The dead don't vote ...

Throughout this process, Wayne Swan continued to be less than enthusiastic and supportive of my efforts to clean up the roll. Bob Bottom, the investigative reporter who retired to Queensland, noted a similar phenomenon on the north coast in the early 1990’s - a whole list of people were enrolled on one side of a beach side road where there was only the sea wall.

Rorting postal votes is also very simple, especially if you have already “seeded” the role with non existent voters.

In my electorate the ALP got a steady 46 per cent of most classifications of votes in most years. The extraordinary postal voting results in Stafford in 1983 therefore raised suspicions. In that year, the number of postal voters increased significantly, and the ALP got an astonishing 72 per cent of the vote!

Why the ALP would get 72 per cent of the postal vote in 1983 is a significant mystery - it seems that about 70 staunch ALP supporters suddenly appeared on the scene in late 1983 and then equally suddenly had disappeared seven months later when a by-election became necessary. When the by-election was held, the then candidate had a different campaign organisation and the ALP postal vote results dropped back below 50 per cent - but only a suspicious minded person would attach any significance to this wouldn’t they?

The enduring mystery in this whole process is that, when they know how easy it is to register false enrolments and for the dead to vote, why does the Electoral Commission so adamantly oppose attempts to ensure the integrity not only of the roll, but of the vote?

In 1989, strong suspicions about potential vote rorting were wide spread in Queensland and the then (Cooper) Government proposed that the Electoral office (then under State control) should computer match the addresses on the electoral roll with those of the State Electricity Commission, based on the reasonable assumption that most inhabited addresses had electricity connected and those that didn’t should be investigated by the Electoral Commission. The screams of protest from the ALP, particularly State Campaign Director Wayne Swan, were almost deafening.

For all the above reasons, phoney postal voting is now a riskier process, and absentee voting is the apparently preferred modus operandi, but there is a very simple way of significantly improving the integrity of the polls - require each voter to present some form of identification when casting their ballot. This was floated by the Federal Liberal Party some years ago, followed by the predictable howls of protest from the ALP.

Yes, there is a risk that this can disadvantage indigent and disadvantaged voters and there are currently cases pending before the US Supreme Court challenging some US State laws which require voters to produce very specific identifying documents. However these objections can easily be over come (in people of good will) by providing only that any official document bearing the name and address of the alleged voter is required.

Realistically, there are very few adults in this country who could not produce a driver’s licence, bank statement, benefits letter or similar. Any special problems (for example, those faced by people in small Indigenous communities, nursing homes, hospices, and so on) could be further overcome by providing that such identification can be waived where the voter is personally known to either the polling officers, a government official or an employee of a relevant institution.

This isn’t rocket science. There is ample evidence of long standing, wide spread, deliberate rorting of our electoral system. A highly effective (even if not perfect) solution is simple, inexpensive and achievable.

Why aren’t we doing it?

Perhaps our Federal Treasurer, as a person with a long history of interest in this topic, might like to look into it?