Dana Wortley (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to address the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Provisional Voting) Bill 2011. This bill amends the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 and the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984. The bill will repeal the requirement for provisional voters to provide evidence of identity before their votes are admitted to preliminary scrutiny. It will implement recommendation 2 of the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters on the conduct of the 2007 federal election and matters related thereto. This measure was also one of the government's 2007 election commitments.

A provisional vote is a type of declaration vote that can be cast by an elector at a polling place on polling day. As with all declaration votes, a provisional vote is sealed inside an envelope and on the outside is written the voter's details, including their name, address, date of birth and signature. A provisional vote is cast when the voter's name cannot be found on the certified list, the voter's name is marked off the list as already having voted, the voter is registered as a silent elector or the voter has cast an absent, early or postal vote. Broadly speak­ing, a provisional vote is used when an elector arrives at the polling booth but the official cannot find their name on the electoral roll.

It is of great concern to the Gillard government, which values and indeed nurtures the right of all Australians to vote, that over 27,000 provisional votes were rejected at the 2007 federal election. The total number of provisional votes was 167,500. At the 2010 federal election there were 203,488 provisional votes cast in total and 28,065 of these were rejected because the voter did not provide evidence of their identity by the first Friday following the polling day. Further examination by the AEC of the 28,065 provisional vote envelopes rejected because no proof of identity was provided showed that in 12,227 instances the name of the voter was later found on the certified list. This is not surprising if you consider that there can be miscommunication between the voter and polling official or that a simple mistake can be made by the polling official in not finding the voter's name on the certified list. It is unacceptable that at both the 2007 and 2010 elections thousands of provisional votes were rejected in the very preliminary stages of processing because voters did not provide the evidence of identity by the first Friday following polling day.

The Australian Electoral Commission has also noted that the admission rate for Senate provisional votes fell from 62.23 per cent in 2004 to 25.14 per cent in 2007. It is a sober­ing thought that, if the 2004 provisional vote admission rate prevailed in 2007, an additional 62,186 Senate votes would have been counted in that election. So the votes of 62,000 Australians were not counted in the Senate voting. That is a lot of Australian voters who did not get a say in the new parliament. Their votes were not counted because the current Electoral Act specifies that, if the required evidence of identity is not provided by the deadline, the envelope containing the ballot papers is excluded from preliminary scrutiny.

So why don't Australian voters provide their proof of identity to the AEC so their votes will be counted? There are many reasons why voters do not provide evidence of identity by the deadline and this does not necessarily indicate any attempt to vote fraudulently. Unlike for many of us here, their lives do not revolve around politics. They are working, raising families, paying mortgages, studying and trying to make ends meet. Many people cannot take time off work to find an AEC office and provide their proof of identity. Many would feel that they have done their duty by turning up on election day to vote. It is the current system that has let them down. It is Liberal Party philosophy which has let voters down. The Liberal Party, of course, is the one which abolished the seven-day close of rolls grace period, thereby preventing thousands of young people from getting on to the rolls and being able to vote in 2007. This government is dedicated to removing barriers to electoral participation, to modernising enrolment and electoral processes and to responding to the increased demand for early voting services. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, has shown that he will take any opportunity to oppose democratic reform and to attack Labor's belief in a modern and fair electoral system.

The amendments in this bill will address the issue of exclusion of otherwise perfectly valid votes from further scrutiny. It is important that amendments are in place for the next by-election, referendum or general election. At present only provisional voters, and no other declaration voter, have to provide evidence of identity in order for their vote to be accepted. This leads to inconsis­tency of treatment of different types of declaration votes. For example, a voter who is eligible to vote and has a provisional vote rejected at preliminary scrutiny only because of failure to provide evidence of identity would have had his or her vote counted if they had instead cast an absent vote, postal vote or pre-poll declaration vote. There is no reason to treat otherwise valid provisional votes differently from other forms of declaration voting.

The current requirement for provisional voters to show proof of identity by the Friday following the poll was put in place by the Howard government. One could question whether it was for honourable reasons that the Liberal government introduced changes to this legislation. The intent was not to improve the integrity of the electoral roll, but rather, one could guess, to assist the Liberal Party in the 2007 and future elections. Before the Liberal government changed the rules, the logical system of matching signatures was also applied to provisional votes. If an Australian voter applied at the polling booth and signed the outside of the envelope to say he was the person who voted, then AEC officials took this back to the commission and they checked it against the signature of the elector which exists on the original or subsequent enrolment forms held by the AEC.

