[Cover letter]

29 February 2016

Dear Committee Secretary,
This organisation has until recently confined itself to pleading, as its name implies, for  honesty in elections, i.e. for the elimination of Vote Frauds under the rules as they are.
 
We have avoided getting into issues of FAIRNESS, i.e. what the rules should be, lest our advocacy against Vote Frauds (which will unfortunately continue unabated in the next election) be diluted with messages re changing the rules.  However of course our members do have substantial expertise in the way that the electoral systems have operated.
 
In the inadequate time available to comment, we briefly make the following points:-

• Australians like fairness and speak of “a fair go” and “fair dinkum”.  The word “fair” does not appear in the terms of reference of this Committee, nor in the Bill nor in the Explanatory Memorandum.
• This Bill is UNFAIR in that it massively advantages the 3 major parties (Coalition, ALP and Greens) and disadvantages minor parties.  It is a backwards step in our democracy, because it will reduce the diversity of views in the Senate.
• We urge that his Bill not be passed, and that there be an extended period of proper consultation to discuss improvements to our voting systems.  (The JSCEM has failed)
• It will in effect disenfranchise about 25% of voters, because these votes will ‘exhaust’ and not be counted in determining the final outcome of Senators that get elected.
• This Bill will massively advantage the 3 major Parties (Coalition, ALP and Greens). 
• It will make it so difficult to get Senators elected from other than the 3 major parties that it will effectively head us down the dreadful USA polarised status of being a “two-party-State” (i.e. ALP+Greens vs the Coalition).
• We deplore that this Bill is being rushed through the Parliament and a Public Hearing with limited participation of only half a day and held in only one location.
• We attach our Briefing Note “method to elect Senators and Senate voting trends”;
• this Briefing Note makes a positive suggestion as to how to improve the system
• We attach our Media Release dated 24 February, which includes inter alia what Senators Dastyari and Conroy said in the Senate on 23 February:- This Bill is “the behaviour of a bunch of schoolyard bullies”… “the purpose of this Bill is to wipe out the cross-benchers”.

Yours sincerely
 
Lex Stewart, President, Australians for Honest Elections Inc

The Queensland State election occurred on 31 January 2015, and the ALP surprised many people in going from having a mere 7 seats in the Parliament to having just enough seats to be able to form government in a House of 93 seats.

The Queensland Coalition government about 9 months ago had amended the Queensland Electoral Act to require an ordinary voter and a prepoll voter to produce identification before being allowed to vote.  This is a very sensible measure, and assists to prevent Vote Frauds such as multiple voting and voting in somebody else’s name.

By the time all the vote counting had finished, the Parliament did not sit in February, and in March sat for only four days, 24 to 27 March.  It is not scheduled to sit in April, and will resume on 5 May.

So in those first four days in the Parliament, just what would you think would be the most urgent business of an incoming Labor government?

Perhaps they would be interested in jobs, hospitals, roads, schools, reforming the public service, police, ports or the environment.

No!! They set about abolishing the voter ID requirements in the Electoral Act.  And gave citizens only a very short deadline till Friday 10 April to offer comments.

We in Australians for Honest Elections found out about this hasty move to abolish voter ID only on Friday morning 10 April, so hurriedly put together this Submission to the Parliamentary Committee just before the 4pm deadline:- 

Dear Parliamentary Committee
I note the haste with which the recently-elected State government wants to repeal the current ID requirements in the Queensland Electoral Act 1992, sections 107 and 2.
The ALP Queensland State government thinks it important to do this as one of the very first things to be achieved in their term of government (however short or long that may be).
I am concerned at the lack of democratic consultation in that the government has set such a short timeframe within which comments may be received - the deadline is TODAY 10 april at 4pm !
Making Vote Frauds easier seems to be a higher priority to this ALP State Govt than issues like jobs, hospitals, roads, police, transport, schools, agriculture, railways, ports and the environment.

