They Vote For You and the Open Government Partnership (OGP) – Continued

By Mackay Ash | Published: April 7, 2016

Back in mid-March, we announced that They Vote For You was getting into the Open Government Partnership (OGP) action. We started by developing policies related to the Anti-Corruption Working Group:

We then looked at the Public Resources Working Group and came up with these:

This week we’ve been going through our list of over 90 existing policies that touch on these and the other three working groups: Access to Information, Civic Participation and Public Services. Here’s what we found:

Do any of these inspire you to get involved with the OGP process?

 

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OpenAustralia Foundation in residence at Frontyard Projects

By Henare Degan | Published: April 1, 2016

A photo posted by FRONTYARD (@frontyardorg) on

A few weeks ago my partner Lisa and I were checking out the Marrickville Open Studio Trail (MOST). MOST is a wonderful initiative organised by my local council, Marrickville Council, where over 50 local studios and galleries have open days over the one weekend.

Being the artist of the two of us, Lisa had picked a few places she wanted us to visit. The first place we visited was Frontyard Projects. As I walked around the gallery, and got a sense for what they do, several ideas started to come together (the Marrickville cà phê sữa đá must have kicked in!).

Years ago OpenAustralia Foundation co-founder Kat had the idea for an “Office of Ideas – a public space for public data work”. This would not only be a physical office space for the Foundation but also an open office where anyone could drop in and hack democracy.

My experience being on the jury for last month’s Walkley’s Editors Lab hackathon had reminded me of how much I like a good hackfest—and we hadn’t yet planned one for this year.

Frontyard offer mini residencies to artists and non-artists. In return for the space and time to think, Frontyard asks for a small gift of time from each resident. That could mean anything from giving a public talk, sharing skills via a workshop, symposium, film night, performance, or something else important for the community.

So I thought – could we combine all of these things?

After a quick chat with the lovely people that run Frontyard the answer was a resounding yes! So from the 11th of April OpenAustralia Foundation will be in residence at Frontyard Projects, culminating in one of our renowned hackfests on the 23rd.

During our residency we’ll have an open office and we invite anyone to join us to hack, share ideas and skills, all while we prepare for the hackfest. If you’d like to join us just pop down to 228 Illawarra Rd, Marrickville NSW 2204 weekdays between 10 am and 4 pm from the 11th to the 22nd of April.

As PlanningAlerts is our most locally focussed project it makes sense for us to work on that at the hackfest. During the Frontyard PlanningAlerts Hackfest we’ll expand the coverage of PlanningAlerts by writing scrapers, work on the core project, and hopefully create some art with public data. We hope you’ll join us – please RSVP to reserve your spot and so we can organise catering.

And yes, we even have some artworks in mind during our residency so make sure to come by and check them out.

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What we’ve been up to so far in 2016

By Henare Degan | Published: March 30, 2016

It’s the eve of our second planning session for 2016. Tomorrow we’ll be deciding what to work on for the next 3 months and scheduling it in. We’ve been getting in the habit of writing a blog post with a quick retrospective of our previous quarter and laying out the plans for the next one.

Unfortunately we didn’t do this at the start of 2016. This was partially because we got wrapped up in time-sensitive work for the Open Government Partnership. But it was mainly because we didn’t come out of the several planning sessions we had with a rough plan for the year, as we did in 2015.

This turned out to be fortuitous because the last three months have seen us work on a number of things we didn’t and couldn’t plan for. It’s good that we can continue to be flexible but tomorrow we intend to end up with a detailed plan for the quarter and complete our rough plan for the year. Wish us luck.

Hang on, what about the end of 2015?

That’s a good question. Let’s do a quick review of what we planned for the last quarter of 2015 and how it worked out.

A chart of how much time we spent on each project during Q4 2015.

Our time tracking for 2015 Q4 by project

We did another great scraping workshop. They’re undoubtedly valuable and we enjoy doing them but they’re heaps of work and financially marginal for the Foundation. We’ll be giving them a break for a while.

They Vote For You for Ukraine, or should I say Вони голосують для тебе? It’s launched, our partners are thrilled, we’re thrilled, and we’re certain the people of Ukraine will be thrilled. This is one of those things we really should blog about sometime soon. It’s an amazing example of international civic tech collaboration.

PlanningAlerts – Write To Your Councillor progressed a lot but not as much as we planned. We’ve rolled it out to 3 authorities and we’re already seeing citizens and councillors have helpful discussions about planning applications – that’s really exciting. We’d hoped to have more of the infrastructure completed but even now that’s still pending.