What this government seeks to do is to restore that system through this bill because it is blatantly unfair that, as a result of the Howard government, provisional voters are treated differently from those who cast a postal vote or an absentee vote. Why should provisional voters face a greater likelihood of being disenfranchised? Why should they have to jump through more hoops simply to have their votes counted? Those opposite still agree with a requirement that provisional voters jump through hoops to have their vote counted. This is despite the detrimental effect on thousands of provisional voters. On the other hand, I am pleased to say that the Australian Electoral Commission supports the federal govern­ment's repeal of the identity requirement. In its submission to the inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters into the 2010 federal election and matters related thereto, the Australian Electoral Com­mission recommended that the requirement for production of evidence of identity by provisional voters should be repealed.

The government's Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Provisional Voting) Bill 2011 will ensure all voters who cast declaration votes are once again treated in a fair and equitable way. It will restore the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to its pre-2006 status where the law, custom and established practice accepted the voter's signature as proof of identity. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I indicate my support for the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Provisional Voting) Bill 2011. I want to discuss and foreshadow the amendments that I will move in the committee stage. I believe there is nothing more important in a democracy than ensuring that everyone who votes in an election has their vote counted. I state at the outset that I have had lengthy discussions with both sides of the chamber on this bill and, when the bills were introduced in a previous form to today, I spoke to the Australian Electoral Com­mission on this issue.

The current requirement regarding provisional voting was introduced in 2006 and at the 2007 federal election 167,682 Australians cast a provisional vote. However, of the 32,000 or so voters who were required to provide evidence of identity within five days to make their provisional vote count, only 5,000 turned up at an AEC divisional office to do so. The remaining 27,000 or thereabouts votes were subsequently dest­royed, not read, not counted. Why those voters did not visit their divisional office is anyone's guess. They could have been busy, perhaps they forgot, they may have thought their electorate had already been decided so there was no point, they considered it too hard or, sadly, perhaps they just did not care enough. Who knows?

While the argument can be made that if these voters truly wanted to make their votes count they would follow the procedures set in place as advised to them by the AEC divisional officer on polling day, I am inclined to try to remove the onus on the individual so as to allow for as many votes as possible to be counted. It is a democratic right of every individual not only to be able to cast their vote but also to have their vote count. In some ways the contents of the envelope are irrelevant. Even if hypo­thetically all of those 27,000 provisional votes contained donkey votes, the point is that every vote that is cast should be counted.

The government's bill goes some way in addressing that, allowing that the divisional returning officer must check the signature on the envelope against the most recent record available to them to verify the vote. But under this model there may still be some whose votes cannot be verified. For example, a woman who has recently married and accidentally signed her married name signature instead of her maiden name or someone whose handwriting on the envelope is illegible—and I can relate to that. As such, I will be moving an amendment that requires, further to the government's measure, for any provisional votes which are not able to be verified against the electoral database that the divisional returning officer must make all reasonable attempts to contact the voter within three days of the election and give them until the Friday following polling day to provide proof of identity at a divisional office. I believe that this is a good and sensible middle ground that addresses the concerns of both sides while, most importantly, maintaining the integrity of our electoral roll. he right to vote is crucial and I think that everyone in the chamber would agree with us. And the right to have that vote counted is just as crucial. It is up to us as legislators to make it as easy as possible while maintaining the integrity of the electoral roll for Australians to vote. I believe that this amendment I will introduce in the committee stage provides that.

I also foreshadow that I will be moving an amendment to this bill with regard to misleading and deceptive conduct following some of the behaviour in recent elections particularly the South Australian state election just last year. This was quite a disgraceful episode where misrepresentation was made as to the how-to-vote cards that were being circulated, and I think that Senator Fielding has a particular interest in this. I look forward to debating this amend­ment during the second reading stage and I look forward to the passage of this bill.

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is nothing more important in our democracy than ensuring that we have a fair electoral system with a high level of integrity. Electoral reform is always a delicate issue because even the slightest change can have a tremendous effect on the outcome of an election. For this reason, I think that parliament should always approach this issue with great caution.

This bill deals with the identification that is required for provisional voters. It seeks to reverse the changes that were made under the Howard government when the coalition held a majority in the Senate. As a result, the Senate at the time was treated more like a rubber stamp than a house of review. It is important that when changes are made to the electoral system we should keep our eyes on ensuring that the integrity of our political system is not driven by partisan politics. Ensuring a strong democracy goes above and beyond that. However, it would appear to some as if both sides over a period of time have approached this issue and formed their positions on the basis of how many votes they stand to gain or lose on any change. This is not the way we should be deciding changes to the electoral system. Family First's role is to scrutinise the merits of this bill and ensure our electoral system is fair and maintains a high level of integrity.

