Advocates for blind and low-vision people will take the New South Wales Electoral Commission (NSWEC) to Australia’s human rights watchdog, accusing it of unlawful discrimination over the removal of an accessible voting platform.
The NSWEC announced earlier this year that it would not be using the iVote online voting system for the looming 2023 state election, following technical glitches during local government elections in Kempsey, Singleton and the City of Shellharbour.
But advocates say no viable replacement has been planned for the online voting system, leaving a gap that will deny blind and low-vision Australians the ability to cast their ballot in a secure, secret and independent way.
Blind Citizens Australia (BCA), with the assistance of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (Piac), is now taking the state’s electoral commission to the Australian Human Rights Commission, complaining that the conduct amounts to unlawful discrimination.
They allege it breaches Australia’s commitment to the United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, which compels government to ensure people with a disability can fully participate in elections.
The case is seeking an urgent conciliation between the bodies ahead of the March 2023 election, and will pressure the NSWEC to reinstate a fit-for-purpose online voting platform for people who are blind or have low vision.
“People who are blind or vision impaired have a right to participate equally and freely in elections,” BCA’s chief executive, Sally Aurisch, said.
“The decision to scrap the only voting platform which truly allowed us to participate equally clearly disregards this right.”
The loss of iVote would force blind and low-vision people to vote using human-assisted telephone voting. That denies them the chance to cast their vote secretly and independently. More than 1,100 people who were blind or vision impaired used the iVote system to cast their vote in the 2019 state election.
Ellen Tilbury, a senior solicitor at Piac, said it was crucial to Australia’s democracy that all members of society were able to fully participate in the electoral process.
“For people who are blind and vision impaired, iVote, the electronic assisted voting platform, enabled them to do that really for the first time independently and secretly, without the assistance of another person,” Tilbury told the Guardian.
The Human Rights Commission cannot compel the electoral commission to set up a comparable alternative to iVote.
Tilbury said the purpose of the complaint was to ensure the NSWEC understood how vital such systems were to people with a disability.
“The key thing that we would like to see and that Blind Citizens Australia is the Electoral Commission really engaging with the concerns of the blind and vision-impaired community and working with them to develop an accessible voting option that meets their needs,” she said.
The NSWEC said it was aware of the complaint but was unable to directly comment on the case.
It said it was offering telephone voting in lieu of iVote, which it had done in previous local government and state government elections.
“The NSW Electoral Commission’s telephone voting option is based on the process used by the Australian Electoral Commission at federal elections,” a spokesperson said.
“The NSW Electoral Commission has met with Blind Citizens Australia and other blind and low-vision stakeholders from our Equal Access to Democracy reference group to discuss these developments and will continue to engage with these stakeholders in the lead-up to the state general election.”
The commission is also reviewing the use of technology-assisted voting for future elections, which will consider the suitability of various technologies in the electoral process.
