Now that the election is over, politicians can finally get down to working on the promises that they made to voters that got them elected. There is one issue that has both major parties in complete agreement: it took too long.
After conceding defeat to Malcolm Turnbull, Labor leader Bill Shorten told the media: “We’re a grown-up democracy, it shouldn’t take eight days to find out who’s won”. Bill believes that the act of counting paper ballots is to blame for the delay and that Australia should embrace electronic voting. Bill claims he wasn’t having a swipe at the AEC saying that he wasn’t taking away “from the professionalism of the Australian Electoral Commission, but it’s the 21st century”.
Addressing the media after his election win Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull agreed with his political rival about electronic voting stating that it is “something we must look at”. Electronic voting is something that the Australian Electoral Commission has been looking at since 2000. Representatives of the AEC travelled to the US in 2001 when electronic voting was used in the Presidential election.
Electronic voting is not something entirely new to Australia as many states have used it in state elections already. New South Wales has used Electronic Voting in their last two state Elections. Many claim that the political parties have implemented so many digital technologies in their campaigns that voting is the next logical step. Electronic voting will allow results to be almost immediate making sure that events like this last election are things of the past.
Another pressing matter for Malcolm is the regulation over the automatic phone calls and text messages that voters received in the lead up to the election calling them “extremely deceptive”. Mr Turnbull proceeded to say “They don’t have to have authorisation like a television advertisement or a newspaper advertisement, so they’re basically existing in a legal vacuum”. Not to mention causing great annoyance for the voters.