while paper ballots were painstakingly examined, sorted and counted.  
Following the 1998 election, the ACT Electoral Commission decided that there had to be a more accurate way of marking and counting votes.  Following an Electoral Commission recommendation to the ACT Government, the ACT’s Electoral Act 1992 was amended in December 2000 to permit electronic voting and counting for ACT Legislative Assembly elections.
In October 2001, for the first time at an Australian parliamentary election, over 16,500 voters used a computer to cast their votes for the ACT Legislative Assembly.  
Electronic voting was provided at 4 pre-poll voting centres for 2 weeks before polling day for those unable to vote on polling day, and at 8 polling places on polling day.  A total of 16,559 electronic votes were taken, representing 8.3% of all votes counted.
The ACT Electoral Commission considered that the use of electronic voting and electronic vote counting was a success and a valuable improvement on democratic processes in the ACT.  The electronic voting system:
•	Eliminated the need for manual counting of electronic votes, thereby reducing the possibility of counting error and speeding the transmission of results;
•	Was reliable and secure;
•	Effectively eliminated unintentional voter errors;
•	Reduced the number of informal votes; 
•	Allowed blind and sight-impaired people to vote entirely without assistance and in secret through use of headphones and recorded voice instructions; and
•	Provided on-screen voting instructions in 12 different languages.

The electronic counting system also had significant benefits.  Preferences shown on paper ballots were data-entered by two independent operators, electronically checked for errors, and manually corrected if needed.  A total of 175,270 paper ballots were data-entered.  This data was then combined with the results of the electronic voting, and a computer program was used to distribute preferences under the ACT’s Hare-Clark electoral system.  
The electronic counting system:
•	Effectively eliminated errors such as incorrectly sorting or counting ballot papers;
•	Increased the accuracy of the election count;
•	Reduced the time needed to accurately count the votes and announce the election result; and
•	Increased the amount of information available about errors made on paper ballots by electors.

The electronic counting system also allows casual vacancies in the Legislative Assembly to be filled “at the touch of a button”.  Casual vacancies in the Assembly are filled by recounting the ballots counted to the vacating member at the original election.  As the electronic counting system captures all preference data on all ballot papers, the computer system can calculate the winner of a casual vacancy ballot in a matter of minutes.  This process used to take several days when it was done by hand.  This computerised method was used to fill a casual vacancy for the first time in the ACT in 2003.
There were some minor problems with the electronic voting system on election day.  The barcodes issued to voters were hard to use.  There were some minor system down-times when an item of hardware failed.  However, no votes were lost through computer failure and, on the whole, reaction to the new system was very positive.  For example, exit polling found that 89% of those polled found electronic voting easy to use.
So where will electronic voting and counting lead in the future?  Inevitably, internet voting is put forward as one way to progress electronic voting.
Parliamentary elections are a fundamental citizen-to-government transaction.  Ensuring the integrity of elections is essential.  The ACT Electoral Commission, in common with many other observers, considers that internet voting is not, at this time, a sufficiently secure way of conducting a parliamentary election and ensuring its integrity.
A recent security analysis of a proposed United States internet voting system, intended for use by overseas and military voters at the 2004 primary and general elections, concluded that the proposed system had “numerous … fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks (insider attacks, denial of service attacks, spoofing, automated vote buying, viral attacks on voter PCs etc), any one of which could be catastrophic.”  (A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), Dr David Jefferson et al., 21 January 2004, page 2,
 www.servesecurityreport.org/).

In addition to these security concerns, the ACT Electoral Commission also considers that another problem with internet voting is the need to provide a reliable identity system that would ensure that only eligible voters could vote.  As Australia does not have a universal identity system, providing each eligible voter with a unique identifier for electronic voting purposes in a secure manner would be a difficult and expensive exercise.
For these reasons the Electoral Commission recommended in its report to the ACT Legislative Assembly on electronic voting and counting system at the 2001 election (available at www.elections.act.gov.au/adobe/2001ElectionReview.pdf) that electronic voting should continue to be provided only at polling places using secure local area networks.
This report describes the electronic voting and counting system in detail, and sets out a series of options for implementing electronic voting at future ACT elections.
The most radical option proposed was to abandon the notion of a “polling day” and instead allow all voters to vote during a 3-week period at one of around 12 locations situated near shops and work places across the ACT.
If this change was made, it would be possible to give almost all voters the opportunity to cast an electronic vote.  This would have the potential of reducing voter errors, reducing the cost of elections and allowing a much faster election count.
The Electoral Commission put forward this model as the only one that could deliver electronic voting to a majority of voters.  The Commission considers that it would not be feasible to provide electronic voting facilities at over 80 polling places on just one day, because of the expense and the logistical difficulties involved.
However, moving to a 3-week voting period would dramatically change the nature of the political process, taking the focus of an election campaign away from a single polling day and spreading it across a longer timeframe.  
Not surprisingly, the ACT Government took a cautious approach and supported a continuation of the existing electronic voting and counting model, with delivery of electronic voting restricted to selected polling places on polling day and to pre-poll voting centres for those unable to vote on polling day.
For the 2004 election, due to be held on 16 October 2004, the ACT Electoral Commission has been given funding for providing electronic voting at the same number of locations as used at the 2001 election.
Following the success of the implementation of electronic voting at the 2001 election, the Commission hopes that a significantly higher number of voters will be able to use the system in 2004.
As for the more distant future, the capability of electronics is increasing at such a rate that it is probably too soon to anticipate what might be possible by the time the next ACT election is due to be held in 2008.  
It may be that, by 2008, internet security and identity concerns may be overcome, and internet voting might be a more realistic option.
Another option might be the introduction of cheap, mass produced electronic voting devices that would enable electronic voting to be provided to all voters at all polling places, leading to the demise once and for all of those old fashioned pieces of paper.

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