Hi,

During Howard's reign we've seen a number of retrograde steps taking us away from the relatively open, free and fair political system that existed previously. I'm no expert but among the disturbing changes are:

• Less time between the calling of an election and the closing of the electoral roll


• Increase of the ceiling for undeclared political donations


• Reduction of the time/questions allowed for non-government senators


• Restructuring of the Senate Committee system to make it friendlier to the government, effectively weakening the process of legislative review

Most people I know are completely unaware of these changes, but I'll certainly be voting for people or parties whose policy is to undo them. I don't know what the labor party's position is on this, but I'd really like to know.

Mate, what are you complaining about?

Changes to the electoral laws were necessary but did not go far enough. There is wide corruption of the electoral roll where people register many times under different names so they have more than one vote. Others do so for other reasons such as the possibility of lying to Centre_link_.

I was involved in investigating electoral fraud after the 1993 federal election. This seat changed hands marginally. After investigating less then 5% of the roll, the number of false enrolments was greater than the number of votes that changed the seat over.

I would personally like to see the whole electoral roll wiped 100% and repeated every 20 years. This enables dead people be removed, those who lived in telegraph poles, in the middle of an intersection and such be removed from the roll, making it an honest system.

Then there is the factor of the electoral office being flooded close to the day of the election. After the election, the electoral offices receive a lot of their mail outs to these addresses returned as non-existent. Something is very wrong here.

I argued this at a meeting of the Queensland Nationals 7 years ago. When some questioned how to get this through the senate, I said that you only have to appeal to the people. Explain the problem with the roll and that any person who group in the senate who tries to block such reform obviously has something to hide by wanting to keep a corrupted system in place.

Who's to stop anyone going to several booths within an electorate exercising multiple voting? You might get asked "have you voted yet" but legally you are not required to answer the q. Any thoughts?

I'm all for improving the veracity of the electoral system and reducing fraud. However its unclear to what extent the fraud perpetrated and the period between calling an election and closing the rolls are _link_ed.

It is obvious that the young, the poor and the itinerant are disproportionately affected by shortening this grace period. And its obvious that on the whole these groups are less inclined to vote liberal.

Its one thing to want to fix a problem in an existing system, but quite another throw out the baby with the bathwater... *cough* IR reform *cough*. Whether its 100 points of ID or a retinal scan doesn't matter, but give people time to register and get their vote.

raven wrote:
Who's to stop anyone going to several booths within an electorate exercising multiple voting? You might get asked "have you voted yet" but legally you are not required to answer the q. Any thoughts?

It is easy to fix. All you have to do is publish the electors in a book for only one polling booth only. Go to any other polling booth even if it's just a 10 minute walk away to leave you voting as an absentee voter. This way, it can be checked against the roll of only one booth before being counted.

andykirk wrote:
I'm all for improving the veracity of the electoral system and reducing fraud. However its unclear to what extent the fraud perpetrated and the period between calling an election and closing the rolls are _link_ed.

It is obvious that the young, the poor and the itinerant are disproportionately affected by shortening this grace period. And its obvious that on the whole these groups are less inclined to vote liberal.

Its one thing to want to fix a problem in an existing system, but quite another throw out the baby with the bathwater... *cough* IR reform *cough*. Whether its 100 points of ID or a retinal scan doesn't matter, but give people time to register and get their vote.

Andy,

There is always lots of time to enrol to vote or ammend your enrolment details. There are 3 to 4 years between elections to do so. The extra time is barely much of a stretch really so it is a null arguement.

As for it affecting the young and poor, this would only be true due to their own decision making. Everyone is responsible for their own actions or lack of.

The extent of fraud can't be said because nobody has investigated it to make it official. It's easy to do by looking at how much mail outs are returned after the election which by the way, is a large amount. Not just of the AEC but of the sitting members too.