The Australian Electoral Commission Isn't Exactly Filling us with Confidence
The Australian Electoral Commission has been forced to clarify that voting multiple times is illegal after they appeared to be encouraging it.
The commission tweeted on Tuesday …
“If someone votes at two different polling places within their electorate and places their formal vote in the ballot box at each polling place, their vote is counted.”
That tweet was viewed more than 800,000 times.
The Commission then followed it up with this …
“We cannot remove the vote from the count because, due to the secrecy of the ballot, we have no way of knowing which ballot paper belongs to which person. However, the number of double votes received is incredibly low, and usually related to mental health or age.”
So the AEC has advertised to every Australian that they can vote as many times as they like, and not get caught!
And how could they know that double voting is rare if, by their own admission, they cannot detect it?
It was only a Twitter pile-on that the AEC belatedly advised …
“Multiple voting is an offence. Real-time roll mark off occurs at all pre-poll centres and many polling day booths. All declaration votes are also subject to strict roll checks.”
Good to know.
Ironically, the AEC revealed they had warned NSW Labor MP Meryl Swanson after she had encouraged people on social media to “#voteoften”.
The AEC tweeted …
“We’ve been in touch with the MP’s office to discuss this. The post was edited swiftly to take that part out. Use of an often-misunderstood colloquial saying that shouldn’t have occurred and was amended.”
A colloquial saying? Where? In Venezuela?
This is just the latest in a series of missteps from the AEC in the lead up to the October 14 referendum.
Last week a woman told Melbourne’s 3AW that she had received multiple voting papers from the AEC, each with her name but with different numbers, after she applied online to be sent ballots for postal voting.
The AEC assured voters this was a computer glitch and unlikely to be repeated.
That was reassuring.
Last month the AEC declared - inexplicably - that while a tick would be counted as a ‘Yes’ vote at the referendum, a cross would not be counted as a ‘No’ vote.
The ‘Yes’ campaign cleverly (or should I say cynically) seized on this and began posting an infographic on social media showing how people might vote - with a tick or a cross.
No-one saw that coming. (Insert massive eye-roll here)
The AEC eventually contacted Yes23 about their misleading infographic. Which was, of course, the least the commission could do after setting up such a silly scenario in the first place.
And then the AEC had to contact the Yes campaign again about the colours in their advertising after it was revealed that signs outside early polling centres were using the same colour and font as the Australian Electoral Commission’s own signage.
The AEC advised the Yes Campaign that the signs might confuse voters into thinking that the Commission endorsed a ‘Yes’ vote.
You think?
The AEC didn’t advise that the signs be changed. Only that they be stationed a little further away from their own.
Which is odd, because when the Liberal Party created signage in a Melbourne electorate at the 2019 election using the same colours as the AEC, the Sydney Morning Herald called it a “massive rort” and the AEC demanded the signs be destroyed.
In a vote as contentious as the Voice to Parliament, you’d think the Australian Electoral Commission would be run by people other than work experience students.
The behaviour and unprofessionalism of the AEC is a disgrace. It's not work experience students, it's full-on card-carrying activists who have infiltrated this supposedly neutral government body. It is WRONG and what gets me is that Albo et al could not care less. Dirty tactics indeed.
Vote early and vote often is an old Labor meme, I remember it from my uni.days when as a young naive foolish uni student, I helped Whitlam win in 1974 handing out htv’s in Ryan. But the use of the electoral colours and fonts, I maintain, lead to misleading poll advertising for the ALP which saw Labor win under pile-o-shi. in QLD after dumping Newman. Labor plastered every polling booth with “ Remember to number every box” in an optional preferential ballot. I was a booth worker for the LNP and reported it because ALP were telling people to number every square. It was down right cheating but some magistrate somewhere declared the signs were legal because they were authorised by the ALP. The teeny-weeny lettering at the bottom said so. I knew it was misleading because electors were asking us if they had to fill in all squares because the sign said so. This cheating lead to Labor going from 6 seats to a majority in one term. The ALP are socialists whose motto is “do whatever it takes”.
Remember what Stalin said - it’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes. I always thought Labor would pull a swifty - it looks like they’ve copied the US democrats in how to cheat at elections.