The shadow assistant minister for cyber security, Gai Brodtmann, has called for the government to classify Australia’s election systems as a “critical infrastructure sector” under the Trusted Information Sharing Network in order to “overlay the appropriate scrutiny and assurance mechanisms to assure the Australian people of the cyber resilience of their democracy”.
There has been a lot of interest suddenly in electronic voting, so I thought I would give some insight into what’s holding it back.
The former chief information officer of the New South Wales Electoral Commission who oversaw the development of its iVote Internet voting platform says that the partial use of electronic voting offers significant advantages, but doesn’t see a need for Australia to go ‘all-in’ with eVoting.
Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull and Labor leader Bill Shorten have both endorsed Australia moving towards the use of electronic voting for federal elections.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has started working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SMS Management & Technology for the hosting of its online digital services.