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The Forum > Article Comments > Voluntary voting is long overdue > Comments

Voluntary voting is long overdue : Comments

By Klaas Woldring, published 4/4/2007

There are plenty of compelling reasons to abolish compulsory voting in Australia.

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Pericles, I respect your opinion but there is no irony intended and no unrealistic totalitarian idea promoted. Compulsory pencil and paper voting for democratic representation may seem to be some sort of entrapment which of itself should be seen not exactly as bad because if you escape from it you are simply entrapped somewhere else which may be even less appealing. However, the compulsory voter is still unconstrained in the ballot zone in that no matter what presents, a voter can still change their thoughts and vote accordingly.

Participating in democracy should not be optional because the alternative, based on an overwhelming accumulation of statistical, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence, can only lead to perceptions that democratic protections and processes do not apply to everyone. It then is an easy step to divisive social, political and moral issues with charming practices like vote suppression through voter intimidation and deception. The US of A has an unaudited voting system with full on manipulation where purged voter lists, an intimidated media and no paper trail are just the beginning of this hokey-pokey dance.

The hokey-pokey may derive from the phrase 'hocus pocus', leading on to the expression "hanky panky" or from the nineteenth-century expression 'holus bolus', meaning 'all at once'. ... and all relevant to the US of A.
e.g.
You put your vote in,
Someone you don't even know pulls your vote out,
They then put their vote for you in,
And they shake it all about,

They do the hokey pokey
and they turn themselves around
AND that is what it's all about.

The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt.
Posted by Keiran, Sunday, 15 April 2007 8:21:07 PM
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Nice one Kieran... however, there
should be a box called "I don't like any of the candidates"
and another labeled. "I want Proportional Representation"
Posted by ybgirp, Monday, 16 April 2007 8:05:24 AM
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rstuart,

I owe it to Klaas to return to the topic of his article, compulsory voting. Yet I want to give reasons why your reservations with respect to the possibility of electoral fraud may not be soundly based. I shall attempt both.

You say ".... You have to enrol before you know for certain what districts require your vote in order to change the outcome, ....", and "Doing it on a massive scale required to change the outcome of an election would I suspect be well nigh impossible." I say, in regard to the first point, 'not necessarily', and with respect to the second point, 'why?'

Submission 161, to which I provided a link, contends that of the order of 200,000 enrolments may have been moved around as between States and electoral divisions just before the 1987 Federal elections. These enrolments, when they manifested themselves, seemed to possess characteristics of transfers of existing enrolments, rather than of new enrolments. Perhaps they were being tranferred at the last minute to where they were seen to be most useful. That submission also contends that a comparable discrepancy existed in the enrolment accountancy at around that time. If so, there is cause for concern, as with enrolment-based fraud there need exist no other evidence of its commision.

It is officially maintained that there has been little evidence found indicative of widespread electoral fraud. That may well be correct, but under the compulsory voting regime a mechanism may well have been emplaced that could be used to conceal yet to be perpetrated fraudulent claiming of votes. It is of the nature of an institutionlized security breach in the handling of voting records, and an outline of it is contained within this post: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5477#70863 .

Should voting become voluntary, and turnout decline significantly at future elections, this security breach could be taken advantage of in the commission of much more brazen and simply executed personation-style fraud to remove any documentary evidence thereof.

Abolition of compulsion, while attractive, may not be a good idea at this time.
Posted by Forrest Gumpp, Monday, 16 April 2007 12:59:44 PM
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The result of an election is important ONLY if the government governs with the consent of the governed but there is no way of checking this fundamental objective of democracy in non-compulsory elections. In compulsory voting elections as here, the government elected is presumed to have a specific mandate but recently at least we have seen how easy it is to poison the channels of public information. I see this as a major problem but not one relating specifically to compulsory voting as such.