Charging commercial users of PlanningAlerts. We said this quarter would be the decider. It’s decided – we’re not working on it any more. We already have a way forward though and I hope we can write more on this soon and go ahead with our plan.

The server upgrade. Oh the server upgrade. We bloody did it! That’s a huge amount of technical debt paid off and has made all of our projects more secure and sustainable.

We said hi to Melbourne. The meetup was massive, we met loads of people, and the relationships we forged are already proving mutually beneficial. Win!

And finally we had our end of year celebration in a park on Sydney harbour. It was a beautiful day and the turn out was great, with many humans and several dogs. We ate some great food people had gone to a lot of trouble to make or bring and had a few drinks. We’ll be doing this again for sure, it was such a nice way to celebrate our year with many of the people that helped make it happen.

The first 3 months of 2016

Phew. Hang on, we need a breather after all that. Ready? Okay, let’s go.

A chart of how much time we spent on each project during Q1 2016.

Our time tracking for 2016 Q1 by project

I’ve split everything we’ve done in the last 3 months into projects but I’ll start with some stuff that didn’t fit into those categories:

  • We ran 2 pub meets in Sydney which were really good and had a great lineup of speakers each time
  • I gave a talk with volunteer Keith Pitty at the Sydney Ruby meetup, RORO, about why you should contribute to OAF projects and how you can get involved
  • Luke gave a workshop at the Walkley’s Editors Lab hackathon and I was on the jury
  • Luke presented at WDYK Sydney March 2016 and told the crowd to roll up their sleeves when they see a design problem
  • We dealt with 389 support email threads
  • Wrote more rada4you.org scraper documentation and assisted our local partner with scraper debugging
  • Wrote 7 blog posts and sent almost 5,000 emails about them to interested people

PlanningAlerts: 37 scrapers worked on by us and volunteers. Maintenance including bugfixes and adding the ability to disable an API key after some abuse of the API. We had to manually deal with a lot of comment abuse on a few applications.

Write To Councillors: 3 trial councils rolled out and working. Added comment performance charts to ensure the work we’re doing is having a positive impact. Started creating Popolo data for Australian councillors. Added the ability to load councillors from Popolo data. Opened 5 pull requests on WriteIt project. 3 pull requests merged into everypolitician-popolo gem.

morph.io: Merged pull requests from 5 volunteers including adding support for webhooks and several bits of node.js documentation. Maintenance including bugfixes and ensuring we have enough disk space. Added a new sysadmin.

Right To Know: Work with mySociety on site promotion stuff including AdWords. We were on ABC Radio’s PM programme talking about a specific request and the importance of transparency and our approach to it.

They Vote For You: Merged a helpful bugfix from a volunteer. Researcher Micaela continues to summarise dozens of divisions and maintains policies. She’s also created policies specifically for OGP topics. We wrote a Senate submission about voting in parliament.

Open Government Partnership: Kat was sent to represent Australia and the civil society network at the OGP Civil Society Leaders’ Workshop in The Hague. We set up the Australian OGP Civil Society Network, including creating the website and network collaboration tools.

OpenAustralia.org.au: Update data for 2 resigned MPs and their replacements. Removed the mySociety research experiments we started last year.

Election Leaflets: Began talks with a potential media partner about running it for the upcoming federal election.

OK, what’s next?

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Scrutinising the audience experience of Election Leaflets

By Erietta Sapounakis | Published: March 29, 2016

I relish elections. The political commentary, the placards, the barbeques and the jam stalls on the day. And I love election leaflets. Surprisingly still relevant artefacts of the democratic process that have maintained a unique style of kitsch for as long as I can remember. And so I got involved in OpenAustralia Foundations’ Election Leaflets, first as an enthusiastic contributor then as a volunteer Twitter moderator.

I monitored the Twitter feed looking out for tweets to promote and questions to answer, and I developed a hunch about who was contributing. Many seemed already familiar or affiliated with the OpenAustralia Foundation and I was curious about the experience of new users. I decided to investigate further and experiment with using Twitter as a source of “voice of the customer” data.

Screen Shot 2016-03-29 at 2.22.03 pm

I manually screenshot 17 months of relevant tweets from 28 April 2012 through to 30 September 2013 which was just after the federal election. (Screen scrapers could only yield one week old results due to constraints of Twitter’s search API.) I then analysed this sample of 132 raw data points from approximately 70 unique profiles. The findings were positive but also revealed a break point in the experience stopping engaged Twitter followers from becoming active contributors.

