Slashdot Mirror
E-Voting Done Right - In Australia
tehanu writes "After all the furor over e-voting in America, Wired News has an article about e-voting done right in Australia. An important factor is that all of the software is open-source. The company responsible actually seems to have given consideration to the integrity of the democratic process, too - from the lead engineer: 'Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me -- someone with a vested interest in the project's success? A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to 'prove' the system's integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy.' They also have scathing words for Diebold: 'The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections. It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election.' In general they are 'gob-smacked' by the whole situation with electronic voting machines in the US right now."
meaning what? If the punch card machines had provided a human-readable printout that the voter could read, and realize that he/she accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan rather than Al Gore, there would have been no issue.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I dislike IRV as much as you do, but at the moment you can't blame Australia - no country is doing any better than IRV for their national elections.
Good methods (like Condorcet) should start in small organizations and work their way up, so that people are already familiar with how good preferential voting works.
Debian, for example, has already worked out lots of kinks and unfairness in their voting system by switching to Condorcet. Some "rules of order" books now advocate using Condorcet when possible. Encouraging this is what will get good preferential voting accepted, not pointing an angry finger at the government that's using a slightly better method than everyone else but still isn't good enough.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Australians invented the secret ballot - which was referred to originally as "the australian ballot". Australian electoral processes have complete preferential voting - or automatic runoff. Upper house ballots are generally on a multi-member electorate - for the Australian Senate, 12 senators are elected from each state at large, this way you get more than just the two major parties, and they generally hold the balance of power.