Professor Michael Cowling

speaker

96 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Professor Michael Cowling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Download This Show · How do you stop being addicted to your phone? · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

Thanks, Ray.

Great to be here.

I look, I don't know about most people, but definitely for me, I think we imagine, you know, the slippers and the cup of coffee sitting at the computer at home, clicking a button and deciding which person's gonna be the next Prime Minister.

But I think in reality it's a little bit more complicated than that.

And sometimes when people talk about internet voting or online voting or using technology, they just mean using technology in the in the in the booth and not necessarily what we're doing at all.

at home and uh regardless, um especially if we're thinking about what's doing we're doing at home, it's just really hard.

Uh as Vanessa just said, in terms of security, in terms of availability, it's it's a difficult problem to solve.

I think Vanessa's right.

I think ultimately it comes down to the controls that we've built over the years and the fact that when something becomes digital it just becomes a little bit easier to change.

And I I think the the case study, the classic case study here, of course, is is in the States uh in twenty twenty, where the the president at the time made the claim that uh electronic voting machines had meant that some bad actors had modified the

results and and he's able to make that claim because of the idea that they're digital and so it is easier to change.

Where we're marking a piece of paper and we've got real people counting things up with scrutineers looking over their shoulder, we just feel a little bit more comfortable that this is something that is true.

V Vanessa's right, it doesn't mean that it's foolproof and ballot papers do get lost, real ballot papers do get lost and they do get miscounted.

It's just that technology makes that process of cheating a little bit easier.

Can I just add to that?

The uh the the e extension of that argument, of course, is that the consequences are much greater for uh voting and what happens in voting in any country in a s but in Australia in particular, when you're voting, you are voting in your Member of Parliament, you're voting in the Prime Minister.

And the Prime Minister has a a lot of power.

So I don't want to belittle people uh people's banking transactions, but the reality is that the Prime Minister gets to spend a lot of time.

want more money and really drive the country.

And so if we get the vote wrong, if somebody hacks it, that can have serious consequences for the country.

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