In an article published on The Conversation, Vanessa Teague and Chris Culnane, from the University of Melbourne, and Rajeev Gore, from the Australian National University, explain that we’ll still have to wait before we can vote online at federal elections in Australia.
Online voting already exist in some Australian states, but the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has decided against letting Australian cast their vote online for federal elections.
The system is not secure
The most obvious argument against online voting is that the system is not 100% secure. Hackers could change the results or find out whom you voted for.
The code is not perfect
Another issue is that the system code can contain errors. In 2012, there was an error in the code of the online voting system for an election in Griffith, NSW, which meant that preferences where not attributed correctly. To avoid this, codes should be made public so several experts can test them.
We might never know if there’s an issue
It’s very hard to detect if something went wrong with the current online voting systems. Hackers could change results without anybody knowing. In Griffith, the error in the code was only found out years after the election.
It would be much easier for us to vote on our computer, from home, but technology is just not there yet. With online voting, we can’t guarantee that the results will be correct and that our identity will be kept private.
Read the full article here.