“ELECTORAL ACT 1992 - SECTION 107

107 Procedure for voting

(1) An elector (other than one who makes a pre-poll ordinary vote under section 112 or who makes, or must make, a declaration vote under subdivision 3) is to vote by following the procedures set out in this section.

(2) The elector is, during ordinary voting hours, to enter a polling booth for the electoral district for which the elector is enrolled.

(3) In the polling booth, the elector must--

(a) give the issuing officer the elector's proof of identity document; and

(b) request a ballot paper from the issuing officer …..

ELECTORAL ACT 1992 - SECTION 2

2 Definitions

proof of identity document means a document relating to proof of a person's identity prescribed under a regulation.”

The Proof of Identity requirements in Electoral Regulation 2103, section 3A are very reasonable and are not onerous.

“ELECTORAL REGULATION 2013 - SECTION 3A

3A Proof of identity document—Act, s 2

For section 2 of the Act … each of the following is a proof of identity document--

(a) a current driver licence;

(b) a current Australian passport;

(c) a voter information letter issued by the commission;

(d) a recent document evidencing electoral enrolment;

(e) an identification card issued by the Commonwealth or State evidencing the person's entitlement to a financial benefit;

Examples—   a Commonwealth seniors health card, health care card, Medicare card,
                     pensioner concession card or repatriation health card

(f) an adult proof of age card issued by the State;

(g) a recent account or notice issued by a local government or a public utility provider;

Examples—   a council rates notice, electricity account statement, gas account
                      statement or water bill

(h) a recent account statement, current account card or current credit card issued by a financial institution;

(i) a recent account statement issued by a … service provider as defined under …. (Cwlth);

Examples—   a telephone bill or internet bill

(j) a recent notice of assessment issued under the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (Cwlth)” 


Even homeless persons and Aboriginals in remote areas would surely be in possession of a Medicare card, health care card, or a similar concession card.
    (When I was western regional Road Safety Manager of the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority 1990-97 I travelled a great deal in central western and far western NSW liaising with Aboriginal communities from the Vic border to the Q'ld border to the SA border, and I created the very first positions in Australia of 'Aboriginal Road Safety Officer', and I employed two - I and these two officers assisted many Aboriginals to get their drivers licence for the very first time)
Therefore I cannot see that anybody could realistically claim to be potentially or actually disadvantaged by the current ID requirements, which did work well during the recent Queensland State election.

However lack of ID does provide advantage to those who want to "vote early and vote often" and cheat in other ways such as voter impersonation, which does occur
  -- for example, when Alasdair Webster MP lost Macquarie in 1993 by only 164 votes, he learned that more than 164 Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious groups with conscientious objection, did NOT receive their customary letter after the election asking why they did not vote -- IN OTHER WORDS due to lack of voter ID SOME HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE HAD VOTED FALSELY, COMMITTING VOTER IMPERSONATION.


A one-page summary of Alasdair Webster's case is at:

http://www.afhe.org.au/uploads/5/9/2/7/5927504/practical_example_of_injustice_alasdairwebster_macquarie-1993.pdf

This being a random sample leads us to the conclusion that the number of false enrolments was about 1,600 for the whole electorate at that time.


I note that the AEC admitted that there were 18,770 multiple votes in the September 2013 federal election, but provided no data on voter impersonations, which were made possible by lack of voter ID in the Commonwealth Electoral Act.

I urge that the current voter ID requirements be retained, and also be expanded to include more stringent identity requirements for Postal votes.

Dear Editor

Some serious maladies in our voting systems are shown by your story “AFP finds no one to charge despite many cases of voting fraud” (26 Feb).

The AEC has admitted 18,770 cases of multiple voting in the 2013 election yet now one-and-a-half years later we find out that they can prosecute nobody.

Endemic problems in the AEC could no longer be hid when they lost ballot papers causing a new WA Senate election at a cost to taxpayers of $23million.

However this was not the first time.

