Liberal Party candidate, Mrs Frances Bailey, lost the Victorian electorate of McEwen (NE of Melbourne) by just five votes in the recent November 24, 2007 election. She then, after a recount by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), won it by just 12 votes.

An AEC spokesman, Mr Diak, reassured Australia a month later that no electoral result had ever been changed by fraud in Australia which implies McEwen also.

Yet as highly respected Singhalese lawyer, Dr M Cooray of Macquarie University pointed out, the 1987 federal election - the third to return the ALP government in less than four years - major public figures had grave misgivings fraud had affected the result of the last of these.

In Section 5.8 of his paper The Hawke Governments, Referendum Proposals and the Constitution, 1988 , headed Malpractices during elections , Dr. Cooray deplored that:

“The public affairs media and the press galleries have been silent on the allegations made by Brian Wilshire of 2GB about manipulation of elections. Journalist Simon Davies in an investigative piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald also focused on the problem.

“Senator Bronwyn Bishop’s allegations and evidence, tabled in the Senate about cheating, received minimal publicity (Senate Proceedings 17 March 1988). If the above allegations had concerned manipulation in favour of the Liberal Party or the National Party it would have been big news.

“Senator Jim Short, Opposition Spokesman on Home Affairs, is reported (Sydney Morning Herald March 1988) as saying that just before the 1980, when he held the seat of Ballarat, the then Electoral office forwarded details of around 1000 late enrolments to his elector.

“He says he sent each of these a letter welcoming them to his electorate and was somewhat surprised when several hundred letters were returned :addressee unknown. It could be surmised than many more than the 300 whose letters were returned were false entries on the electoral roll. Senator Short lost by 400 votes.

“Suspicion must arise based on the Jim Short experience as to whether a small group of people had worked to place bogus voters on the roll in marginal electorates and exercised votes for the bogus voters. These votes would have swung the election in Ballarat.

“Prior to 1984 a person could only vote in the polling sub-division within which he resided. In practice he had a choice of about 3 polling booths. As a consequence of change in electoral process introduced by the Hawke government, a person can vote in any polling booth. This means that the same person can go to each polling booth in the electorate and cast as many votes as there are polling booths. This change has facilitated and encouraged fraud.

“The AEC admits that, after the July election, a computer scan showed 11,000 instances of multiple voting. The AEC, after investigation, decided to pursue 20 of these cases. Most of the 10,880 cases, not worthy of investigation, were said to be due to computer error. Computers, if properly programmed seldom err. The computer findings provide grave cause for concern which the AEC has apparently not taken seriously, wishing to dismiss the problems…

“The 1987 election was won by the ALP even though the Coalition gained a large number of votes and there was a swing against the ALP of dimensions which electoral experts had, prior to the election, forecast would give victory to the Coalition. Two major explanations were provided.

“(1) Environmental groups (the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society) claimed that they gave 2.2.% of the votes to the ALP government in 11 marginal seats. The media gave widespread prominence to this claim. However, this claim was challenged by the Forest Industries Campaign Association (FICA) in a booklet published on August 14, 1987, based on research by the Roy Morgan Research centre. This predictably received little publicity in the media.

“(2) The ALP was said to have conducted a special campaign in the marginals. Professor Malcolm Mackerras expressed the opinion that the swing in marginal seats was inexplicable and that none of the provided explanations is satisfactory

“Marginal seats are generally unpredictable. But what was curious about the 1987 election was the consistency with which all the marginals defied the national swing. The recent NSW elections demonstrated a wide swing in many areas. The ALP however did very well by comparison in marginal seats. There appears to be an unreal consistency in the marginal seats where the ALP holds its ground or the swing against it is less than elsewhere.”

Added 23 January 2008 - ELECTORAL  FRAUD – A NON-EXISTENT MALADY

David Humphries  (SMH .18/1) declares that: “As Special Minister for State responsible for electoral law, Senator John Faulkner is drafting legislation to undo manifestly self-serving changes made by the Howard government in 2006.”

One of these “self-serving changes”, to be changed by Senator Faulkner,  Humphries says is “closure of the electoral roll immediately on issue of the writs – rather than the previous seven-days grace”.  How was closing the roll on the issue of the writs serving the Howard government? Humphries says “because it was an attempt to limit enfranchisement of the young whose votes favour Labour.”

