Good news for blind voters

In a decision that may have implications for future elections, the Administrative Decisions Tribunal has ruled that the NSW Electoral Commission (NSWEC) discriminated against a blind person by failing to provide him with a means of voting privately as other citizens do.

Darren Fittler wrote to the Commission before the 2004 Council elections asking for a braille ballot paper so he could cast a secret ballot for his local council, Randwick. The commissioner had not replied by election day, and when he went to the polling place he was told that that only paper ballots were available.

Mr Fittler’s wife therefore had to read him the ballot paper and mark it for him, so his vote was no longer private. The ADT awarded Mr Fittler $5,000 for hurt and humiliation and warned the commission not to repeat its discrimination.

The Tribunal made it clear that it was just dealing with Mr Fittler’s application, which it did not regard as a representative complaint. It found that providing him with a Braille ballot could reasonably have been achieved with sufficient notice, and might have cost as little as $50, which was a small amount in view of the total spent on the election.

The NSWEC had argued that according to their interpretation, the current electoral legislation did not allow Braille votes as it requires ink-on-paper ballot papers that are initialled on the reverse by an electoral officer.

Braille takes up much more space than print so it is complex to reproduce a larger ballot paper like one for a local council election, let alone the Legislative Council or the Senate, and they would be likely to have a number of pages.

In addition, the Tribunal found that the electoral legislation did not spell out that ballot paper should actually be made of paper, and the inference was that a “substance that has similar characteristics” could suffice. It also found that it was not necessarily a requirement for the ballot paper to be only one page as each page could be signed by an official.

At the conclusion of the case, a representative for NSWEC said that it will provide Braille ballot papers for people who request them for the next local government elections in September 2008.

According to Simon Waterhouse, the Equal Access to Democracy Coordinator at NSWEC, the commission is investigating how it can best implement the Tribunal’s decision. He said that according to blindness support agency Vision Australia, trials of braille templates that go over the top of the existing ballot papers have not been very successful.

Another issue is that only a small percentage of people who are blind or vision impaired can read braille. It is mainly people who have been blind from birth or lost their sight when they were relatively young who learn braille, and they are in the minority compared with people who lose their sight through ageing.

According to Judy Birkenhead, the Assistant Director Electronic Voting for the Australian Electoral Commission, the federal trial used a telephone-style keypad in a similar manner to phone banking. “People who are blind or have low vision are already familiar with using the telephone so they can use our keypad quite quickly and easily,” she said.

Ms Birkenhead said that the federal trial required special legislation to be passed by parliament. The outcomes of the trial will now be assessed, and new approval by the government along with further legislation would be needed for electronic voting to be included in subsequent federal elections.

Mr Waterhouse said that the NSWEC was not looking at introducing electronic voting for the 2008 local government elections, as current legislation did not provide for it and the cost would be prohibitive. The Commission has followed the trials of electronic voting for the federal and Victorian elections and will consider trialling some form at the 2011 state election, if the legislation is changed to allow it.