Senator the Hon Mathias Cormann

The Morrison Government is upgrading the Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) ageing ICT systems to safeguard the security and integrity of our democracy into the future as part of our Economic Recovery Plan for Australia. The upgrades include new systems for control of personnel and logistics, and more seamless voter interactions with the AEC.

As part of the 2020-21 Budget, the Government is investing $96.7 million over three years, to replace and modernise the AEC’s key elections systems. This builds on funding provided in the 2019-20 Budget and is the first tranche of upgrades to their ICT infrastructure.

The first stage of upgrades includes:

• Improvements to the AEC Contact Centre, including access to additional self-service channels including more online support and the a telephone virtual assistant;
• Temporary Election Workforce systems, to ensure over 90,000 workers are efficiently deployed at every election;
• Supply Chain Management controls, to support rapid production and delivery of materials to polling places and counting centres;
• Coordination capabilities, to allow improved monitoring of operations and incidents.

Investment in future tranches will 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. These events are highly reliant on ICT systems.

This investment in ICT upgrades will ensure the AEC can continue to efficiently run Federal Elections, while improving services for Australian voters.