Certified Electronic Lists reduce multiple marks according to Australian Electoral Commission.
They'd need funding to increase electronic certified lists 10 fold but haven't been allocated sufficient funds to do it all at once .
Mr Rogers (Electoral Commissioner, Mr Tom Rogers): Whether we ever get to 40,000 devices—I'm not sure it actually represents value for money.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentar...y?bid=committees/estimate/25206/&sid=0008Mr Rogers :
At the last election almost a third of votes, I think, were issued through electronic certified lists. I think we deployed over 4,000 certified lists.
It's a good technology.
It was our initiative to introduce those to start with. At the 2013 election—I may have the figures wrong—I think we used about 400 of them or thereabouts at that event, and we've multiplied them over that period of time.
One of the big things that we found that electronic certified lists do is actually improve queue timings quite radically. At the last election, citizen satisfaction with queue timings went from 78 per cent to something like 92 per cent, because it's a quicker way for us to do business.
At the same time, it can assist in preventing multiple voting.
To be very clear, no citizen is turned away if they turn up to a polling place and say that they haven't voted.
But if we've got a flag on an electronic certified list that says that someone has voted, that individual is sent over to the table to do a declaration vote, so that we actually have a written vote in an envelope. Obviously, only one vote's included in the count, and we do the check after the event. I think back to the Griffith by-election, which was the first election where we used only electronic certified lists, and it had a big impact on the level of alleged multiple voting.
Right now, we're working on a project to explore ways in which we can roll out electronic certified lists to as many polling places as we can, but the cost of rolling those lists out would be mammoth.
