MELBOURNE, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- A parliamentary inquiry into electronic voting in Australia's Victoria has begun just weeks after the first online national census was plagued with issues.
The Electoral Matters Committee heard submissions from electoral commissions, technology experts and community advocacy groups as it tried to determine if electronic voting in Victoria is a realistic possibility.
The University of Melbourne's Vanessa Teague and Professor Rajeev Gore from Australian National University (ANU) said the failure of the online census should act as a warning to not ask Victorians to vote using a similar system.
"The potential advantages of electronic voting are obvious, but the risks are not," Teague and Gore said in their written submission to the committee as reported by News Limited on Monday.
"Voters' democratic rights are not enhanced if their votes can be manipulated, the privacy of their vote can be violated, or if the system fails to provide evidence that withstands a legal challenge."
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was forced to give Australians an extra month to complete their census, a survey taken of Australia on any given night once every five years, after an alleged hack took the website offline for most of the proposed August 9 census date.
"In a single fell swoop the appalling incompetence of ABS statisticians has dealt an absolute blow... to the future of online voting," David Glance, director of the University of Western Australia's Centre for Software Practice, told News Limited in August.
Calls for the introduction of electronic voting in Australia were renewed following the July federal election which was left hanging in the balance for weeks after polls closed due to a long vote counting process.
In a written submission to the committee the Victorian Electoral Commission recommended that voters with vision or motor impairments or poor literacy skills be allowed to access remote electronic voting.