The democratic deficit can be easily measured if we find that public procedures and processes important for maintaining and deepening public trust in a government were ignored. We can apply this to all the topical issues ..... water, energy, mass immigration, education, health, infrastructure, etc. With a fascist the problem has never been how best to present the truth to the public. Instead it is spin and how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

An example of this hollowing out of the central processes of democratic life can be found in NSW recently with the appointment of the new Director General of Education without any public process of gazetting and interviewing for the position. The Education minister, Della Bosca just trotted in one of his mates, Mr Coutts-Trotter a former "spin doctor", a man married to federal Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek, a man with no formal educationalist background and one who could never qualify as a school teacher because of his earlier criminal background and gaol for using and selling heroin. This newly elected Iemma government did not receive a mandate to destroy recognised public processes and our trust.

This is where we should reward those rare journalists, if you can find them, who see through the spin doctoring by daring to identify and report these crucial issues. We will never have politicians of substance, integrity and intellect unless the public have the same.
Posted by Keiran, Monday, 16 April 2007 4:11:43 PM
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In the last State election in Victoria I attended to the table and announced to the woman my identity and that I refused to vote on constitutional grounds. Nevertheless she put a line through my name and sought to hand over the ballot papers to me. I refused to touch them and repeated the same objection and then went over waiting for my wife to complete her voting. I walked out of the room and looked through the glass window observing the woman to hand the ballot papers I had refused to accept, to the electoral officer in charge and he subsequently deposited the form in their relevant ballot boxes. I immediately confronted him that his conduct was in my view illegal and tampering with election and asked his details. This he gave. I made a formal complaint directly to the Premier, and weeks later repeated the same but no response. The manual for electoral officer prohibit them to put any ballot papers, not being their own off course, in a ballot box. Till it does occur (as I expected) and nothing is being done about it.
In the past, some years ago, Curacao Cat was found to be a registered voter where its owner had it registered for voting! It was a CAT!

Not only is compulsory voting unconstitutional, but also the association to pay $1.95 per primary vote to a candidate means that the major getting more then 41 million dollars and use this for their advertising campaigns, etc. meaning that Jo Blow, an INDEPENDENT has hope in hell to get heard lacking such fast amounts of moneys.
As I also made clear in Court, why as an INDEPENDENT candidate should I vote for my opponents, as even if I were to vote for myself by the distributing of preferences my vote will go to other candidates I stand against. That is like going for a job interview and the prospective employer ask you to do preference voting for other aspirant workers and he then will give the job to the one who gets the most votes.
Posted by Mr Gerrit H Schorel-Hlavka, Monday, 16 April 2007 7:26:20 PM
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An interesting counter to the potential disfranchisement mentioned by CJMorgan earlier in this thread is revealed when you visit the Australian Electoral Commission website. The FAQ about Proof of Identity, see http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/What/enrolment/faq_poi.htm , in answer to its very first question " What is the Proof of Identity (POI) scheme for enrolment?" says:

"The POI scheme for federal electoral enrolment comes into effect throughout Australia on Monday 16 April 2007. From this date all eligible electors, that is Australian citizens aged 17 years and above, will need to prove their identity when enrolling for the first time, re-enrolling to get back on the roll or updating their enrolment because they have moved or changed name. POI for enrolment was introduced by the Commonwealth Parliament, as part of a package of changes to electoral law that was passed in June 2006."

Sneaky. Very sneaky.

The Federal government has apparently, very quietly, lowered the voting age to 17!

With enrolment and voting being compulsory, this notoriously tight-fisted government may just have found a way to off-load a substantial part of the cost of at least one election directly onto electors. Just about the ultimate in 'user (or more correctly, non-user) pays'. By not openly announcing the change, there will be a very large number of 17 year olds who will, as things stand, incur not just one, but possibly two fines after the next elections. One for failing to enroll, and another for failing to vote. And Mum and Dad will stand surety for the payment of the fines, you may depend.

Who do we blame, Abbot, or Costello? Or should we suspect bad karma, and blame Turnbull?

The 17 year old cohort in the population numbers around 250,000 persons, Australia-wide. The majority of these will be Australian citizens. At $50 per head per offence, the potential fine revenue could be of the order of $25M for just one election. Good one.

And I wonder how many others may be caught not having enrolled?
Posted by Forrest Gumpp, Thursday, 19 April 2007 11:09:13 AM
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