On the positive front the findings showed plenty of advocates of the OpenAustralia Foundation and Election Leaflets who encouraged others to share content, promoted the Twitter profile, were proud of their own contributions, and used the tool as it was designed – to scrutinise promotional electioneering material.

But there was evidence that despite this activity some followers could not easily work out how to contribute expecting to be able to add content directly to the Election Leaflets Twitter feed somehow. This experience was best typified by one Twitter follower, a journalist who needed to ask for help to work out how to contribute leaflets.

margotsjourney

There were also indications that richer and more instructive experiences needed to be created for would-be volunteers to join the community and participate across all channels – from the Election Leaflets site, to Twitter, and the Google Group.

Election Leaflets had created a community of advocates and influencers but the evidence showed that it was hard for the uninitiated to contribute. The conversation and engagement that was generated by the leaflets was all on Twitter – there was nothing connecting Twitter to the site and nothing connecting the site back to Twitter to demonstrate the impact that Election Leaflets was generating.

What can we learn from this? Election Leaflets had proven itself as a successful and even fun tool. The next step for it and perhaps similar projects is to develop as an end-to-end experience. For Election Leaflets this could mean borrowing some techniques from content marketing and creating specific landing pages for new users coming to the site from Twitter outlining how it all works. It could include specific onboarding experiences for the general public and journalists. The pride and fun of people contributing could be harnessed by encouraging healthy competition and bragging rights. Further research and experiments would no doubt yield more ideas.

Election Leaflets was a minimum viable product that successfully made election ephemera easily accessible online. Its future may be at a cross roads – the National Library also archives election pamphlets although it doesn’t yet publish content live for either enjoyment or scrutiny. The next step should its evolution continue will be for us to create a minimum viable experience for both familiar and new users to meet the needs of the community as a whole.

Posted in ElectionLeaflets.org.au | Leave a comment

Our submission to the Inquiry into procedures for counting and reporting the vote in a division

By Luke Bacon | Published: March 17, 2016

If you follow this blog, or our projects like OpenAustralia.org.au or They Vote For You, you’ll know that we work hard to increase peoples’ access to information about what goes on in Parliament. We recently wrote about problems with the way votes are recorded. The lack of a complete record of voting makes it really hard for you to find out what your elected representatives do on your behalf. This problem needs to be fixed.

The Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Procedure is currently holding an inquiry into using an electronic voting system to record divisions (votes in Parliament). We think electronic voting is an important solution to some of the existing problems.

Here’s the OpenAustralia Foundation submission to the inquiry:

Dear Committee Secretary,

The OpenAustralia Foundation welcomes the opportunity to make submissions to the Inquiry into procedures for counting and reporting the vote in a division. We congratulate you for taking the time to review this aspect of operations as it has the potential to deepen our Parliament’s ability to fulfil its legislative, oversight and representational responsibilities.

Who are we?

We are a pioneering charity whose vision is to transform democracy in Australia by giving all Australians the tools they need to effect the change they want. We create technologies that encourage and enable people to participate directly in the political process on a local and national level.

One of our projects is a website, They Vote For You, that helps Australians keep track of how their federal representatives vote on issues they care about. The website tracks how politicians vote and draws on currently available voting data from the Parliament’s official records.

What is the problem with current procedures?

Under current procedures, Australians cannot look at the official records of Parliament and easily see how their Members of Parliament (MPs) have voted on a given matter. That is a giant transparency and accountability problem.

Only divisions are recorded in the official record and yet most votes take place ‘on the voices’. This means that many bills pass through the House of Representatives without any written record of how each MP voted. Without this information, Australians cannot hold their MPs accountable. For a good overview on how voting data is currently recorded in Parliament, and the impacts of this system, see our blog post They Vote For You – Finding the real facts about voting.

Solutions

The problem of accountability could be solved if all or most votes were taken by division rather than ‘on the voices’. This is impractical under current procedures as divisions take up considerable time. However, electronic voting can change that.

Electronic voting would allow MPs to vote by simply pressing buttons on a screen which cuts out the time spent moving across the chamber, counting and recording, and then everyone returning to their seats. This time saving could allow many more votes to be officially recorded. We believe that all votes that are crucial to the passage of bills (for example, second reading and third reading votes) should be recorded so that everyone has access to a more accurate record of how their representatives vote on their behalf.