For over 10 years Australians for Honest Elections Inc (AFHE) has been pointing out previous cases of losses of ballot papers, multiple voting and other problems, but the AEC has been inert.

However, far worse than multiple voting is the woeful state of the Electoral Rolls, partly due to false enrolments.

For example, the AEC admitted in a parliamentary committee on 13 November 2014 that there are “139,898 more electors on the NSW State Roll” (kept by the NSW Electoral Commission) “than on the federal Roll” (kept by the AEC).

Also, when one of our AFHE members doorknocked less than 10% of the Kingsford-Smith electorate in early 2013, he found 500 definitely false enrolments, and another 1,000 enrolments worth investigating.  He took these lists of names and addresses to the AEC, asking that they check and cleanse the Electoral Roll.  The AEC refused to act, and we sailed into our September 2013 election with unknown amounts of false enrolments.

How confident can we be of a fair and honest NSW State election?!

Yours sincerely




Lex Stewart, President, Australians for Honest Elections 

"This article below, dated 12 February 2015, is good in that finally a Liberal MP or Senator is waking up with concerns about false ballots due to people changing addresses.  In this case the Liberal Senator, in order to score a few points off Labor, questions the legitimacy of the ballot for federal Opposition leader - maybe Albanese won it instead of Shorten?  We in AFHE are non-party political and do not concern ourselves with internal manouevrings within a political party - our concerns are in the public arena, for fair, honest and open democracy.  But, granted that the ALP has been caught out in several articles in the Sydney Morning Herald in recent months about ALP Branch-stackings for the purposes of preselections and internal ALP business, and granted that electoral funding is granted per vote, is anybody silly enough to suggest that false stackings of the Electoral Roll are merely confined to internalparty matters, and are not going to be also used externally to gain extra votes (and funding) in a State or Federal election, especially in a key marginal seat?!  And it would be good if Liberal MPs and Senators would raise concerns about the problems in our voting systems for the noble reasons of our democracy, and not merely to embarass the opposition."


Bill Shorten's leadership ballot under scrutiny

Date February 12, 2015    Sean Nicholls    Sydney Morning Herald State Political Editor


Labor's Sam Dastyari is being called upon to make a personal explanation to the Senate about his knowledge of or involvement in irregularities in the 2013 ballot that installed Bill Shorten as federal Opposition Leader.

The call was made by Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells after Fairfax Media revealed that a staff member in Senator Dastyari's office requested that addresses for 50 ballot papers be changed before the vote.

An ALP tribunal found at least 20 of those addresses were changed to the post office box or residential address of Auburn councillor Hicham Zraika.

Cr Zraika was recently suspended from the Labor party for six months after the tribunal found he had engaged in "unworthy conduct" including falsifying meeting records of his own branch.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells told the Senate that Labor "needs to get right to the bottom of this scandal and take steps to deal with any branch stacking or vote fiddling".

"An ALP tribunal may have suspended the middle man who received the redirected ballot papers but what has happened to any others involved in this episode?" she said.

"Today's reports of the irregularities in the ballot that installed Bill Shorten as Labor leader cast doubt on the validity of the vote."

Senator Fierravanti-Wells noted Senator Dastyari had yet to make a statement to to the Senate "to personally explain this situation and what he knew about the machinations of his staff member. I call on the senator to do so."

Senator Dastyari dismissed the call by Senator Fierravanti-Wells as "a joke".

"I thought we'd moved past this kind of low rent type of politics," he said.

"At no point has there been any accusation of wrongdoing against me by the Review Tribunal or any others."

Referring to last year's Independent Commission Against Corruption hearings into political donations, Senator Dastyari said it was "all a bit rich coming from Connie considering a dozen Liberal MPs from her own NSW branch had to resign over real corruption allegations".

On Thursday, Cr Zraika said it was "unfair and unjust to be accused of manipulating party membership and stacking when it is clear as daylight who changed those addresses.