Electronic voting in federal elections too risky, warns Aust'n expert

An Australian computing expert has urged the country's electoral officials not to embrace online voting because of fears it could corrupt the electoral system.

Dr Vanessa Teague, from the University of Melbourne, has warned the Australian Electoral System that the high-tech e-voting solution is too risky.

"There are three reasons why Australia shouldn't move to an online voting system: the system might not be secure; the code might not be correct; and, most importantly, if something goes wrong, we might never know," Teague said on Thursday in an article published in Election Watch, a University of Melbourne publication.

But as the world continues to engage in the revolutionary digital age, many analytics believe the pencil-to-ballot voting system is one that is now out of date and should be superseded by an e-voting format.

New South Wales has welcomed the innovation system, but Australians are unable to vote online at the federal level. The next federal election is to be held on July 2.

The 2013 Western Australia Senate election was conducted in the old-fashioned, manual way, but some paper ballots were lost which prompted a rerun, sparking further pressure for Australians to move to an online voting system.

In the Electoral Matters Committee's 2014 report, several problems with electronic voting, including confidentiality, anonymity and cost, were noted.

"After hearing from a range of experts, and surveying the international electoral landscapes it is clear to me that Australia is not in a position to introduce any large-scale system of electronic voting in the near future without catastrophically compromising our electoral integrity," Committee chairman Tony Smith MP said in the report.

In last year's New South Wales election, more than 280,000 votes were received via a personal computer or mobile phone device. This was the biggest use of online voting in a compulsory election in Australia.

Teague and fellow computer security research, Alex Halderman, found "a serious security vulnerability" in the NSW iVote system, which was used in the 2015 election.

According to their research, an insecure third-party server imported a code into the voting session. And despite eventual repair of the breach, around 66,000 votes had already been received at that stage. This meant an Internet hacker could have exposed e-votes, altered them and possibly compromised the iVote's verification.

Despite her reservations of the process, Teague said secure electronic voting is possible, but only in a polling place. The two researchers worked with the Victorian Electoral Commission to develop a system which could run at a state level anywhere in the world.

"Under this system, voters cast their votes at polling places using a computer. The system provided evidence to each voter that their vote was recorded as they intended and properly included in the count. It also provided evidence to scrutineers that all the votes were properly processed, without revealing individual votes," she said.

"Receiving votes from the Internet is the easy part. Proving that you got the right result, while keeping votes private, is an unsolved problem." Enditem