Electronic Voting in Australia (Canberra Election)

[david_aked]

So Canberra recently had an election (Polls closed yesterday). This isn’t about who won or lost, but rather about Electronic Voting and how it’s done in Australia.

This is the first election I’ve ever been to that had electronic voting as an option. I’ve been voting for 24 years. (Compulsory voting too. So every election. State and Federal)

First a link from the ACT Electoral office:

Development of the system | Elections ACT

In there they discuss the development of the voting software. But here’s the fun part. Scroll to the bottom of the page. That’s right. The source code. Patch notes. The lot. The entire app is open source and independently audited before each election.

This was the easiest voting I’ve done. From the time I parked my car to the time I was getting back in my car was maybe 5 minutes. I had to walk about 40m (120ft) each way. Probably spent as much time doing that as I spent voting.

I thought this would be of interest to a few BB people. Especially the opensource aspect and the involvement with disability/accessibility communities to develop the software.

[Unintended]

So you’re telling me having the states pay roughly 1800 different companies to quickly cobble together bare-minimum spec software with no proper auditing to run on modified ATM machines is an inferior way of doing elections?

[david_aked]

Wait til you hear that in Australia we also try to make it easy for people to vote. There were 3 polling booths within 5 minutes drive of me and 1 polling booth was a 15 minute walk from where I live. (It was raining when I went so I drove). All were open 7 days a week for about 10 - 12hrs per day. We had about 3 weeks to vote.