Madness

The government is planning to trial electronic voting at the 2016 local body elections. This is pure madness. Quite apart from the fundamental security issues - overseas electronic voting systems have been shown time and time again to be insecure, allowing votes to be changed (and results manipulated) undetectably - there's that other problem: it fundamentally compromises the secret ballot. >Electronic voting means telling the government who you vote for, and them keeping an electronic record of it, perhaps forever (because you can never be certain that electronic data has been destroyed, whereas you can watch used ballot papers and record-books being incinerated). Worse, given the way government careless leaks our private information, we can't guarantee that this highly sensitive information won't end up in the hands of third parties (like ACC info does).

We can't trust the software. We can't trust the hardware. And we can't trust the government. Democracy is too important to be treated like this. We should not be placing the outcome of our democratic elections, or records of our democratic choices, in the hands of random script-kiddies (or worse, government officials).