WA shops for device fleet for 2025 elections

Western Australia's Electoral Commission is planning to lease 2020 personal computers for the state's general elections in March.

Most of the devices -1870 - are15-inch laptops used to mark off voters across WA’s 59 electoral districts over two days.

The Electoral Commission has also requested 150 all-in-one desktop devices to manage election data entry at its central processing centre in Perth.

According to a request for tender, the devices will be delivered on a lease agreement by late November.

“The preference is to have a device that affords the easy deployment of a standard operating environment (SOE), using standard tools, according to the tender's statement of requirements.

“The majority of these devices will be used for one or two days, with the residual [ones] used for only two to three weeks.”

The WA government more broadly currently has a whole-of-government common use arrangement (CUA) with Acer, Dell and Lenovo, which allows government agencies to purchase or lease devices from either the manufacturers themselves or their partners.