Victorian Electoral Commission W
Submission to the
Inquiry into Electronic Democracy
January 2005
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Summary
This submission presents the views of the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) on electronic democracy specifically in relation to election processes. As background, the submission explains the role of the VEC and its current use of electronic technology in the following areas:
electronic electoral and enrolment administration;
online enrolment lookup;
electronic draw for ballot positions; and
electronic vote counting.
The submission then considers possible future applications of electronic technology in electoral processes. Firstly, the submission sets out a framework, from the VEC’s perspective, of what makes a change worth enacting. From the VEC’s point of view, changes are worthwhile if:
a)they solve the following problems with the existing system:
difficulties achieving access to voting and secret voting for people with certain disabilities (most notably visual and motor impairments);
accidental informal voting;
difficulties for people with poor English language skills; and
difficulties for people in remote locations within the State and for people outside the State at election time.
and/or
b)they move practices closer than the present system to attaining the following goals:
all people whom it is considered appropriate to enfranchise have the opportunity to vote;
voters vote free from coercion;
voters vote knowledgably, after due deliberation;
results are known in a timely manner; and
votes are recorded and counted as voters intend, and voters have confidence that this is so.
In light of this framework, the VEC presents an analysis of five possible changes to the conduct of Victorian elections:
internet and telephone voting;
voting on computer kiosks at polling places;
automated vote scanning;
voters adding themselves to the electoral register and changing their details online; and
the provision of candidates’ policy information online by the VEC.
A summary of the analysis is presented in Table 1 on page 30.
The VEC has reached the following conclusions:
there are currently significant security concerns with internet voting and low public confidence in it and, until these are resolved, internet voting should not be pursued other than on a very limited and controlled scale (e.g. for Antarctic voters);
computer voting kiosks at polling places would provide many benefits for people with various disabilities and for people with poor English, while avoiding substantial concern about security;
the VEC intends to explore the possibility of developing a prototype computer voting kiosk to be trialled on a limited scale in selected pre-poll and election day voting centres at the next State election;
- the VEC considers that the most benefit would come from targeting this trial at voters with disabilities and voters with poor English language skills;
- the paper printing of ballots for verification by voters would not be appropriate in this situation, particularly as one of the main groups at which computer voting would be targeted would be the vision-impaired;
- such a trial would be subject to:
- legislation enabling the electronic recording of votes at selected pre-poll and election day voting centres (the VEC has recommended that government consider enabling legislation providing for this);
- legislative change allowing early voting as of right (which the VEC has recommended to government already);
- the outcomes of a feasibility study to be undertaken by the VEC; and
- the provision of sufficient funds.
automated vote scanning by optical character recognition should be pursued if favourable results come from the AEC’s feasibility study of this facility;
the benefits of allowing people to modify their details on the electoral register online or enrol to vote online do not outweigh the potential risks; and
the VEC should not take on an increased role of providing candidate policy information.
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1The VEC’s roles and functions
The Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) undertakes a number of activities relating to elections in Victoria, as set out in the Electoral Act 2002 and elsewhere. These include:
the administration of the Victorian enrolment register;
the conduct of Victorian parliamentary elections and referenda;
the conduct of local government elections when appointed by councils;
the provision of other services using the information, material in its possession or expertise acquired in the performance of its functions (such as local government electoral representation reviews, jury lists, statutory, commercial and community elections, and work in support of the Electoral Boundaries Commission);
the promotion of public awareness of electoral matters; and
the conduct and promotion of research into electoral matters.
The VEC also notes its commitment to promoting cost-effective ways of improving access to voting for those for whom access is currently difficult.
The VEC is pleased to present this submission to the Inquiry into Electronic Democracy from the perspective of its involvement in the conduct of elections and in its capacity as a conductor of research into electoral matters. On these bases, the VEC can consider issues both from an operational perspective and in terms of their relation to a healthy electoral system. However, the VEC emphasises that its principle business is the conduct of elections, and that it has not had the opportunity to undertake comprehensive research into all possibilities and issues associated with this subject.
