The NSW Electoral Commission (NSWEC) has confirmed its electronic voting system, iVote, will not be used in the upcoming local government elections in September due to legislative restrictions.
NSWEC CIO, Ian Brightwell, told Computerworld Australia the agency had put forward several applications to use iVote and a combination of iVote and call centre based phone voting which were rejected by the government.
“The use of iVote or any form of phone voting for local government elections would require legislative change similar to the changes made to legislation for the parliamentary elections,” Brightwell said.
At this stage, the use of iVote is legislated to operate for all state elections, including both by-elections, unless the NSW Electoral Commissioner decides it should not be used.
“We will need additional funding approval to use iVote at the next state general election in March 2015 and we would expect to apply for this funding in early 2013,” he said.
Once funding approval is gained, the agency will move to begin a tender process for a supplier for the system’s core technology. The current system was provided by US-company Everyone Counts under a contract that will not cover the next state election in March 2015.
According to Brightwell, before the iVote system is next used it will undergo some updates, primarily around the vote verification process.
“Currently we only give a receipt which allows the elector to track that their vote has passed through our system and entered the count,” he said. “Best practice now is end-to-end verification of the vote.
At the time iVote system was initially procured, end-to-end verification was not an option as it poses numerous technical and electoral problems for which solutions are only now emerging, Brightwell said.
At the last NSW election, there were three times more voters using the iVote system than the electoral commission expected.
Despite this, the system will remain much the same from the user’s point of view, he said, with access to a Web browser or phone option which will use either dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) technology or a call centre approach.
Just 218 blind and vision impaired voters (of a total 2259 iVote users) used the system at the last state election in March 2011, which offered only the DTMF option. The number of such voters increased some 400 per cent at a recent by-election in Clarence with the advent of the call centre option.
Down the track, Brightwell did not rule out the development of an e-voting mobile application, as the number of voters using the Web interface via their smartphone continues to rise, but said it would not be without complications.
“We know changing the layout of the upper house ballot paper for a small screen would help both voting on smartphones and on Web browsers, but ballot layout is a delicate electoral issue.