Humphries clearly is ignorant of electoral history. The electoral roll always closed with the issue of the writs throughout our history until the ALP  Hawke government introduced the seven-days grace, to enrol after the issue of the writs, in a self-serving move to enhance its own youth vote.

Through 3 terms of office, the ALP, led by Senators Faulkner and Ray on the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, blocked the efforts of the Howard government to restore the time-honoured practice of 80 years to close the roll on the issue of the writs. The latter succeeded in its 4th term.

Humphries did not mention that all 17 year olds are provisionally enrolled and that Divisional Returning Officers of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) officers continually visit schools to educate children on their duty to enrol on the electoral roll as soon as they are 18 years old.

Humphries did not confine himself to accusing the Howard government of being self-serving in deliberately seeking the close-of-the-roll reform to limit enfranchisement of young voters. He accused it of a deliberate lie insofar as: “This (reform) was presented by the Howard government as an attack on electoral fraud (a virtually non-existent malady).” 

However, if Humphries is wrong  in his assumption that electoral fraud does not exist, and the Howard government was right in the view that it does, then the question to be asked is whether it is easier for any party workers, who plan to stack the electoral roll with fraudulent names, to do so in that seven-days grace period without being caught. The answer is ‘yes’ if the form of such fraud is to ‘stack’ the roll with different false names.

Once an election is called, Divisional Returning Officers (DRO’s) across Australia are swamped with the enormous task of preparing for over 80,000  voters minimum by setting up polling booths throughout their electorate, organising and training 70,000 casual workers, dealing with inquiries and so forth. The shorter the election, the more stressful this intensive pressure.

With the flood of enrolments, almost all in the seven-days grace permitted since 1983, the casuals manning the electoral roll data base would have neither the experience nor time to check them in the rush to get the electoral rolls printed for use in all phases of the election.

This obviously provides a gateway for roll-stacking of ‘ghost voters’ in different names and addresses; the one form of fraud under the secret ballot system that the AEC will never be able to identify until electoral roll reviews long after the election, if at all. For example, David O’Farrell, NSW Australian Electoral Officer for  the AEC, removed 100,000 ‘unenrolleable addresses’, such a pizza parlours, after a drive-by dwelling review recently.

About 450,000 people enrol at the 12th hour, two-thirds of them re-enrolments. In the 1987 election, 750,000 enrolments were processed in the last week according to the then Commissioner Dr. Hughes. 100,000 of these names disappeared from the electoral roll not long after in NSW and Victoria.

Humphries grounds his argument on the belief electoral fraud is a “virtually non-existent malady.” It is far more than a ‘malady’. The truth, that it is a hydra-headed crime, endemic in all our elections, is manifest from intensive reports of four federal elections to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters of the federal parliament and  reported in the press.

These were Fisher 1987 and Dixon 1993 in Queensland, and Macquarie 1993 and Richmond 1990 in NSW. The AEC itself took part in the latter investigation. As the former Chief Electoral Officer of Northern Ireland Pat Bradley CBE, veteran of overseeing international elections for the United Nations, said when visiting Australia as a guest of the H.S.Chapman Society: “I have never seen an election where there is no fraud.”

"GetUp" - an article by Dr Amy McGrath, 21 December 2007

The internet-based lobby group, GetUp, which claims 200,000 members, has received no mention in the media although it is one of the main players in the current federal election. It is running on-line propaganda for the Opposition. It is doorknocking in chosen electorates which could facilitate knowledge of the voting status of householders or completion of enrolment forms. It is planning to have members outside all booths with pro-Labour propaganda.

 Because GetUp is not running any candidates and does not declare itself a party it does not have to register its corporate structure, donations, or affiliation with political parties to the Australian Electoral Commission. It is free to advance policies of official parties, and canvass voters to vote for them, if  propaganda materials used declare their sources.

Is GetUp a ‘front’ for the ALP as Liberal MP Andrew Robb told the ABC 7.30 Report on August 4, 2005, and its real face in this current election different from the ‘me-too’ face? This real face is not one of Blairite New Labour. It is Old Labour with a tinge of Marxist green in a nod toward their comrades-in-arms, the Greens and. the Democrats. 