In providing comments, the VEC bears in mind its own possible future involvement in changes brought about by new applications of electronic technology. In particular, the VEC emphasises the importance of it maintaining complete impartiality in the conduct of elections and of ensuring public confidence in the electoral process. As part of maintaining public confidence, the VEC considers it essential that every election it conducts be treated with the same degree of importance and aim for the same degree of accuracy and security. The VEC therefore strongly rejects the notion of using local government elections as testing grounds for risky technology.[1]
Finally, the VEC emphasises that there are political dimensions to changes in the way that elections are run. However, these are matters for Government and the Parliament to consider, rather than the VEC.
2The VEC’s current use of electronic technology in electoral-related activities
The VEC has already adopted electronic technology to assist it in a number of areas. These changes have primarily brought about benefits from an operational point of view and all are concerned with behind-the-scenes aspects rather than the actual voting process for voters.
2.1Electronic electoral and enrolment administration
Election administration
Since 1998, the VEC has had an “Election Management System” (EMS) – a custom-built software application – which it has used in the preparation for and conduct of State, local government and other elections. EMS assists the VEC in the following elements of elections:
managing resources, locations and personnel;
administering nominations and candidate statements (including functions like checking statements for profanities), determining candidates’ orders on ballot papers (see Section 2.3), producing how to vote cards etc.;
tallying votes – including from data entered in computer counts (see Section 2.4) – and processing data from manual counts;
issuing and processing postal votes;
checking voters’ details against the rolls for absent and declaration votes; and
enforcing compulsory voting.
During the conduct of an election, much of the work is done in Election Offices (which are located within electorates or, in the case of local government elections, within municipalities), as well as in the VEC central office in Melbourne. EMS is accessible from all relevant locations, providing a centralised database with a consolidated view of the election that can be readily accessed from all offices. The software has also enabled a number of business functions to be undertaken more quickly and effectively than in the past.
There may be a view that the VEC should make the EMS source code available in the public arena as a method of ensuring transparency in the electoral process. However, only two of the many components of EMS have any bearing on election outcomes – the electronic ballot draw (see Section 2.3) and the algorithm within the computer count module that calculates the correct distribution of preferences (see Section 2.4). The VEC has taken a number of measures to ensure that these components do not bias outcomes. Firstly, the VEC has rigorously tested the software. Secondly, the VEC has had the software audited and certified by an independent expert agent. Thirdly, the VEC provides the raw data of voting preferences to scrutineers, so that they can calculate the results for themselves, thereby verifying the accuracy of the EMS application. Therefore, the VEC does not consider it necessary in this case to make the source code available to the public.
Roll administration
The VEC keeps a continually-updated electronic database of Victorian electors referred to as the enrolment register. The VEC produces a number of products from this register, including voting rolls for State and local government elections, jury lists and lists of electors for members of parliament and registered political parties. It is important for this register to be kept up-to-date given the possibility of by-elections being called at any time and the short time frame between elections being called and rolls needing to be produced. Rolls need to be ready in time to check the validity of nominations early in the election period, as well as being ready by election day to check the eligibility of voters.
Prior to 1993, the VEC was dependant on the federal enrolment register to produce rolls for State elections. Since 1993, the VEC has been able to keep an independent Victorian enrolment register, enabling it to add State-specific elements (e.g. State voting districts) to the data and to produce rolls for the elections it conducts. At the same time, though Victoria’s register is distinct from the federal register, its electronic nature means that the Victorian register can still be easily updated with changes made to the federal register. That way, voters need only modify their details or enrol to vote once for both Federal and State elections.
A number of other benefits come from the electronic nature of the register:
the various products created from the register can be produced quickly;
products can be provided to appropriate stakeholders electronically (e.g. to candidates for mail-outs);
voters’ details can be verified quickly and easily;
rolls can be scanned by computers after elections to identify people who have not voted;
when boundaries for voting districts are redrawn, voters can easily be re-coded from one district to another;
the possibility of directly scanning people’s enrolment forms (rather than keying in the data manually) exists, although it is not currently actualised;
statistical information can be readily produced for conducting State and local government boundary reviews to ensure that numbers of voters within areas meet legislative requirements;
the VEC has been able to implement a series of initiatives aimed at keeping the register as up-to-date as possible through comparing the register with data from other organisations such as VicRoads and the Residential Tenancies Bond Authority, which can be done automatically by computers; and
provisional votes can be verified on election night so that a result can be declared as quickly as possible.
