Page 1180 - Week 03 - Thursday, 22 March 2012
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Augmented Electoral Commission followed the process prescribed in Part 4 of the Electoral Act 1992. The detail of the process followed is set out in the Augmented Electoral Commission’s Redistribution Report – ACT Legislative Assembly Electoral Boundaries Redistribution 2011, tabled in the Assembly on 27 October 2011.
(2) Section 36 of the Electoral Act 1992 requires the Augmented Electoral Commission to endeavour to ensure, as far as practicable, that the number of electors in an electorate at the time of the next general election of members of the Legislative Assembly will not be greater than 105% or less than 95% of the expected quota for the electorate at the time.
To estimate the number of electors anticipated to be on the roll at the time of the next election, the Electoral Commission requests assistance from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to calculate projected enrolment by suburb/locality at the time of the October 2012 election. This calculation was undertaken for the 2011 redistribution process by taking the actual enrolment statistics as at 30 September 2010 as the starting point for the calculations, and applying population projections to those enrolment statistics.
The enrolment statistics as at 30 September 2010 included those electors who were enrolled for the August 2010 federal election. It is estimated that at this time around 84% of eligible 18 year olds in the ACT were enrolled on the electoral roll. Basing redistribution enrolment projections on the state of the roll immediately following the roll close for a general election is desirable as it takes account of the higher level of enrolment compliance that is evident at the time of a roll close. As a result, the projections used for the 2011 redistribution were intended to take account of the likely level of enrolment of 18 year olds (and all other age groups) at the time of the 2012 election.
(3) Amendments to the Electoral Act 1992 would be required to implement on-line or internet voting for Legislative Assembly elections. Whether on-line voting is implemented in future is a matter for the Assembly. The Electoral Commission is unaware of any proposals to introduce on-line voting for the 2012 Assembly election.
(4) The ACT’s electronic voting and counting system, eVACS©, has been used at the 2001, 2004 and 2008 ACT Legislative Assembly elections. After each election, the Electoral Commissioner has reviewed its operation using feedback from the public, polling officials and in particular, the Electoral Commissioner’s ICT systems development reference group. This reference group includes representatives of political parties, MLAs, academia, disability groups and other relevant organisations, such as the Proportional Representation Society. The electronic voting system to be used at the 2012 election will be similar to the system used in 2008, with relatively minor and technical changes to the system made to enable the system to run on modern hardware.
(5) The electronic scanning of ballot papers and interpretation of preferences on those ballot papers using Intelligent Character Recognition technology was used for the first time at the 2008 election. The Electoral Commission has adopted as standard practice the conduct of reviews of its information and communication technology systems used at each Legislative Assembly election. The purpose of these reviews is to assess the effectiveness of the systems used and to determine if any improvements to systems and/or procedures are desirable. As discussed at page 19 of the Electoral Commission’s Annual Report 2010/2011, the review of the operation of the scanning system was undertaken as part of this standard practice of reviewing these systems. In
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