Electronic Voting !

It seems extraordinary that in this electronic twenty-first century we have just had an election and it has taken eight days to deliver a verdict on which political party will have the numbers to govern in the House of Representatives.   The laborious task of allocating preferences to determine the Senate outcome finality may still be a month away.

The government has spent billions to wire the country with the NBN network.  The computer has shrunk to a size that can be held in ones hand with the development of the Smartphone and this is certainly the age of instant messaging.  The postal network is on the verge of bankruptcy because we are both billed and settle our accounts online electronically.   Recording a vote in an election seems to be the last standout in the pen and paper era of yesteryear !

Both sides of politics are promising to give consideration to a move to electronic voting but it is certain that they will move with caution.   Few world countries have embraced this concept and so far it is only in place in Kazakhstan, India and Brazil.  We are warned that security can not be guaranteed and this has been aptly illustrated by the infiltration of crime in siphoning off money by deception.  Even the International banking world has fallen victim to clever scams in which millions of dollars have mysteriously " disappeared " !

Electronic voting would require some sort of personal input to a central data base.  Within minutes of the poll closing the power of the computer would deliver an instant result with all those preferences being cross referenced and allocated.   The problem is that at this stage of its development the computer world is not immune to " hacking " and we could not be sure that the final outcome was a true result.   It would be very suspect if the outcome was an unexpected result !

The clever people who devise computer systems doubt that the electronic world can ever be made totally secure.  Voters may be required to attend a polling station and record their vote on a secure line to a central tally room but it would be much harder to ensure security if each individual were allowed to record their vote using their home computer or Smartphone.

Politics is the source of both power and money.  Staggering sums are spent at each election to influence the vote.  There is no doubt that if we embraced electronic voting at least some people on both sides of the political divide would give consideration to using the electronic media to illegally swing the vote in their favour.   In the world balance of military power it is highly likely that a foreign country would seek advantage by manipulating the vote to bring a friendly regime to office.

Concern has been steadily mounting at the intrusion that electronics is making in the art of voting influence.   The power of the computer has been utilised to generate what are termed " Robo-Calls ". These can take the form of either text messages or voice calls sent to a broad spectrum of people and in many cases spread a damaging and consistent lie.   The source of this communication is well hidden and it can be very effective in swinging votes.

Eventually, cost and logistics will make electronic voting a necessity.  The problem will be to police the lines of communications to ensure that the end result delivers the votes that each voter intended !