Electoral Commission Takes Modern Approach With Genesis

THE multimillion-dollar IT upgrade now rolling out at the Australian Electoral Commission is intriguingly titled Genesis.

But its not the start of a move to electronic voting. Indeed, Tim Pickering, AEC first assistant commissioner, electoral operations and chair of the Genesis board, has grave doubts about the practicality and security of e-voting.

"We are not proposing to incorporate e-voting into Genesis at this stage because we have concerns over the security over the internet," he says.

Genesis - General Enrolment, Elections Support and Information System - is a plan to modernise the AECs hardware and software applications, replacing 20-year-old legacy systems and future-proofing its architecture.

Originally the aim was to replace the commissions old mid-range servers. It became an opportunity to combine and replace its two linchpin software platforms - the electoral management system (ELMS), which provides election-day logistics and results, and the roll management system (RMAS), which tracks address details of all voters.

The $2 million-a-year project is in its third year and due for completion after 2010. The new servers will run the existing software systems on 2007s election day.

The roll will still be printed and voters names ticked off manually as they arrive at their polling station. Networking polling booths to the central enrolment database is possible and could help identification and minimise risk of multiple voting - but Mr Pickering says thats out of the question.

"Its just a matter of dollars and cost," he says. "We could do electronic marking of names now, but would have to replace $10 printed lists with $2000 laptops in 7700 polling places.

"We observed a trial of that in the UK in March and it was a very expensive setting-up of the wireless network in the borough and fraught with technical problems."

Mr Pickering says the priority is to ensure votes remain secret and tamper-proof.

"We will only enter into alternative methods of (federal) voting if we can assure ourselves the system can meet those requirements. Because we have used this system for so many decades, there are a number of checks and balances right the way through that minimise (tamper) behaviour. We have almost infinitesimal levels of people trying to fraud the system."

The commission will not make its code available for public scrutiny, but those involved in the electoral process are welcome to undertake external independent audits.

Genesis will interface with the $650,000 virtual tally room, which produces graphs and reports for the AEC website and the media on election night, but will not make provision for electronic tallying of votes.

Mr Pickering says: "It is up to the Government whether or not legislation is changed and trials are funded for us to experiment with different types of technology."

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