Boaz: "Call me Stupid but anything which promotes the Greens is anathama."

You said it, Boazy.

Freeranger, what is ironic is that Greens, Dems and One Nation voters, are the least likely to follow how-to-vote cards. Maybe that's where all the "informed" voters are?

Yes could be GrahamY. Supporters of the major parties do seem more likely to follow the ticket - because they are voting for the party and not for the best person to represent them in their electorate.
I understand the need for party structures as a effective way to form government but I find it quite hilarious when hard line members of a party (any party) think their local candidate is a dog - but they still hand out for him or her on election day and vote for the machine!

GrahamY,

An interesting take on the situation in Victoria. I find I can't get out of my head something that former Australian Electoral Commissioner Colin Hughes said in a submission he made in October 2000 to the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Integrity of the Electoral Roll that followed the revelation of enrolment irregularities in North Queensland.

This submission is published at http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/em/ElecRoll/subColinHughes.doc

Professor Hughes estimated that, should the electoral roll for the division of Herbert have to be recompiled from scratch, somewhere between 26,000 and 36,000 names out of a total of around 86,000 formerly carried on that roll would NOT have claimants present themselves for re-enrolment. This represents between 30% to 40% of all names carried on the roll. Other divisions may well have somewhat less (perhaps as little as 10% of all names) than these percentages, if the number of missing expected claimants is related to population mobility as Professor Hughes appears to indicate. Whether or not the proportion of missing claimants is really related to population mobility, should such proportions of names effectively be available for use manipulatively in elections, the prospect exists for the political complexion of whole parties to be subtly altered without change of 'trading name'.

Could it be equally correct to restate your claim that "political battles in Australia are won by occupying one side or the other of the socio-demographic divide and reaching into the conservative blue-collar vote" by saying that political agendas in Australia are established by the manipulative use of very large numbers of electoral enrolments in combination with genuinely popular minority causes in an otherwise innately conservative electoral environment?

Something said by the late (Sir) Kieth Murdoch also worries me. He reportedly said, while reporting with respect to the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and the Australian political oversight of the war, something to the effect of "you don't understand how things are really done". At the time I first read it, it seemed a non sequitur. What did he really mean?

I don't think Colin Hughes has the slightest idea what he is talking about. In the court case leading up to the Mundingburra re-election both the Liberal Party and the Electoral Commission canvassed the whole electorate looking for false enrolments. They found hardly any. Mundingburra is part of the Herbert electorate.

We know subsequently that there had been some, because Karen Ermine was jailed for using a handful of false enrolments in internal ALP ballots. But I stress the word "handful".

Everytime I have managed a campaign in a winnable seat, or been the candidate, the first thing that I have presecribed is a direct mail to every elector. When you get a return you send that to the electoral commission with a request to have them removed. In Greenslopes I did find a few enrolments in cow paddocks, and I did keep a copy of every return, but there were nowhere near enough to even think of challenging the result. Certainly nothing like 30 to 40 percent.

It's possible in a seat like Herbert that you'd get a higher turnover than average, and as we all move house on average once every five years, then in an average electorate each year you'd expect 20% of electors to have moved from the place they were first enrolled. That doesn't mean they've moved from the electorate, nor that they won't re-enrol in the correct electorate if they have moved.

And of course that assumes that they were on the roll in the first place. The most mobile Australians are the youngest ones, and they have an increasing propensity not to enrol at all.

Robg, you can be as "informed a voter" as you like but if you think your vote is counted beyond your first preference then you are sadly mistaken.

When I scrutinized a federal election in Eden-Monaro in 1982 the votes were bundled into piles according to which box had a "1" in it. When it came to allocating preferences the votes for the minor parties were sampled and then the block of votes was allocated to the major parties.

As a left leaning Greens letterboxer, I stopped everything when I read the article about Greens preferences. Absolutely no way do I believe Ted Ballyhoo's promises to rebuild the infrastructure that the previous Liberal government sold and trashed.