VOTING BEFORE ELECTION DAY - VOTING BY PRE-POLL, POST, ABSENTEE &. PROVISIONAL.
DECLARATION VOTES: Until quite recently, one had to give a valid reason for pre-poll voting before election day itself.
This has been abandoned and now anyone can vote pre-poll before the election. What is to stop those people voting again on election day at any or all the polling stations in that electorate? No-one will know who the vote comes from and their vote will be counted.
At the 2010 Federal Election, Shadow Minister Eric Abetz estimated that of those who pre-poll voted 20,000 – 30,000 voted multiple times.
In early August, 2013, the government removed the limitations around pre-polling and as a consequence around 560,000 votes were cast at polling booths and 1,329,988 votes were cast via post. The AEC has admitted that 18,770 multiple votes occurred in the 7 September 2013 election, and of these 8,000 cases were passed on to the Police, yet nobody was prosecuted.
Furthermore the weak recommendations of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters final report of 15/4/15 will not fix the multiple voting problem nor enable successful prosecutions in future.
With postal votes, the name and address of the voter is clearly written on the outside of the envelope. During this envelope's passage to the ballot box, there is nothing to stop anyone tampering with the votes inside the envelopes or copying the details of the voter for future use. The Postal Workers Union has a history of tampering with postal votes which were previously mailed to the AEC in separate sealed envelopes to limit the ability of postal officers from seeing/copying the personal details on the confidential envelope containing the postal vote.
Changes by the AEC of rules, ostensibly to save working time, have seriously undermined the integrity of Australia’s democratic voting system.
In 2000, Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper had the heading:
'' Let's be honest, electoral fraud has to stop”.
The article brought attention to serious deficiencies in the current system. But Parliaments and the Electoral Commission have remained deaf to the most obvious need for simple changes.
We at Australians for Honest Elections seek genuine reform so that we can be confident that those who govern us are there because they have been honestly elected.
This has been abandoned and now anyone can vote pre-poll before the election. What is to stop those people voting again on election day at any or all the polling stations in that electorate? No-one will know who the vote comes from and their vote will be counted.
At the 2010 Federal Election, Shadow Minister Eric Abetz estimated that of those who pre-poll voted 20,000 – 30,000 voted multiple times.
In early August, 2013, the government removed the limitations around pre-polling and as a consequence around 560,000 votes were cast at polling booths and 1,329,988 votes were cast via post. The AEC has admitted that 18,770 multiple votes occurred in the 7 September 2013 election, and of these 8,000 cases were passed on to the Police, yet nobody was prosecuted.
Furthermore the weak recommendations of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters final report of 15/4/15 will not fix the multiple voting problem nor enable successful prosecutions in future.
With postal votes, the name and address of the voter is clearly written on the outside of the envelope. During this envelope's passage to the ballot box, there is nothing to stop anyone tampering with the votes inside the envelopes or copying the details of the voter for future use. The Postal Workers Union has a history of tampering with postal votes which were previously mailed to the AEC in separate sealed envelopes to limit the ability of postal officers from seeing/copying the personal details on the confidential envelope containing the postal vote.
Changes by the AEC of rules, ostensibly to save working time, have seriously undermined the integrity of Australia’s democratic voting system.
In 2000, Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper had the heading:
'' Let's be honest, electoral fraud has to stop”.
The article brought attention to serious deficiencies in the current system. But Parliaments and the Electoral Commission have remained deaf to the most obvious need for simple changes.
We at Australians for Honest Elections seek genuine reform so that we can be confident that those who govern us are there because they have been honestly elected.