The 2012 Declaration on Parliamentary Openness supports electronic voting for this reason. Article 20 calls for the use of roll call or electronic voting in most cases and calls for “maintaining and making available to the public a record of the voting behavior of individual members in plenary and in committees”. Our Foundation has endorsed the Declaration alongside many of the world’s leading parliamentary monitoring organisations. Over 170 organisations have now registered their support.

We believe that the arguments against electronic voting that were raised in the Committee’s June 2013 inquiry Electronic voting in the House of Representatives can be readily overcome. One concern was that electronic voting would lessen the visibility of other MPs’ decision-making in the House (section 3.6, 2013 inquiry report). This can be resolved by using, for example, coloured lights to give a clear visual representation of the MP’s vote to the rest of the chamber.

This particular solution is used in the Irish Dáil Éireann (Ireland’s lower house), where a large display panel, that reflects the horseshoe layout of the chamber, lights up in green or red to show how each Member is voting. The display panel is positioned above the seat of the Ceann Comhairle (the Chairperson or Speaker). You can learn more about this system in the press release announcing its introduction in 2002 at or in the Dáil Éireann Standing Orders. Once voting records are captured as digital data in real time we can create all kinds of new, helpful ways to see how how MPs vote – for those inside and outside the House.

Further, the concern that electronic voting would take away an important opportunity for MPs to “move away from their allocated seats and speak informally to their colleagues and Ministers” (section 3.40, 2013 inquiry report) can be overcome by introducing more informal discussion opportunities during breaks. Time saved through the introduction of electronic voting could be allocated for this for example.

Summary

Electronic voting can improve transparency and efficiency in the House of Representatives. It will resolve a major gap in the current counting and reporting procedures by allowing the House to produce a fuller voting record. This record will be used by Australians to hold their MPs accountable, and will become an important historical record of MPs’ contribution to our democracy. Without this level of accountability, our democracy remains open to abuse by politicians who say one thing to their electorate but vote quite differently within Parliament.

The OpenAustralia Foundation supports the introduction of electronic voting into the House of Representatives and looks forward to the opportunity to discuss this further.

Yours Sincerely,

Katherine Szuminska and Henare Degan
OpenAustralia Foundation

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They Vote For You and the Open Government Partnership (OGP)

By Mackay Ash | Published: March 16, 2016

Homepage TVFY

In July Australia will submit its first National Action Plan to the Open Government Partnership (OGP). These National Action Plans are lists of concrete commitments to advance open government in an OGP member country over a two year period by improving transparency, participation, and accountability. The commitments are co-created by the government and civil society.

The OpenAustralia Foundation plans to contribute a commitment around greater parliamentary openness. You can read about how we’re going about it, and how you can create your own commitment, in Kat’s recent blog post How to make an OGP National Action Plan commitment.

You might be able to tell that we’re quite excited about the OGP process. In fact, we’ve joined a collection of civil society organisations to set up the Australian OGP Civil Society Network. Through the Network you can join a Working Group that interests you and help create ambitious commitments for the our OGP National Action Plan. There are currently five Working Groups:

  1. Access to Information;
  2. Anti Corruption;
  3. Civic Participation;
  4. Public Resources; and
  5. Public Services.

They Vote For You is also getting in on the action. We want to help the Working Groups see how our elected representatives are voting on these subjects in Federal Parliament. We’ve started with the Anti-Corruption Working Group and already have two new policies to They Vote For You:

Take a look at how your representatives voted and join the Anti Corruption conversation. Or maybe one of the other Working Groups tickles your fancy?

Posted in OpenAustralia Foundation, They Vote For You | Tagged , , , | 1 Response

How to make an OGP National Action Plan commitment

By Kat Szuminska | Published: February 23, 2016

Start Starting Line Americorps Cinema Service Night Wilcox Park May 20, 20117

Photo by stevendepolo on Flickr (cc by 2.0)

Australia has only 5 months to define ambitious open government reforms for its first Open Government Partnership (OGP) National Action Plan. In this time we must gather raw ideas, research, discuss and deliberate them into fully developed, budgeted, and agreed commitments. In July the government must announce the commitments it will implement over the next 18 months.

Defining concrete commitments, building support for them, and negotiating with our government is the most important work our Civil Society network can do right now. Unfortunately, it’s not very clear how to actually do this yet. Last week, Henare, Luke, and I got together to discuss what the OpenAustralia Foundation might do to make the process clearer. We soon realised we didn’t really know what the process was ourselves.

To demystify it, for ourselves and others in the network, we’ve decided to jump in and have a go. We’ll create one commitment in an area we care about and document the process for everyone. We invite you to collaborate with us. Join us on the journey, and together we’ll show how one group of citizens creates an action plan commitment towards reforms that make a big difference in our community.

