Is the Senate's new vote capture system as risky as e-voting?
By Richard Buckland, Roland Wen | iTNews
[Opinion] How to maintain trust in a high-quality electoral process.
This article was co-authored by Ian Brightwell, former director of IT at the New South Wales Electoral Commission.
A computerised system is being used for the first time in the 2016 election count for all Senate ballot papers to capture voters’ preferences.
On the surface, this process, conducted out of the public gaze, may not seem to have significant risk compared to electronic voting and electronic counting. However, it has similar risks to full-scale electronic voting.
Electronic election systems can fail catastrophically (wrong person elected), irreversibly (hold the election again?) and invisibly (could I notice if my vote was counted incorrectly?). This is significantly different from commercial systems such as electronic banking.
Accordingly, electronic election systems need to be engineered extremely carefully to control the risk and rate of flaws and bugs, and be developed and operated openly with scrutiny so that bugs, errors and vulnerabilities, which will inevitably be present, can be detected before they have a difficult-to-reverse impact.
However, the new Senate vote capture system had to be built rapidly, with little time for design or testing, and is being operated in a way that allows only part of the process to be scrutinised.
There are risks that time pressures over the next few weeks may encourage shortcuts to be taken that would further reduce the level of scrutiny, and also reduce the integrity of the vote capture process. This new system may well prove to be the weakest link in the election process.
