THE AEC HAS TAKEN TO CENSORING ‘FREE SPEECH’ AND SMEARING OUR MINOR PARTIES, BUT HERE’S THE THING …
The Australian Electoral Commission has been out and about early in the election cycle, throwing as much mud as it can on minor parties and their supporters.
According to the Guardian, AEC is accusing “minor party candidates” of making “baseless claims about election fraud”, calling it “dangerous misinformation imported from the US”.
I guess labelling anyone who criticises our electoral system as a ‘dangerous Trumper’, is easier than actually doing your job and safeguarding the integrity of Australia’s voting system.
The AEC even had the gall to boast it had “successfully applied to Facebook to take action” against anyone discussing ‘voter fraud’ in the lead-up to the election, with at least five posts removed and two pages taken down entirely”.
Nice. So, misusing your delegated power to silence free speech is now cause for crowing amongst Australia’s authoritarian public officials.
Here’s the thing. Voter fraud is a real issue with real effects.
Just ask Gough Whitlam, who famously told Joe Riordan, after he lost the Sydney seat of Philip:
“Comrade, comrade, how negligent of you. To lose a seat in which there is not one, but three cemeteries is unforgivable.”
Once upon a time, Australian’s ballot papers were numbered and therefore traceable if a result was in doubt.
All attempt at accountability was discarded in the 1980s by Bob Hawke who said he wanted to make it “simpler and easier” to vote.
His “reforms” not only made it “easier” to vote – they made it easier to vote more than once.
Enrolling is now incredibly simple. No ID required. Just fill in a form online or at the Post Office and your good to go.
Subdivisional rolls, which once meant a name only appeared at one polling place, were scrapped and a person’s name now appears on the roll at EVERY polling booth in an electorate.
This means there is nothing to stop someone going from one booth to another to vote.
When later the votes are counted, there is no way of knowing whether a person has voted once, twice or multiple times.
The AEC may check a few ‘sample’ ballots here and there, but it simply doesn’t have the resources to check them ALL.
Pre-polling and postal voting has also increased enormously in recent years.
Did they vote again on election day? Nobody really knows, because nobody really checks.
The fact is Australia’s electoral system is a shambles that depends on a form of ‘honour system’ no business manager in the world would accept.
Electoral fraud is virtually undetectable and untraceable.
It is also a form of corruption that the AEC and major parties have ignored for years.