from Australians for Honest Elections
· AEC not capable of detecting false enrolments that we found previously
· Audit Office reports show AEC did not act on recommendations to fix things
· cheating by multiple voting (18,770 at last election) can be expected again
As the deadline has now just passed for people to get their names onto the Electoral Roll, elections-monitoring body Australians for Honest Elections points to long-standing problems in the Electoral Rolls and questions the Australian Electoral Commission’s capacity to adequately cleanse the Rolls of false enrolments.
“There is always a last minute rush to get many thousands of enrolments onto the Electoral Roll before the deadline. We have evidence that the AEC accepts last-minute rush enrolments at face value and does not properly check them, and that some of these enrolments are then rapidly removed after the election, having been used to vote in false names. It seems that the AEC has neither the willingness nor the capacity to properly check that many enrolments are genuine,” said Lex Stewart, President of Australians for Honest Elections.
“There were 18,770 multiple votes at the last election yet nobody was prosecuted and no remedial measures have been introduced to stop it happening again!”
“With lack of ID to vote, such false enrolments and multiple voting could swing the results in marginal seats and pervert the election outcome,” said Mr Stewart.
The Australian National Audit Office conducted investigations into the “Integrity of the Electoral Roll” in 2002, 2004, 2010 and 2014 and found massive problems, and made recommendations, yet the AEC did little to fix things up.
EVEN WORSE the ANAO report of 4/11/2015 was ignored by Parliament and the media. The report states in unusually harsh language for a Canberra bureaucracy that the AEC inter alia has “not adequately and effectively addressed the matters that led to recommendations being made.
“Special Ministers of State have been ‘asleep at the wheel’ for years, allowing the AEC to get away with negligence of which the bungled WA Senate election fiasco was only one prominent example of many that this organisation has evidence of”
“Putting it bluntly, the AEC is simply not capable of running an honest, fair election with a clean Electoral Roll,” said Mr Stewart.