The transition from hard-copy electoral rolls to electronic rolls saved more than $20,000 and about 200,000 sheets of A4 paper. For the first time on Saturday, all voters were greeted by officials with hand-held personal digital assistants, small electronic devices, rather than a binder with more than 300 A4 pages.

Commissioner Phillip Green borrowed 1000 PDAs from the Queensland electoral commissioner ''which saved paper and was good for the taxpayer'', he said.

''It was only feasible to borrow them. We could never had bought them, which was in part why it was so attractive.''

Voters were delighted by the environmentally friendly decision.

Voting officials were also pleased. Kerrie Jones worked at the Griffith poll. The 40-year-old Oxley resident worked as a polling official during last year's federal election and said the small electronic devices saved a lot of time.

''You only have to hit in the first three characters of the first and last name and it finds it for you,'' she said.

''It's much easier than flicking through a huge binder.''

Mr Green said the commission had drawn up a business case for using the PDAs.

''It was not only the printing and binding. We had to ship the lot to Sydney to be scanned. We estimated this would cost $74,000. The software we had made for the PDAs cost $50,000 to $55,000, a saving of $20,000-ish.''

Canberra has 243,471 registered voters, of whom 36,600 voted electronically during three weeks of pre-polling at five venues across the city. Another 7400 voted electronically on election day.

In the 2004 election, 28,169 votes were recorded electronically.

Mr Green said about 44,500 Canberrans had voted before election day.

''From all the accounts I'm getting, the PDAs were really well accepted and it all went well,'' he said.