Everyone in Australia that’s a sad loser nerd is currently watching the AEC website to find out who is going to be the next barely managerial leader of this sunburned racist hellhole. A lot of people have jumped in with their takes because the AEC is taking longer to relocate ballots and do the counting. I have no idea why they’d want to be more careful about ballots.
A couple of particularly annoying dickheads out there have brought the multi-headed hydra of idiocy that is electronic voting to the fore. “Oh if we did this all on computers we’d have the answers now and be able to move on”. Basically the argument is because the current system is taking a while to count we should throw it out and put the entire thing on computers.
Here is why this is very stupid
The current system works
When you propose a new system, you usually need to recommend something that is much better than the current system to get up. E-voting is in no way better than the current system and here is why
- We have decades of experience dealing with paper voting and preference counts in Australia, we have NONE dealing with e-voting on a nationwide scale
- Paper voting is accessible to almost anyone. Many people don’t have access to technology, so couldn’t vote from home, so then you’d still need voting centres - which would need, what, desktop PCs there so people could vote? PCs are not as easy as a paper ballot.
- Sending voting information in the post or over the internet doesn’t guarantee the security of the ballot - mailboxes get stuff nicked from them all the time, particularly credit cards and pins. There is no security here. It is not as secure as a paper ballot.
- Counting. Intel had a huge fuckup in their chips back in the day that lead to them not being able to COUNT properly. Computer scientists literally can’t figure out numbers that stop rockets from exploding on launch. Computers cannot be trusted to count your ballot as effectively as multiple individuals and scrutineers by hand. What happens if there’s a bug in the aggregation component of the software and we have to re-run an entire election because a developer couldn’t get the data right?
- Transparency. The Australian Ballot is a system predicated on secrecy. Sure we can build a new system that takes a ballot from a logged in user that has to have some kind of identity (so we don’t get double voting) and then puts it into a count system. Or we could rely on our EXISTING system that ALREADY DOES THIS. Also, what happens if we have everything sent into a centralised DB and someone alters the values and changes the table and we have no traceability logs? We have to run the entire election. Say someone miscounts the paper ballots or puts the wrong number in the returns system - we can go back and re count the ACTUAL paper votes.
- Cost. Many people say e-voting would cost substantially less than an actual paper election, they may be right in terms of the fixed costs - but keep in mind as in point 2, we’d still have to have voting station and voting attendants and the rest of the kit and caboodle as well as transmission mechanisms - would we transmit ballot counts over the open internet or over a VPN? Sure its costlier to transport actual paper ballots but as in point 5, paper ballots are actually more transparent.
- Who builds it. Say we make it a glorious open source project on open source hardware built by out of work blue collar Adelaide workers who build some kind of hellish democracy booth for us all - but how can we trust it? OpenSSL is open source and it’s had tonnes of vulnerabilities so again, open source doesn’t mean it’s safer than a damn paper ballot. Government projects in this day and age don’t get built like this, it’s much more likely we’ll have some nightmarish Au-Vote my-gov hellscape built by KPMG/Deloitte/some other crook consulting agency for two gorillion dollars that people who try to vote after 4pm AEST get locked out of. Again, this is not better than paper ballots
- but but but what about the blockchain? Nobody cares about the blockchain except for idiot bitcoin nerds - shut up.
It’s going to cost more, be less secure, in the long run take longer to get the value because people won’t trust the outcome and be hideously opaque as to how it works. The AEC’s system is the best in the world and Australian Democracy is one of the best and most democratic systems in the world. Don’t let a couple of deadshits who just want to get ‘THE NUMBERZ’ faster fuck up a system that’s been working incredibly well for over 100 years. We ❤️ you AEC, don’t let the idiot tech fetishists force you to change a thing, keep countin those paper ballots and let us know when you get to the end of them.
