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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (28 November) . . Page.. 3261 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

apparently made a recommendation and the government has adopted it. We are now being asked to act upon that.

Mr Humphries provided brief lists of what the bill would allow. He told us that this bill is the first in Australia to allow voters to vote electronically, which I think we all knew. The bill tells us about the fundamental architecture proposed for the electronic voting system and it establishes principles for electronic ballots performing all of the electoral management functions possible with the use of ballot papers, so we are told.

Mr Speaker, the bill gives the Electoral Commissioner control over how the electronic voting system will operate. I do not argue with that; I have great faith in our Electoral Commissioner. The commissioner will have power to approve the software used to record votes cast using the electronic voting system. He will be responsible for ensuring that the machines and the software are kept secure and that they cannot be tampered with.

The commissioner has identified three requirements that in his view the system must fulfil for democratic elections; that is, secrecy, transparency and accountability. I can think of some more and I will mention them in a minute. In the last few weeks we have seen what happened when a recount became necessary in the US presidential election, using a mixture of machine voting and handwritten ballot papers.

To the commissioner's trio of requirements, I would add a few more: firstly, user friendliness. The whole kerfuffle in Florida has been about whether a hole was punched in a card. Obviously, it was not user friendly, because so many people particularly in one county made a major error in their voting. The system must be capable of being quickly and easily understood by people, particularly by non-English speaking voters, elderly people and people who have never used a computer. Believe it or not, there is still a lot of it in this country. We are going to ask them to vote electronically. Lots of people cannot even use an ATM machine; they do not want to use one, to be frank. But we are going to ask them to use a similar system to vote.

The machines must undergo careful user testing and finetuning before voters confront them in a real election. The software must present the choosing process to the voter in a way that is neither threatening nor capable of being misunderstood. Those are simple requirements, but satisfying them will demand great skills from the people who create the system. If you do not believe me, just look at what happened when computers were first introduced. Everybody thought using computers was going to be simple. It turned out to be a very complex business to use a computer to do what you actually wanted it to do. You have heard it before many times: garbage in, garbage out. Nothing has changed. Computer systems are complex and for some people they are difficult to understand.

The second requirement that I would add is clarity of individual ballots in the event that a recount becomes necessary. Recounts will become necessary here, just as they have in the past and as they have in other parts of the world. They should have a fail-safe capability, because electronic systems do crash. Duplication of the central server seems to be an essential requirement and both systems should operate in parallel in real time. That would be expensive; but if it is the wish of the Assembly to proceed to electronic voting, I think we have to accept that penalty.

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