Page 1488 - Week 06 - Thursday, 2 July 2020
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day. One consideration was that sharing pencils in voting booths was not a COVID-safe practice. Thus, installing as many electronic voting stations as possible, which have the ability to be easily wiped down between users, becomes a safer option. Thus, all pre-polling sites will have multiple electronic voting devices rather than just one electronic device available on each site, which has been the case in some previous elections.
The bill also enables voters with visual impairment or other physical disability which makes it difficult for them to vote in a usual way, such as attending a polling place or via postal vote, to vote by telephone. This was recommended in 2017 by the select committee inquiring into the Electoral Act, and COVID has meant that this option has become even more important. The Greens support this option and I note that the proposal includes a supervisory role for an additional person to be on the phone simultaneously to ensure that the vote is correctly recorded by the electronic voting system.
This real-time scrutiny or oversight will be very important as, in general, electronic voting does not have the same level of scrutiny undertaken on it as is applied to non-electronic voting papers. The electronic votes or electronic ballot papers are generally stored securely but are then able to be processed by the Electoral Commissioner simply by the press of a button, and the votes are not subject to the levels of physical and personal attended scrutiny that the old-school ballot papers are.
Another provision that was recommended by the committee in 2017 was enabling overseas voters to vote electronically, including people stationed in Antarctica. I understand that Elections ACT has been considering this, and it was proving too difficult. However, COVID has, amongst many other things, enabled this to be reconsidered, and the Greens are pleased that this is now able to happen for this election, for eligible voters. It will still be an offence for overseas voters to make misleading statements—such as whether they have previously voted in this election—to Elections ACT staff. It should be noted that postal voting will still be allowed in this election but that postal services are potentially more unreliable at the moment due to global transport issues during COVID and there is a risk of disenfranchisement with postal votes.
The Greens see these clauses as sensible amendments overall. We would be keen to see an evaluation of their use and impacts after the election to help the next Assembly determine whether they may be able to be adopted into our legislation on a more permanent basis for applications for future elections or whether they are simply interim measures to deal with the current global health situation. We have a number of other issues that we want to discuss in relation to electoral legislation; however, some of those issues will be discussed in the debate on the 2019 electoral bill, which, I believe, will be coming up later today. We will also be debating the 2018 electoral bill, which is currently being planned for discussion in late July.
The second area of change in the bill is to repeal a change to the Supreme Court Act that was made in the original COVID bill in April this year. That change allowed judge-only trials for serious offences that would usually require a jury trial if that was
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