Abbott dumps on low income Australians from the ski fields of France.

HG is quite correct in his first paragraph. We have no information as to the location and/or method of lodgement of the claims for provisional enrollment of the in excess of 44,000 names we infer advanced to full elector status during the first 22 days of July 2010, nor as to the distribution of those names between electoral Divisions. One would think that a digitised enrollment management regime would be capable of generating such statistics, but I am unaware as to any such being available to the public.

Back in 2000, Christopher Pyne chaired a Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters inquiry into the integrity of the electoral rolls. Of the many submissions from the public, one was from Professor Emeritus Colin Hughes, who had been Australian Electoral Commisioner 1984 – 1989.

Professor Hughes submission, although dealing with generalities of electoral roll management, had a significant focus upon the Federal Division of Herbert in North Queensland. Herbert covered an area which included the Queensland State Electoral District of Mundingburra, in relation to which there had not long before been a successful challenge to an election outcome that had resulted in a change of government on the floor of the Queensland Parliament. Australian Electoral Commission interest in respect of the Division of Herbert was self-evident, as a joint roll-keeping agreement existed between the Commonwealth and Queensland, as was the case in relation to all States. There had been shenanigans revealed in the Court of Disputed Returns with respect to enrollments in Mundingburra.

One of Hughes’ comments in his submission envisaged a scenario wherein the entire electoral roll for Herbert would be scrapped, and all eligible persons were to be required to re-enroll, even though Section 85 of the CEA as it stood prevented that from being done. Hughes ventured the opinion that if this was done, he would have expected somewhere around 30 to 40 percent of names that had been carried on the old roll would have no claimants appear to effect re-enrollment. Perhaps Hughes envisaged, in 2000, that Parliament might shortly amend the CEA to permit such reconstruction of a roll from scratch.

On the face of it, such an educated guess could be taken as merely forewarning as to the extent of turbulence with respect to persons changing residence but not updating their electoral enrollment particulars. In the context of the AEC claim of that time that only around 85% of persons eligible for enrollment actually effect it, even more room is made for the explaining away of such a seemingly large ‘unsupported’ content on some electoral rolls.

There is a problem, however. Whereas the AEC had made its assessments as to the extent of electoral enrollment of the eligible population based largely upon sampling-based studies, it appears it had never cross-checked the total number of enrollments against eligibility extrapolated from national population statistics. It seems no publicly available on-going reconciliation of electoral eligibility derived from ABS population statistics, with electoral enrollments actually recorded, had ever been undertaken! There are indications from private submissions to other Parliamentary JSCEM inquiries that electoral enrollment had been near 100% of the eligible for decades.

If BOTH the AEC sampling-based studies, AND unofficial population-statistics-based eligibility assessments are correct, then that means that, with around 95% of names routinely showing vote claims made against them Australia-wide, entities other than genuine electors are lodging not less than 10% of all ballot papers in all elections. Its just that we have no idea how such ballot papers, from one election to another, may have been marked.

In a context of de facto 100% electoral enrollment, Hughes’ expectations as to 30+% ‘non shows’ in Herbert, were other Divisional rolls to be re-built from scratch, could be expected to be reflected to greater or lesser extent in those Divisions also. Dependent upon how many otherwise genuine electors fail to claim a vote against what is presumed to be their ‘left behind’ enrollment at elections, the ballots lodged by non-genuine entities at elections may well exceed the arithmetically derivable minimum of 10%.

All such tainted ballots deployed in one way, in an Australian context, would likely be enough to swing ANY Federal election. It also strikes me as being enough, deployed selectively, this way and that, for profoundly influencing in the longer term the parliamentary content of any or all political parties ever likely to participate in a government. A sort of ‘secret pre-selection’, but one operating on criteria unknown to the genuinely voting public. Would that explain some of what we seem to be seeing in the political firmament today?

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