In this case, in looking closely at the bill I can see that there are certainly two legitimate sides to the debate. The coalition argues that by upholding a high standard of proof for provisional voters to prove their identity, it makes the opportunity for fraudulent behaviour less prevalent. The higher the onus of proof you place on a voter to prove their identity, the harder it will be for rorts to occur, and certainly insisting upon photo ID instead of simply comparing the two sets of signatures is a higher onus of proof.

But that is not the only factor that needs to be considered when looking at this bill, otherwise we would not just require provisional voters to produce photo identi­fication, we would go even further and ask them to produce a number of sources of identification, perhaps, for example, a passport or a driver's licence, just to be sure. Obviously there needs to be a balance between what is necessary and what is reasonable. Just as it is important to ensure that every vote is legitimate, it is also important to ensure that every legitimate vote is counted. Under the current system there are indeed thousands of voters who take the time to go to the polling booths but who do not end up having their votes counted because they do not satisfy the amended identification requirements under the current legislation. These are people who want their voices heard and deserve to have their voices heard, but they do not happen to take their wallets with them to the polling booth and they now miss out on participating in the democratic process. The question is: is this reasonable or not?

It is true that provisional voters can go to an Australian Electoral Commission office within five days of an election and produce photo ID. But let's face it, how realistic is this option really for many, many Australians? Voting takes time and effort, and plenty of people who turn up to their polling booth and get told that they will have to make another visit in a few days time to show their photo ID simply do not get around to coming back a second time. That ultimately means that their votes get thrown in the bin and do not get counted like everybody else's. I think we would all agree that this is hardly a good result.

What this bill seeks to do is restore the system that was in place prior to the 2007 election and require provisional voters to have their signatures confirmed against their signatures on the AEC's records. Family First believes that this will still ensure a high level of integrity of the electoral system whilst at the same time not excluding thousands of legitimate votes. Family First did vote against the Howard government's 2006 bill and we do not support the retention of the existing measures.

David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In rising to wind up the debate on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Provisional Voting) Bill 2011, I thank all senators who have contributed to this debate. By repealing the requirement for provisional voters to provide evidence of identity as a requirement for these votes being included in the count for an election, this bill fulfils the commitment which Labor took to the last two federal elections to reverse the regressive changes made by the Howard government to the Electoral Act in 2006 and thereby to restore fairness to our electoral system.

As Minister Gray noted in his second reading speech, this amendment to the Electoral Act is supported by the independent Australian Electoral Com­mission, the AEC. In its submission to the inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters into the 2010 federal election, the AEC recommended that the requirement for the production of evidence of identity by provisional voters should be repealed. No-one had any doubt in 2006 about why the Howard government brought in the change that this bill seeks to reverse. The respected election commentator Malcolm Mackerras, a former member of the Liberal Party secretariat, said that they were motivated solely by a 'relentless pursuit of the electoral interests of the Liberal Party'.

The effect of those changes was to make it harder for Australians to enrol to vote and harder to cast their votes, and that was in fact the coalition's intent. The changes were based on the calculation that the majority of the people who would lose their vote would come from those social groups more likely to vote Labor: first-time voters, new citizens, Indigenous Australians, people with poor English or low literacy skills, itinerant workers and the homeless. Professor Brian Costar of Swinburne University in Melbourne, one of Australia's more respected political scientists, told the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters:

We know that provisional voters ... are not a mirror image of the electorate as a whole. They tend to be more Labor and Green than they are Liberal, National, or anything else.

At the 2010 general election, over 28,000 provisional votes were rejected because the voter did not provide evidence of identity by the deadline. The AEC found that most of these people were actually correctly enrolled. They lost their vote purely because they did not supply photo ID as required by that 2006 coalition amendment. The coalition claimed that these amendments were necessary to maintain the integrity of the electoral roll. They maintained this claim, and presumably they are still maintaining it today, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support the assertion that any such threat exists. The Senate does not have to take my word for it on this point. Let me quote what the AEC said in its submission to the inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters into the 2007 federal election. It said:

… it can be clearly stated, in relation to false identities, that there has never been any evidence of widespread or organised enrolment fraud in Australia.

That is actually quite a conservative statement. In fact, there is no evidence of any organised enrolment fraud in federal elections in Australia at all. So we are moving to repeal the Howard government's 2006 amendments because they were partisan in their intent, because the justification for them was spurious and unsupported by any evidence and because they have been harmful in their effects.

This bill restores fairness and equality of treatment for all voters in our federal elections. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.