Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me no joy to be speaking on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Provisional Voting) Bill 2011 today, because all this bill will do is affect the integrity of our voting system. The honourable member who just spoke mentioned the 2007 election and the seat of McEwen. I had some experiences with the voting and the vote counting in the seat of McEwen. There were multiple votes cast in that election and there was nothing that the AEC could do about it. I will give one example which I think illustrates why we have to be so careful to maintain the integrity of our electoral system. There was a parish priest who received a note from the AEC inquiring as to why he had voted three times in the electorate of McEwen. It turned out that someone had voted under his name in New South Wales and then twice within the electorate of McEwen at different polling booths. There was nothing that the AEC could do about it, apart from giving him a ‘Please explain’. When he explained that he had voted only once and had voted within the local community where he works, that was the end of the story, and those other two votes were counted.

The interesting thing about the McEwen electorate during the election of 2007 was that there were multiple cases of people casting more than one ballot, and it was the first time that the union movement en masse had been up to scrutineer and to also hand out how-to-vote cards at polling booths in that electorate. During the Work Choices campaign they bussed union officials into the electorate so that they could hand out how-to-vote cards and do the scrutineering. And—surprise, surprise!—we also saw an increase in multiple voting.

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