The Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) ageing ICT systems are to be upgraded as part of the post-pandemic Economic Recovery Plan for Australia.
The upgrading will include new systems for control of personnel and logistics, and more seamless voter interactions with the AEC.
Announcing the measures, the Minister for Finance, Senator Mathias Cormann said the first stage of the upgrades would include improvements to the AEC Contact Centre, improving access to additional self-service channels with more online support and a telephone virtual assistant.
Also planned, he said, were better systems for the temporary workforce at election times, ensuring more than 90,000 workers were efficiently deployed.
There are also to be controls on supply chain management to support rapid production and delivery of materials to polling places and counting centres.
Coordination capabilities would also be improved to allow improved monitoring of operations and incidents.
Senator Cormann said future upgrades would include the replacement of the Electoral Roll management technology, improvements to data analysis and the decommissioning of legacy systems.
“Federal elections are Australia’s largest peacetime logistical events, involving an unparalleled scale of operations for venue management, staff recruitment and product movements,” Senator Cormann said.
“These events are highly reliant on ICT systems,” he said.
“This investment in ICT upgrades will ensure the AEC can continue to efficiently run Federal Elections, while improving services for Australian voters,” the Minister said.