At the OpenAustralia Foundation we work to make parliament more open through projects like They Vote For You. We see some clear gaps in Parliamentary openness that our first National Action Plan can address, so that’s the area we’ll focus a commitment on.

To start things off here’s the process we plan to go through to create our first OGP National Action Plan commitment:

  1. Define the problem – what is it? Who else cares about this?

  2. Work out what makes an effective commitment

  3. Develop the commitment according to the OGP’s  template

  4. Submit commitment somehow – how best to do this? By when?

I’m off to get started now. We’ll keep you posted about what we learn along the way. Drop in or lend a hand in this Open Parliament discussion.  Or find out more at our pub meet tonight in Surry Hills.

Posted in Announcement, Open Government Partnership, Open Government Partnership, OpenAustralia Foundation, OpenAustralia.org, They Vote For You | Tagged , , , , | 3 Responses

You Saved the Historic Alexandria Hotel – Go You!

By Henare Degan | Published: February 10, 2016
A photo of the current Alexandria Hotel and an artists impression of the proposed development

The Alexandria Hotel and what could have been

In June last year a development application was submitted to demolish the Alexandria Hotel, an old pub in inner-Sydney, and replace it with a new apartment block. Hundreds of people in the local community opposed the loss of this historic building and over a quarter of those people used PlanningAlerts [PDF] to have their say.

Yesterday a commenter passed on a letter from the City of Sydney. In it the council conveyed what appears to be the final word on this development – that the applicant has discontinued their appeals against the application being refused. So it looks like this old building has been saved. Not only that but the council is proposing for the building to be heritage listed soon.

We send PlanningAlerts (over 30 million of them so far!) so that people can find out and have their say about what happens with their built environment. So while we’re impartial when it comes to specific developments, we can’t help but smile at the poetic justice of an old pub being saved. After all, an old pub being demolished out of the blue is what sparked Richard Pope to create the original UK version of PlanningAlerts.

It also goes to show that your comments on PlanningAlerts, each of which is sent to council as an official submission, can and do make a difference to your local area. From saving a whole historic pub, to encouraging and supporting local businesses, or providing super-local knowledge to gently suggest improvements to an application.

Thanks for making a difference.

Posted in PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Responses

Another big story from Right To Know, and how you can do it too

By Henare Degan | Published: February 5, 2016

Screenshot showing the released document that has a table of agency names

Over recent weeks there’s been lots of interest in a story about Australia’s mandatory data retention regime. In passing these controversial laws last year the government agreed to reign in the number of agencies able to access your data. However, the laws allowed agencies to re-apply for access. Two weeks ago it was discovered that over 60 agencies have done just that. This discovery was reported by most major news organisations in Australia.

While mandatory data retention concerns the OpenAustralia Foundation–after all, most of what we do is on the internet–this post isn’t about that. It’s about the largely untold story behind this recent discovery. It was all down to one person who is deeply concerned about the implications of data retention.

A couple of months ago Geordie Guy submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request publicly using our FOI request site Right To Know. What sparked all of the media interest recently is that his request was successful and it revealed the names of most of the 61 agencies seeking warrantless access to your metadata.

Dozens of news stories over several days, all from one person’s request on Right To Know.

The amazing thing is that you can do this too, about the issues that you care about. As you can read in his fascinating article about the process he went through, Geordie knows a thing or two about the FOI process. But you don’t need to and that’s the great thing about Right To Know.

When the agency initially indicated they were planning to refuse his request, Geordie cleverly changed its scope. If you were making a request and the same thing happened, you could add an annotation to your request asking for help from the fabulous community on Right To Know. They’ll almost certainly help you get the information you’re after.

Usually requests are free but in this case the agency decided to charge over $500 for access to these documents. This didn’t stop Geordie either. He successfully crowdfunded the fees for the request in just two and half hours. This isn’t the first time someone has crowdfunded FOI requests on Right To Know. It once again shows that there are people out there ready to support your quest for public access to important documents.

Have a listen to Heidi Pett’s story about this case on ABC Radio National’s PM programme. It’s one of the few media reports that looks at the full story and acknowledges the passionate individuals and volunteers that helped this this important information about our data retention system see the light of day.

We hope it will inspire you to make your own request for information about something you care about. Go ahead and create a new request on Right To Know now.

Posted in RightToKnow.org.au | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Response

They Vote For You – Finding the real facts about voting

By Mackay Ash | Published: February 4, 2016

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.

