While national attention often focuses on the Australian Electoral Commission’s preparedness for AI threats during elections, state electoral commissions face a distinctly different challenge: near-continuous election cycles, varying funding models, and diverse technical capabilities to address evolving information threats.

Yes, that’s right. Every state and territory has their own electoral commission, separately funded by their state or territory government. We run all local and state elections in our jurisdiction. We are not the state offices of the AEC!

My Churchill Fellowship research reveals dynamics largely absent from federal policy discussions. Unlike the AEC’s 3-4 year federal election cycle, state commissions manage much more frequent electoral activity: 20 local and state elections scheduled across all Australian jurisdictions from 2025-2028 alone – and that’s not counting by-elections that can’t be predicted. This creates multiple opportunities for bad actors to deploy AI-enabled influence operations to target Australian voters completely outside the federal election cycle.

Recent evidence from Western Australia illustrates these operational realities. The recent Parliamentary inquiry into WA’s 2025 state election documented that WA Treasury provided $37.5 million additional funding to WAEC to run the election, instead of the $49.5 million formally requested. This contributed to a raft of operational challenges that ultimately affected public and political trust and confidence in electoral processes, even though it did not result in a failed election. And that’s just one state electoral commission: it’s a different story in every state and territory.

If electoral commissions face resource constraints for traditional operations, what capacity exists for addressing new, sophisticated information threats? My upcoming Churchill report examines the challenges faced at state and territory level. My research explores how electoral commissions might engage meaningfully on platforms like TikTok, encrypted messaging services, and emerging AI-driven platforms, where political conversations increasingly occur, to constrain dissemination of and counteract engagement with disinformation, AI-generated or not. Yet resource and capability constraints impact how these eight separate commissions can maintain a meaningful presence across such diverse information environments .

International examples suggest possibilities for leveraging existing community networks, creating partnerships with grassroots organisations for human-centred conversations about democratic participation.

But such approaches require sustained investment beyond current funding cycles.

The question emerges whether state electoral commissions need different funding models to reflect the world we live in. In Victoria, for example, our enrolled voter list has grown by 21% since the 2012 State election, but our baseline funding has not increased by one cent, not even due to indexation. And our information security and disinformation risks have grown significantly since then.

So, how might electoral authorities balance traditional operations with emerging information challenges while maintaining public confidence in democratic processes?