It wasn't only Forrest that had seen referendum issues coming. It seems that so, too, has the Electoral Reform Secretariat, for the Green Paper, under the somewhat innocuous heading to Chapter 8 of "Registration of parties, and candidate nominations", under point 8(f), in part, says:

"Noting the requirement for a referendum,
are there any amendments that you think should be
made to section 44 of the Australian Constitution?"

It is interesting to note this media release by the Special Minister of State, Senator Joe Ludwig, in connection with what Klaas Woldring has so rightly pointed out, by way of warning to all Australians, is the party-of-government's electoral reform agenda:

http://www.smos.gov.au/media/2009/mr_362009.html

Some of Forrest's interest in referendum issues centred around vote formality, and the application of that part of Section 128 of the Constitution prescribing how any referendum vote was to be counted that said:

"And if in a majority of the States
a majority of the electors voting
approve the proposed law, and if a majority
of all the electors voting also approve
the proposed law, it shall be presented
to the Governor-General for the Queen's assent."

Sir David Smith KCVO AO, former Official Secretary to five Governors-General, had also had a thing or two to say in relation to formality issues at referenda. He had said it in a Submission to the JSCEM Inquiry into the conduct of the 2004 Federal elections. His submission, 'How do I say Yes or No: Let me count the ways', No. 159, may be viewed by downloading a PDF file obtainable by clicking on this submission in the list of submissions posted here:

http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/em/elect04/subs.htm

The thing was, Forrest reckoned that a referendum recorded as having secured a 'double majority', and therefore passed, had not in fact done so when the informal votes at that referendum were dealt with as Section 128 requires. It had been the 1946 Social Security referendum question.

Some background? See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=950#16590 and following posts.

Forrest

I haven't been following this thread closely, so sorry for sounding flippant, but this looks like an interesting conversation you're having with yourself here. :)

If you want some discussion, you know there's a post waiting that if responded to would at least receive a reply.

Or have I offended you?

I'm sorry if I have. I get a bit carried away at times, but you should know I mean well. :)

The Onlineopinion General Discussion topic 'One in five Australians failed to vote....',
a topic opened by OLO userID 'Communicat', on Monday, 26 November 2007 at 11:12:00 AM, attracted a total of 60 posts
over a 16 day period. Discussion archived here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1306&page=0

The 2007 Federal elections had been held on the preceding Saturday, 24 November 2007, and the counting of votes was continuing.

A series of 20 posts to that thread was made by me debunking that ridiculous, but seemingly officially supported, claim of a 20% failure to vote, with the first being on Monday, 26 November 2007 at 2:41:36 PM, and the last on Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 7:33:57 AM. The posts were made during the progress of the finalization of the election count as it was recorded as proceeding by the various updates to the AEC Virtual Tally Room website as the count approached finality, as now able to be seen here: http://vtr.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionFirstPrefs-13745-115.htm



A number of disturbing anomalies came to light as the discussion proceeded.



This post, for example, described the information from the VTR updates as "Pointless and unsatisfactory at best. At worst a possible means of withholding information from the public that might otherwise alert it to prospects of electoral tampering.":

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1306#24016

The Electoral Reform Secretariat within the DPMC really need to digest the stuff put on record in this archived OLO thread if there is genuine interest in transparency in electoral administration. I've already tried to lead into the issue on that forum with this post: http://forums.pmc.gov.au/Electoral_Reform_Green_Paper#comment-882

Its a one-way street. I can only link here to my own last post, and not to any other, on that forum. The protocols of the PM&C Forums prohibit the posting of links, so I can't post a link there to this post, for example. This allows for an inquiry to proceed without it being obliged to have official knowledge of the existence of problems.

So much for online engagement with government and the ability to advise of these problems.

Brought to you by OLO, Australia's e-journal of social and political debate, and palindromic Journal of Record.

Now for an apology to viewers.

The link, http://vtr.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionFirstPrefs-13745-115.htm , given in my post of Tuesday, 17 November 2009 at 11:45:30 AM, to the AEC Virtual Tallyroom for the 2007 Federal elections does not work, it seems. In the browser it simply displays as 'loading', but nothing happens. There is no redirection notice, nor even a '404 Firefox cannot find the server at ...' message. I must admit I simply copied it from one of my posts to the 'One in five Australians did not vote ...' topic: it used to work then, so I assumed it still would.

I did test the link at the time of posting and noted that it did not load, but dismissed that as a temporary problem, perhaps associated with the one warned of by the Electoral Reform Secretariat in an email in response to my reporting inaccessibility of the PM&C Forums website last Saturday. The Secretariat had advised:



".... Unfortunately there was an unexpected outage
on Saturday 14th November due to a major infrastructure cable
being cut during construction work in the area. ..."



As a check, I googled '2007 Federal election results', which yielded, indirectly, this link:

http://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/federal_elections/2007/vtr_guide.htm

I learned there that "Since the last election the AEC has significantly upgraded the Virtual Tally Room.". Indeed, so it would seem.

Would it be churlish of me to wonder why the page layouts would all have had to be reworked? I grant that, at least to my obviously over-critical eye, the VTR of the 2007 Federal elections certainly demonstrated the need for improvement when reporting future electoral event results. But here was I thinking that the finality of the 2007 elections would have had to be left, for better or worse, to display as it did during the progress of the count, given that election records are themselves matters of critical public importance.

OLO may be a Journal of Record, but it seems the AEC website is not.

Where do we go from here?

To the Governor-General?