– Abraham Lincoln

When the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill 2015 went through the House of Representatives, it passed without one division (or formal vote) being recorded in the official record of Parliament. This means that there is no record of how individual Members of Parliament (MPs) voted on the bill.

But aren’t all votes in Parliament recorded?

Unbelievably, they are not.

There are two kinds of votes in Parliament: votes ‘on the voices’ and divisions. Votes on the voices are the most common kind of vote and involve our representatives yelling out ‘Aye’ (yes) or ‘No’ and the chair deciding which side is in the majority without writing down any names.

Divisions are less common and only occur if two or more of our representatives call for one. When a division is called, the bells of Parliament ring out for four minutes to alert any missing representatives that they should return to their chamber immediately if they want to vote. Then the chamber (either the House of Representatives or the Senate) is locked. During a division, our representatives walk to either side of their chamber: the right side to vote yes; and the left side to vote no. Then they are counted and their names are recorded.

Because most votes occur ‘on the voices’, we have no practical way of knowing how our representatives vote most of the time. What we see on They Vote For You (which takes its voting data from the Parliament’s official records) represents just a fraction of the votes actually taking place in Parliament.

Why is this important?

If we don’t know how our representatives vote, we can’t hold them accountable. Bills can speed through Parliament ‘on the voices’ without any public record of how each representative actually voted. The example I mentioned above was the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill 2015 (‘Allegiance to Australia bill’), which passed in the House of Representatives without one division being recorded. This was possible for two reasons: (1) the bill had bipartisan support, meaning both the Coalition and the Australian Labor Party supported it; and (2) those major parties control the House of Representatives because almost all our representatives there (known as Members of Parliament or MPs) are members of those two parties.

On the other hand, many of our representatives in the Senate (known as senators) belong to minor parties or are independents. This means that the two major parties have far less control in the Senate and so there is more debate and a far greater chance of divisions being called, as was the case with the Allegiance to Australia bill.

In fact, most anti-terror bills have bipartisan support so that the only voting data about them on They Vote For You comes from the Senate. The consequence of this is that many of our related policies only include the voting habits of our senators, including:

So if we want to know how our MP voted on any of these subjects, our only option is to go to the House Hansard (the official transcript of the House of Representatives, which is also available on OpenAustralia.org) and trawl through pages and pages of parliamentary jargon and hope that our MP contributed to debate. If they didn’t, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know.

How can we make the system better?

If every vote in Parliament was made by division then we could always see how our representatives voted on our behalf. Unfortunately, this solution has a major downside: divisions take a long time. There is four minutes of bell ringing, then moving across the chamber, counting and recording, and then everyone returning to their seats. In other words, Parliament would go on forever.

There is another way however: electronic voting. Representatives can simply vote by pressing buttons on a screen, providing a complete record and saving time. It shouldn’t take any longer than voting ‘on the voices’ because representatives can stay in their seats and counting is done by computer.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Procedure has already done an initial investigation into the possibility of e-voting back in 2013 (see their report). While they concluded against it, they emphasised that theirs is ‘very much a preliminary examination and the Committee cannot make any considered conclusion or recommendation without details of the options and their implications’.

Their main criticism was that e-voting lessens the visibility of Members’ decision-making in the House and takes away the opportunity for Members to ‘move away from their allocated seats and speak informally to their colleagues and Ministers’. The report goes on to say that ‘[a]necdotal evidence suggests that many consider these informal professional exchanges essential to their work’.

Since there are many solutions to these objections – including the use of differently coloured lights to make our representatives’ votes visible to their colleagues in Parliament and more informal discussion opportunities during breaks – the resistance to electronic voting seems to be more about parliamentarians being sticklers for tradition. Though it is possible that parties are concerned that there may be an upsurge in party members crossing the floor (or rebelling) if electronic voting was introduced. After all, it’s easier to be a rebel when it’s just a case of pressing a button rather than having to cross a chamber in front of all your party colleagues and the gaze of your party whip (whose job includes ensuring all party members attend and vote as a team).

Calls for parliaments to use electronic voting in order to increase parliamentary accountability are growing louder. In 2012, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness was launched and has since been endorsed by a number of organisations, including the OpenAustralia Foundation. Article 20 of the Declaration calls for parliaments to minimise voting on the voices and instead use methods such as electronic voting that leave a record of voting behaviour, which can then be used by citizens to hold their representatives accountable.

 

What do you think? Is it time for electronic voting in our federal Parliament?

 

Posted in They Vote For You | 3 Responses