When Stewart queried a non-response to Abetz’s letter with the subsequent Special Minister of State, the AEC claimed in a letter they did reply, and attached their reply — but there was nothing attached. When followed up again, and asking for a copy of the (alleged) attachment, all he received was a colossal cold shoulder – the AEC and minister’s staff ignored his embarassing requests. 

 

By EDITOR, CAIRNS NEWS

QUEENSLAND MPs have been warned of likely voting fraud in this month’s state election following reports that some 300,000 additional young voters had enrolled for the October 31st poll.

The Labor Party across Australia has a sordid record of foul play in elections at party branch, state, federal and council elections, as reported previously by Cairns News.
The latest warning comes from NSW psephologist (election researcher) Lex Stewart who has written to Katter Party and independent MPs urging them to check their local electoral rolls. Under Queensland law, updated enrolments on electoral rolls must be gazetted every month.

“Vote frauds are likely to be done by the ALP/Greens to rob you of seats in the coming Queensland State election,” said Stewart in the letter to the MPs. He has wide experience in detecting voting fraud at both levels of government.
“In 1993 the federal Liberal MP for Macquarie lost his seat by 164 votes. I was his staffer. We found powerful evidence of at least 300 false enrolments.”
Commonwealth and Queensland electoral laws still provide little protection against vote fraud and allow bogus registrations by people claiming they are moving to a particular electorate and then registering at an address. Postal voting also provides opportunities for fraud.

There is also little protection against multiple voting because voters are still not required to present a form of acceptable identification at an ordinary pre-poll or election day vote.
Stewart has told the federal government’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) that authorised identification should include normal methods of identification used to open bank accounts or obtain government entitlements.
Stewart has supplied the Queensland MPs with details of the Macquarie incident
that he previously gave to the JSCEM. “If you read it, you will be shocked,” he said.
“You can expect a surge of false enrolments at the last minute onto the electoral roll, and there will be insufficient time for the ECQ and/or the AEC to check them for validity.”
In his submission to the JSCEM Stewart noted that the Shepherdson Inquiry in Queensland found that ALP members had been involved in voting fraud in 1986, 1993 and 1996. “This was a finding by a judge, based on evidence,” Stewart noted.

Stewart is not alone in recommending protection against vote fraud. A previous JSCEM has already recommended use of proper ID before voting and a national rollout of Electronic Certified Lists be fully funded and implemented prior to the 2019 federal election.

Stewart also has the name of an ALP figure who is prepared to come and testify in the JSCEM to tell of the electoral frauds that he participated in over a period of years in federal, state and council elections using false names on the electoral roll as instructed by some of the key ALP leaders in Sussex Street HQ and some ALP MPs.

“He is prepared to talk at a public hearing of JSCEM, and I have offered him several times to JSCEM, but have been furiously opposed by AEC officials and by then (circa 2007 or 2013) Liberal party chairman of the JSCEM.”

Serious concerns over the Australian Electoral Commission and its mismanagement of the voting rolls were also raised by an Australian National Audit Office report in November 2015. This followed five previous reports raising such concerns going back to 2002.

The 2015 report said actions taken by the AEC prior to the 2013 election in response to previously agreed ANAO recommendations “have not adequately and effectively addressed the matters that led to recommendations being made”.
One matter of particular concern for Stewart is the Continuous Roll Update process “done by AEC officials sitting in airconditioned offices in Canberra doing comparisons of electronic databases (e.g. driving licences, births, deaths, marriages, school enrolments, exam results etc), but avoiding any practical external fieldwork to check the realities.

“I point out that CRU may well be good at including persons onto the Electoral Roll, but cannot address the issue of ‘validity’, excluding deliberately false enrolments stacked onto the roll by using the provisions of Commonwealth Electoral Act section 98AA(2)(c), where the third option for identity appears in section 6 ‘Evidence of your Identity’ of the AEC form Envorle to Vote or Update Your Details.

“This process is wide open to rorting, because once you have one false or dead person on the Roll, then unscrupulous persons can do false enrolments by forging that signature, and the AEC does not enquire into signatures, in fact it has no capacity to verify the signatures anyway!”