These abilities have provided significant operational benefits and reduced costs. For example, the initiatives aimed at keeping the register up-to-date by electronic means have replaced door knocks, which were more expensive and, as they occurred less often, were less up-to-date. The electronic register has also recently enabled the VEC to introduce online enrolment lookup (see Section 2.2).
An additional functionality of the electronic register was trialled at the last State election. In selected polling places (including those interstate and overseas), rather than checking eligibility and recording who voted on paper electoral rolls, voters were checked against and recorded on a digital version of the rolls on laptops. In addition to providing faster and more accurate verification of who did and who did not vote, this was particularly valuable for absentee voters, as voters’ presence on rolls for other electorates, and exactly which ballot they should be provided with, could be instantaneously ascertained. The use of laptops in this way is something that the VEC is considering expanding at the 2006 State election.
An important consequence of storing the register electronically is that it facilitates the production of mail-out lists from the data. The Electoral Act 2002 makes specific provision for the supply of enrolment information to certain specified stakeholders. However, a freely-available electronic mail-out list could compromise the integrity of the enrolment register, as voters may be unwilling to enrol or keep their enrolment up to date due to concern about where the data go. Consequently, whereas in earlier times the register was sold to any interested party, the Electoral Act 2002 requires the Electoral Commissioner to balance the public interest in providing information with the privacy interests of electors when dealing with requests for the provision of enrolment information by parties other than those stakeholders specified by the Act. Now only very few agencies are provided with data from the register.
2.2Online enrolment lookup
Victorian voters can verify their enrolment details over the internet, from any location at any time convenient to them. Not only can they check that their personal details are correct, but voters can also check what electorates and wards they live in. This can be particularly important for people around the time of council elections, when people may or may not have to vote depending on which municipality and which ward they live in. It is also of assistance for people trying to find out who their elected representatives are.
The process occurs automatically, with no input required from VEC staff. This replaces the situation of voters needing to telephone the VEC during office hours and VEC staff verifying their details for them (more recently on computer and earlier on microfiche). This service enables voters to verify their details more conveniently and with far less labour required from the VEC. In the three weeks before the close of the 2004 council elections, 222 voters’ details were successfully looked up using the online enrolment lookup facility. This number will grow with publicity and increased public understanding.
To protect people’s privacy, a user has to enter specific details about a person into the program, more than one needs to enter if checking the register in person at the VEC office. Similarly, one can only enter incorrect data a certain number of times before the program refuses to allow the user to perform any more searches.
2.3Electronic draw for ballot positions
Legislation requires the VEC to randomly determine the order in which candidates are listed on ballots. Traditionally, this was determined by blindfold and bingo-barrel draw. However, the EMS software (see Section 2.1) includes the ability to provide a randomly-ordered list of candidates easily and in a matter of seconds.
The faster and easier production of the order of candidates has enabled the faster provision of information to the media during elections, and reduces the risk of problems (such as appearances of impropriety) coming from the blindfold and bingo-barrel method.
The facility has been used at the last two State elections. There is currently no legal basis for its use at local government elections, but the VEC is holding discussions with Local Government Victoria to address this. Some Returning Officers have expressed a preference for the traditional method, based on nostalgia for “the spectacle” of the traditional method and based on its more clearly transparent nature. That is, any viewer can see clearly that there has been no tampering with a bingo-barrel, but that cannot be readily seen with a computer. However, there have not been serious challenges to the electronic draw for ballot positions from candidates or from members of the public.
2.4Electronic vote counting
As part of the EMS software (see Section 2.1), the VEC can enter voters’ preferences into a database that then calculates which candidates have been successful. This has been particularly useful in electorates using proportional representation (many of Victoria’s councils and, from the next State election, regions for Victoria’s Legislative Council), where the calculation of results can be quite complicated. Teams of data entry operators can enter voters’ preferences into a central server over a secure LAN (all data entry is conducted at one location, so there is no need to pass information over potentially insecure lines).