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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (28 November) . . Page.. 3264 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

public can use safe in the knowledge that it will give a right result and safe in the knowledge that, if a count needs to be reviewed or retaken, the system can achieve that simply, easily and with integrity.

Mr Speaker, I think that these matters are too important to be dealt with lightly and I am seriously concerned about what the bill and the minister have not said. I am not too concerned about what is in there, but I am concerned about what has not been said and I think that we need to deal with those matters before we put the bill into practice.

MS TUCKER (11.42): The Greens will be supporting this bill, although we will be putting amendments later. The bill amends the Electoral Act to allow for electronic ballot papers, electronic capture of ballot information, and electronic counting of ballots in ACT elections. It will also allow this data to be used to determine the filling of casual vacancies in the Assembly.

The bill does represent a very significant change to the way elections have traditionally been conducted using paper ballot papers and the manual counting of votes. I note that the ACT will be the first jurisdiction in Australia to allow electronic voting and that this bill goes far beyond what is allowed in other Australian jurisdictions for the electronic counting of votes. I am quite happy for the ACT to be a groundbreaker in many areas of government activity; but, at the same time, I think that we need to take a cautious approach to any reforms, particularly one which goes to the heart of our democratic system.

Mr Kaine has just expressed very clearly his concern about a number of matters that I think would be common to most concerns felt by anyone looking at these changes. Some of the concerns Mr Kaine raised have been addressed by the proposal by the commissioner, but there are still lots of important issues there.

In assessing this proposal for electronic voting, I think it is necessary to see whether it can provide the same benefits as the current paper voting system. Voting systems must be transparent and open to scrutiny in order to assure the public that their votes are counted accurately and reliably. There must be no opportunity for interference in the casting or counting of votes. Voting systems must also ensure that voters can cast their votes in privacy and that their votes can be kept secret.

I accept that there is a potential for electronic voting and vote counting to meet those criteria. I am aware that manual vote counting can be a very arduous process, with piles of ballot papers having to be manually sorted and counted. The distribution of preferences can be particularly difficult, with piles of ballot papers having to be regularly reshuffled into different piles for recounting.

I can understand the desire by the Electoral Commissioner to simplify this process and reduce the chance of error. However, at least the ballot papers are solid and can be observed by scrutineers and there is a physical trail by which votes can be tracked. If we moved to electronic voting it would be much harder to see these votes physically as they would be just electronic data inside a computer.

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