Strange vote patterns defeated Pauline Hanson?
· Higher than normal postal votes in Hanson’s electorate, Lockyer
· Loopholes in the law make postal voting frauds easy
· A week after the election, some polling booths not yet included
· Election experts claim postal voting fraud rife in marginal electorates
Pauline Hanson beaten by 180 postal votes that kept arriving in mail until closing day of February 9. No post marks are required by the Queensland Electoral Commission on envelopes containing ballot papers.
Strange patterns among postal votes in the Queensland State election are leading some election analysts to suspect that Pauline Hanson (and others) are being unfairly culled out.
“We issued a media release before the Queensland election warning that Vote Frauds would be likely to occur in the area of postal votes, due to large loopholes in the recently-amended Queensland Electoral Act,” said Mr Lex Stewart, President of Australians for Honest Elections.
“We warned that the new ID requirements of sections 107 and 3A of the Act are ineffective in preventing vote frauds because they do not apply to POSTAL voters, where no such identity proofs are needed! Whereas the Commonwealth Act requires people to have a reason to apply for a postal vote, we warned that section 119(1) of the Queensland Act allows anybody, including false enrolments, to apply for a postal vote without any reason at all!”
The Commonwealth Electoral Act requires a postal vote envelope to be postmarked BEFORE the election, but Postal votes in Queensland can even be posted AFTER the election!!
“Therefore, where a close contest became evident in a seat on election night, did we have party hacks filling in Postal Votes on the Sunday and Monday after the election?” asks Mr Stewart.
Voting figures from the Queensland Electoral Commission as at 4:13pm 6 Februaryhttp://results.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/state/State2015/results/district45.html
show that Lockyer has a surprisingly high number of postal votes, 3,225 which is 10.7% of the total votes, and also that the rate of informal voting among postals is rather low.
“Lockyer’s percent of postals 10.7% is higher than the statewide average of 8.7%, yet it is a fairly small electorate, only 60km from north to south, and one would expect more postals in larger rural electorates, like Cook in far north Queensland, which runs almost 1,300km north to south, and has only 801 postal votes, or 3.5%. – or has counting not finished yet?” said Mr Stewart.
“The Queensland Electoral Commission is negligent in that in Lockyer (and other electorates) not all polling booths have been included in website figures a week after the election!!
Pauline Hanson with 49.65% of the votes is running neck-and-neck with the LNP at 50.35% but only 59 out of 61 polling booths have (as at 6 Feb 4:13pm) been included.
Where have the ballot papers from these two booths been for a week? Who has had access to them? And could they have been tampered with to the detriment of Pauline Hanson?”
“Postal voting has long been recognised as fertile ground for vote cheating, and for this reason many countries around the world do not allow any postal voting.
UK Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC (who sent people from both sides of politics to jail in the UK for vote frauds) said during his visit to Australia 4 years ago that the ‘system of postal voting is a recipe for fraud … the system is highly vulnerable at a number of critical points’.”
How many blank ballot papers were there in the final count? At the booth where I scrutineered blank ballot papers accounted for 30% of the informal ballots! Anyone know?