The ACT's Electoral Commission will abandon an internet-based system to allow overseas voters to cast ballots online, citing increased security threats to electoral integrity facing this year's poll.
Electoral Commissioner Damian Cantwell said a risk assessment for the October ACT election had identified threats to electoral integrity and service quality as the most pressing issues facing the territory.
Preparation for the October 19 election is now in full swing, rehearsals taking place to test all systems from ballot printing, ballot scanning, electronic voting, counting and result publishing.
Mobile voting is also set to be introduced for homeless communities, and a low-sensory voting centre will be open for the voting period.
The electoral commission will also be required to manage complaints about misleading electoral advertising for the first time.
Mr Cantwell said the ACT was not immune to broader concerns and misinformation and disinformation.
"We're not immune to those threats to electoral integrity that we've seen materialise, not just in Australia but overseas," Mr Cantwell said.
Mr Cantwell said the Australian Electoral Commission, which manages the federal election and referenda, had seen people seeking to portray Australia's electoral system as broken by importing conspiracy theories and falsehoods, particularly from America.
"They talk as if the technology that has been used in American elections in some way or another is in use here. Well, it's not," he said.
"Again, we're not immune to those issues or risks and the reason is it's a connected society and Canberra is a particularly, I think, well-connected and informed society."
Mr Cantwell said if the electoral authority in one jurisdiction had its reputation bruised, that affected the reputations of all electoral authorities.
"A lot of our actions are aimed at ensuring that we put all those considerations in place and that we're doing what we can to promote the trustworthiness and integrity of our systems and processes, and people can trust the outcome," he said.
New political advertising laws will prohibit misleading claims for the first time in the 2024 election campaign. The territory's electoral commissioner will be required to determine whether authorised campaign material is misleading and set out what, if any, remedial action is required.
Elections ACT had previously raised concerns about being granted the power to make decisions about political advertising, noting it could diminish community perceptions of the body's independence.
But Mr Cantwell said the commission would be well prepared this election to consider political advertising, and had learnt from their South Australian counterpart.
"It's part of our rehearsals and preparations very much," he said.
Mr Cantwell said the legislation was challenging but the job of the commission was to now enact it.
"No point wishing it away. It is what it is and the government's made the call. So now we need to enable the team here to prepare for it, rehearse it and then for me to be able to make decisions around it," he said.
"And that's what we'll do."
Electronic overseas voting was introduced for the 2020 election and the commission recommended after the poll the system be reinstated for future elections.
In 2020, 1554 ballots were cast using the electronic overseas voting system.
Mr Cantwell stressed there had been no issue with the system in 2020 - "It was a successful, great deployment then" - but new advice had led him to conclude he could not satisfactorily mitigate the risks of using the system again in 2024.
Advice had been provided to Elections ACT by federal security agencies and ACT government ICT experts, he said.
"I think you can see it in the public domain: the issues of increased cyber threats and actions by state and non-state actors and those who would wish to, for a number of reasons, criminal, nefarious, malicious, whatever actions or intent they might have - that the risks to IT systems more generally have increased certainly since 2020," he said.
Electronic voting has been available in the ACT since 2001, and has been criticised by independent researchers.
Vanessa Teague, an associate professor at the Australian National University, criticised both the in-person electronic voting system and the overseas internet-based system.
"They were not even using end-to-end encryption for the votes [on the overseas system]. That is, anyone with (legitimate or illegitimate) server access could read everyone's vote, while it was still connected with the person's identity," Dr Teague said.
"I also think that the iVote crash in 2021 has shown that Internet-based elections can be very embarrassing for administrators, and very expensive when they have to not only re-run elections but also reimburse the campaign costs of those candidates who have to re-do their campaign."
Dr Teague the fundamental risk of the in-person electronic system was that it did not have a paper record to verify a person's vote matched the electronic record. Scrutineers also had no way to verify that every vote was properly included in subsequent processing.
"The right way to improve the security of ACT elections is to ensure that voters have a paper ballot they can verify, to make sure that their vote is what they wanted. Then there needs to be a proper process for auditing the electronic record against those voter-verified paper records," she said.
Dr Teague and Andrew Conway identified counting errors in the 2020 election as a result of the electronic voting system, but none were significant enough to affect the outcome.
Mr Cantwell said he was preparing for an increase in electronic voting, and did not expect to see an increase in demand for paper ballots despite increased cyber security and electoral integrity concerns in the community.
"I think on the trend that we will observe for a number of elections now, where EVACS is available and people know about it, it's known to be a trusted and expeditious means of meeting their obligations," he said.
Mr Cantwell said the commission never took public perception for granted and would work hard to ensure Canberrans could trust the outcome of the election.
"That's not to say people are not entitled to challenge us or to ask us questions," he said.
"And we invite that. It's all part of the critical review of our systems and processes, and our scrutiny processes."
