Quote:A group of election security experts said after a deep dive into Australia’s electronic voting systems that they have “serious problems” with the accuracy, integrity and privacy with elections run by the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Electoral Commission.
 
The team of four cybersecurity professionals concluded that the ACT e-voting system errors did not impact any election outcomes, but could potentially sway future vote counts if left uncorrected.
 
Dr. Andrew Conway, Dr. Thomas Haines, Prof. Vanessa Teague and T. Wilson-Brown aren’t accusing anyone of intentionally sabotaging the Australian electronic voting and counting system (EVACS), but are asking for more transparency from the government into the system’s current source code.
 
“We believe that the internet voting system is new, and that the voting, paper-ballot scanning and counting modules have been completely rewritten since 2016,” they said. “But we cannot be certain, because we have not seen any of the 2020 source code.”
 
The researchers also recommended the use of paper ballots and the suspension of internet voting.
 
“Secretive, unverifiable systems like the ones used in the ACT 2020 election make it relatively easy to change the recorded list of votes cast, in a way that observers cannot notice,” they said. “It also makes accidental errors more likely to remain undetected.”