Yes Terry, there are many dificiencies in any system of secret voting in a Democracy.We must have compulsory voting and yet the debate on that is far more critical to the outcome than the problem you discuss.Also there is the debate on preferences, mandatory or optional.I know, and as a Queenslander, so do you, that the changes to electoral boundaries make a big difference,Branch stacking has gone on for as long as personal ambition rules a candidate's action more than their ideals.Practical considerations rule out asking for identification at the polling booth, unless you want the polling day to become a "polling week." "Democracy is the worst form of Government-except for all the rest!" "The people on the other side of the house, are not the "enemy"-they're the "opposition,"- the enemy is sitting right behind you!" These are quotes attributed to Sir Winston Churchill. Still, I think more attention could be paid to the ressurection of eligible voters.It is a grave matter.

The utterly fraudulent voting process in the US should make us very thankful we have the system we have. Thank god for the AEC! It is therefore even more incumbent on us to ensure the continuing validity of our system, and the author of this article is right to arouse our indignation. We have something precious and we should protect it jealously. However, I find it hard to believe that what rorting occurs here is limited to the ALP, as Grygar implies.

Yes, the ALP may be tarred in this article, and probably rightly so, however, the issue of electoral fraud is also endorsed by the AEC when it comes to candidates, so what hope is there?

Given that most Party MP's don't realistically represent their electorate, but, the wider party interest, and that most voters vote for a party, rather than a person, our whole system has been corrupted by party machines that exempt themselves from privacy laws and funding regulations etc, and represent those who fund them - unions, developers, industrialists etc.

It should be compulsory for all candidates to live in their electorate for at least 12 months prior to candidature and they should lose there place in parliament if they move out of the electorate.

Any seat that does not have a margin of more than 2% should be subject to a roll audit.

In this article http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/01/04/1198950073955.html

it states:

nine of Labor's 83 seats were won by margins of less than 1.5%;
the Coalition's won 13 of its 65 seats by less than 2%, five of them by less than 0.22%.

Surely the AEC could manage this and forget about even looking at any safe seats with large margins?

Things have got a lot better since I came to Australia in 1970. Then, a massive gerrymander denied the people their choice of federal government in in 1961 and 1969. Postal votes filled out in old people's homes, with no scrutineering, were mysteriously overwhelmingly for the Liberal Party. People were taken to vote who were incapable of understanding who they were voting for (as evidenced by the way they had to be told what to do).

Now, there is less room for gerrymanders. When scrutineering was introduced into old peoples' homes, the number of those deemed capable of voting plummeted. The third problem, however, persists.

At the recent federal election, a deliberate diffficulty was created for new voters; the time in which they could enroll between the announmcement of the election and the closing of the rolls was shortened . (Yes, most of them might have enrolled earlier. But the intention of the then government was perfectly clear, and it was effective.) The proposal to require indentification would similarly disadvantage young voters. No, you can't assume, without research, that everyone would have a letter from a business organisation or a bank which they could bring to the polling place. New voters are unlikely, until they enroll, even to discover that they need one. They are not likely to have saved one for the purpose. The young get very few of such things anyway.

There was a proposal a few years ago that people would have to produce a Medicare card. Since at the time only one Medicare card was provided for entire families, the system would have prevented a great many people from voting--especially where one or more members of the familiy worked on Saturdays.

By comparison with these things, the problems that are mentioned in the article are minor.

Still the Electoral Office is working on them. Voters are visited every so often, with priority being given to new voters, and those not found to be living where the rolls say they are are removed from the rolls. Spurious addresses are noted, so that they cannot be used again.

Johntas is right. What we have here in Australia is not too bad at all. For all the improvements that could and probably should be made to our voting system, Australia has an extraordinarily high participation rate of eligible voters compared to other comparable Western democracies.

That Terry Gygar only points the finger at the ALP is understandable. What the little ID blurb at the end of his article fails to mention is his pre law career as Queensland Parliamentarian as Liberal Member for Stafford from 1974 to 1989.

A very good, albeit depressing, article. The author hinted at, and I think he may be correct, that the AEC may well be more complicit by turning a blind eye, than anyone realises.
I am always surprised how few people here are ever convicted of any kind of actual election voting fraud. A few years ago it was reported that an Australian was convicted for unlawfully voting in an American election (his defence was that as a permanent resident he thought he was allowed to vote). This would mean that approximately the same number of Australians are convicted of voting fraud in Australia as in America!

A good web site on the history of electoral fraud in Australia is that of the HS Chapman Society.
http://www.hschapman.org/

Yvonne, How can it be a virtue that a lot of Australians vote if the reason they vote is due to government compulsion?

Tinman, I very much disagree that we must have compulsory voting. Why make a bad result (where dead people are voting) even worse by adding the influence of those whose interest and knowledge of the political system is also as dead as those six feet under?
http://compulsoryvoting.org

(OK, the knowledge of the dead voters is probably up to scratch, but their corruption of the process casts a deathly pall over the democratic ideal)