Letter to Sydney Morning Herald 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 (see photo attached) 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, www.afhe.org.au