In 2022, it is clear that many, if not most activities that we
would ordinarily carry out in person, can now be done online. But
sometimes, technology fails and things can go wrong. The 2021 NSW
local government elections are an example of that.
The NSW Supreme Court recently set aside the 2021 local
government election results in respect of the Shellharbour City,
Kempsey Shire, and Singleton Councils because of a technical issue
with their remote electronic voting system, iVote. Those Councils
must now rerun their elections. The technical issue in question in
the case of NSW Electoral Commission v Kempsey Shire
Council (No 2) [2022] NSWSC 282 was that, because of high
iVote uptake, not all voters who applied to use iVote actually
received the iVote number that they needed to be able to actually
vote remotely.
