The one where we didn’t know the result for almost a month after we voted?

The Australian Electoral Commission said that taking a month before a result could be the norm for all tight elections in the future.

Some seats that have candidates winning by a large margin were quickly declared but other seats that were tight continued to be counted until the last vote before the inevitable recounts were requested.

With the modern world of technology we live in, I can’t help but wonder why it has to be like this.

Surely electronic voting would be a much more efficient method of voting.

It would save time and money and deliver a result almost instantaneously – which is difficult in our current manual system with our preferential voting systems.

I know that the last Council elections in NSW used a process whereby all of the voting slips that residents completed at polling booths were bundled up and sent off to a processing centre to be keyed into a computer to then have the computer compile the results.

That double-handling seems like a waste of time and money.

People are sensitive about their finances and their health but the latest reports from the ABS show that 72 per cent of Australians use the Internet to do their banking and, now that the government is offering the facilities, many people are using the Internet to lodge Medicare claims and manage Centrelink benefits.

If people are comfortable undertaking their activities via the Internet, lodging an electronic vote would not be a step too far.

There are twenty countries in the world where they have taken the step forward.

these include very diverse areas such as India; Kazakhstan; UAE; Germany; US and Estonia.

I am talking about electronic voting.

These countries don’t just have electronic voting but Internet voting.

It is almost embarrassing to me when I speak with my overseas family and friends that, a week after the latest Federal election, we don’t have a winner.

In Australia we have an old-fashioned idea that lining up in long queues and putting a mark on a piece of paper and then waiting for some indefinite length of time is a better method of voting than electronic voting.

In the 2010 Brazilian Presidential election, more than 135 million voters saw a result 75 minutes after voting closed because they used electronic voting.

As far back as 2004, India used EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) to allow 380 million voters to cast their ballots.

Estonia had Internet voting back as far as 2005.

To ensure residents were comfortable with the process, surely an initial system could still have polling locations with computers and paper voting slips.

You could walk in, vote electronically and fill in the paper voting slip.

Better still, as soon as you voted electronically and were happy with the entries, a paper slip could print out your vote that you then accepted and placed in the voting box.

Any questions over the accuracy of the electronic results would trigger a system whereby the paper votes were then counted to compare against the electronic results.

This process would still see polling booths setup across the country and, as an added bonus, if a person voted informally at the booth, a warning could be given to let the person know their vote was not going to count.

Some people deliberately vote informally but more informal votes are accidental.

Once this process was accepted, the next logical step would be to vote from the comfort of your own home.

Not only would this be more convenient for residents and save time and money, but imagine all the trees saved by not having voting papers handed out at polling booths.