George Williams, in the fourth paragraph of the article, says:

"The problem [of the state of the electoral rolls
making a mockery of the elections] works especially
against interests of young people. They make up
most of Australia's missing voters, with only
one-in-two 18-year-olds currently enrolled."

According to the chapter on population in Year Book Australia, it appears the 18-year-old cohort of the population in 2010 numbers around 240,000 persons. Half of that number, the number claimed by George to be unenrolled, comes to around 120,000 persons. I have difficulty in understanding the claim that such young people 'make up MOST of Australia's missing voters'. It seems to me that this group, on the face of it, accounts for only a small proportion of the allegedly missing 1.4 million persons eligible, but unenrolled.

Of course, to be fair, it would have to be admitted that the 19, 20, and 21-year-old cohorts could also have been meant by George to have been included in the description 'young people'. Accepting that this might be so, and that a propensity for a declining, but nevertheless significant, proportion of each cohort to remain unenrolled exists, it would seem that unenrolled young people could still only account for around at most 250,000 of the claimed 1.4 million missing from the rolls.

How are the allegedly outstanding other 1.15 million missing enrolments accounted for, George?

You say in your opening paragraph that "all the evidence points to the fact that 1.4 million Australians are missing from the roll[s]". What evidence is that George? Links would be good.

The electoral commission has an enrolment system in place so as to avoid fraud.

If you cannot change the system, instead of whining, try and work within it. There is nothing stopping you automatically posting a semi completed reply paid envelope to the individuals that would be acceptable to the IEC.

Of course Pericles- to me, George only really seems to be advocating alternative, easier methods to enroll electronically as far as direct propositions go.
Whether he actually does support compulsory voting or not, he doesn't seem to be endorsing much in the way of reinforcing the 'compulsion' part to voting, merely the access- and that I can't really criticize that alone, even if he does believe compulsory voting is good.

Well, George seems to be a bit slow coming back with the results of any research, or links thereto in respect to the accounting for the outstanding 1.15 million eligible claimed to not be enrolled, so I'll put up what I've been able to find.

To begin with, the Special Minister of State, as recently as November 2009, was claiming only a total of 1.1 million to be unenrolled as at the 2007 Federal elections. See this twitpic of a post to the dpmc forum on the Electoral Reform Green Paper: http://twitpic.com/27ewoz . Yet George's claim has that number having increased by 300,000 in less than three years. How is that?

Here is a link to the dpmc forum on the Electoral Reform Green Paper, for those who wish to navigate their way around for themselves: http://forums.pmc.gov.au/Electoral_Reform_Green_Paper . Note that there are three web pages of comments. A viewer can move forward or backward by clicking the page numbers at the bottom of any page. Just to confuse viewers, the second page of comments shows as 'page 1' in its URL, thus: http://forums.pmc.gov.au/Electoral_Reform_Green_Paper?page=1 , and similarly the third as 'page 2'. Take care if you wish to avoid missing anything.

Getting back to the 1.15 million eligible seemingly unaccounted for, is it possible that by a process of weasel-wording it is being represented that the million or so 'ten pound poms' and their then children are now statistically regarded as being eligible for enrolment due to the 2002 legislation that permitted them to take out Australian citizenship without having to abandon their British citizenship? See this twitpic of a relevant post to the dpmc forum: http://twitpic.com/27ewoz

If this is so, has anybody told these permanently resident British citizens this wonderful news?

Should they even need to take out Australian citizenship? See: http://twitpic.com/27g2y2

Compulsory voting is what makes the nonsense - anyone who really is interested will enrol. Mandatory voting is not what was intended and lets the candidates off the hook to just use postal means TV or hanging around in shopping centres instead of having to actually work for your vote as they still do in the UK where it is still free choice.

Also would most likely save us all taxpayer funds.

Plus go back to first past the post.

It was supposedly to make sure both majors got in but it seems that it works find in the UK and seems to me to save hard work on the part of the politicians or would be. UK has 3 major parties on the old system but we cant manage it on this tweaked one. Cynical?

Worried Man I agree completely.
Welcome to the forum!