Australia to replace postal voting with i-voting platform

With a land mass of over 7 million square kilometres, Australia is the sixth largest country in the world. However, it is also one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world with a total population of density of just 2.7 people per square kilometre. Compare that to the approximately 32 people per square kilometre of the United States and the 349 people per square kilometre in India. What this means is that reaching each and every citizen can be quite a logistical challenge, particularly for residents of the Outback.

It's no wonder that the Australia Post is considering the elimination of traditional home delivery for mail, moving toward local “community mailboxes” instead. For some Australians, this could mean walking several kilometres simply to fetch or to send off any mail at all. The future of the postal service in Australia is uncertain and this could leave postal voting in jeopardy.

As it stands, Australians do have the opportunity to vote through the mail, but this configuration is rife with challenges. Sending blank paper ballots to citizens and then requiring them to send the ballots back can be costly and time-consuming, not to mention potentially unreliable as the ballots could be lost in the mail. Online voting can overcome many of the issues of postal voting, particularly for Australians living in remote areas. If they can get online, they can vote and the ballot can be received and tabulated instantly.

As with any change, there are risks and challenges associated with online remote voting system. Ian Brightwell, Chief Information Officer for New South Wales’ Electoral Commission, has indicated that Internet voting is worth the risk. By moving toward internet voting, the democratic process is far more accessible not only for residents of remote areas, but also for Australians who may be living overseas or travelling interstate. There is no requirement to return back to their home district to cast a ballot.

Australian authorities are not considering to replace traditional voting altogether; their goal is to provide a complimentary alternative that will enhance the accessibility of the electoral process. Brightwell foresees the iVote system accounting for no more than 10-15% of all ballots cast.

Internet Voting: unreliable actions to capture voters

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According to Andrew Ellis, director for the Asia-Pacific region for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, one of the four factors that influence voter turnout is accessibility to voting: to make available polling stations and offer alternate voting practices such as e-voting or vote by mail. 

It’s true that voter turnout is an important indicator of a healthy democracy, but this does not mean that it must be attained at any cost. Internet voting is one of the electoral systems that governments have been using to attract more voters, but its use places democracy at risk.

Estonia has been renowned for its early adoption of online options for its elections. Switzerland has followed Estonia’s example and has incorporated Internet voting into its system. This is not a rare decision for the country, keeping in mind its antecedents with postal voting: by increasing flexibility, Switzerland’s turnout grew from 30-35% in 1995 to 50-55% in the early 2000s. It was no wonder then that the electoral authorities would push this flexibility even further by taking advantage of communication technology. Nowadays, over 90% of Swiss voters use the Internet to cast their ballot. The question here is whether we can trust the results of these democratic exercises.

The idea in itself is good and the results are favorable in terms of voter turnout. However, it is not exempt from grave flaws. Internet voting is hard to monitor, and therefore it could be easily tampered with. A senior advisor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, when asked by the Election Assistance Commission to evaluate Internet voting, stated: “Internet voting systems cannot currently be audited with a comparable level of confidence in the audit results as those for polling place systems. Malware on voters’ personal computers poses a serious threat that could compromise the secrecy or integrity of voters’ ballots.”

With online voting, Switzerland remains devoid of a physical proof of each vote that can be audited at any given time. A voting platform that includes machines with paper trails (vote receipts) provides verifiable evidence for anyone to validate the results of an election if need be. On the other hand, Internet is largely accessible by anyone, and is in fact a harbor for identity theft. Some form of biometric registry and authentication is needed to prevent dishonest people from voting on behalf of dead citizens. This, too, is a problem that is solved with the use of voting machines.

We can’t be too flexible and forget auditability and integrity in the name of comfort. Voters need easy access to their right to suffrage, but the results need to reflect exactly the people’s intent as well as abide by the “one voter, one vote” principle. With its lack of verifiability, both of the voter and the votes, Internet voting can hardly guarantee either of these values.