Look no further than Getup’s own website which reported an account of its launch in the Australian of August 1, 2005 with a remarkably large foundation fund of $1.5 million, augmented since then by ‘modest donations’ from unions, corporations and mini-donations from a massive accretion of on-line ‘members’ via single issue campaigns.

The founders of Getup were two Australian Harvard graduates, David Madden and Jeremy Heimans, who copied the American internet MoveOn.org organisation (founded 1998) for whom they ran online campaigns in support of President Clinton against George Bush. 

Other directors cited were also pro-Labour - Bill Shorten, Australian Workers Union national secretary, Evan Thornley of Look Smart internet and Amanda Tattersall research director for Unions New South Wales . Shorten is now an ALP federal candidate. Thornley is already a Victorian State MP. Both resigned from GetUp. Other directors were Cate Faehrmann  director of NSW Nature Conservation Council, Don Mercer chair  Australian Institute of Company Directors , and very briefly John Hewson. The office of GetUp run by Executive director, Brett Solomons, is in one of several hotels owned by his father, namely the Edinburgh Castle in the city. Both father and son are said to have played a strong role in the creation of GetUp.

Mr. Madden and Mr. Heimans told the Australian(5.8.05)  they founded GetUp because  ‘there is a real frustration with institutional politics.’ Therefore it would provide ‘an alternative to the present political parties’ and ‘deliberately issues-based.’ It also had a wider purpose “We want to hold the Government to account in a way that mainstream political parties don’t.’ They proceeded to run at least 24 issues-based campaigns which generated a massive potential mailing list of 200,000 alleged  members over the next two years, some by default because they answered ‘yes’ to e-mailed questions like “Do you believe the ABC should be independent?”

Such ‘people’s power’ has been harnessed against the Prime Minister in his seat of Bennelong, through a GetUp creation 3,000 votes because  ex-national ALP official and husband of rival candidate, Maxine McKew, said she could win the election with 3,000 votes. GetUp teams plan to doorknock all  90,000  households, and  to man all booths on election day supporting the ALP and the Greens whose printing they have subsidised. In one case a team of three ALP ‘foot soldiers’ asked a resident how many people were living there, and how she would vote, on November 16.

Such people’s power, that encourages contempt for parliamentary government, and harvests large sums of money without accountability to campaign against it, is an abnegation of democracy.

EXCERPT FROM MY BOOK ‘FRAUDING OF VOTES? (Reprint with lengthy foreword by Bob Bottom  and addendum by me pp. 199-200)

ALP  stalwarts in fraudulent voting Fisher  Queensland 1987

ALP ‘foot soldiers’ in elections are not necessarily unionists but many of them are, and unions certainly pre-select the candidates in Queensland as the pre-selection ballot scandals of 2000 have shown. The Courier Mail threw a bomb into those scandals with an admission by an anonymous whistleblower (with bona fides) about the ‘rorting’ process in Fisher electorate in the 1987 federal election.

Campaign workers doorknocking with street-address rolls identified rental properties, caravan parks, and dwellings where people had moved elsewhere but their names were sill on the roll at their old address, then fanned out in teams to impersonate them in the 60 booths on election day.

The whistleblower said: ‘in a marginal seat the potential to swing a result is obvious. If just a handful of workers out of a campaign team of 100 are in on it, the ‘rorting’ can be significant. Some zealots would quietly compete to get the most names. If 8 workers had each come up with 45 names in Fisher, it could have been enough to ‘rort’ it. The odds of being caught are small (Courier Mail Nov.4 2000).

Certainly the result in Fisher, according to the winner, Mr. Lavarch, was the closest in Australia .

‘It took 3 days of recounting.’ He won by 701 votes.

The whistleblower also said: ‘It is a system that flows from a subculture which condones‘rorting’ because it is better than losing. It is orchestrated with a wink and a nudge – nothing on paper. And the names of the people who get a vote without knowing it are transferred between state and federal elections. There’s a whole stack of people like me around…It’s endemic. It’s how you get a good reputation (ibid).’

13 April 2007
The President and Committee of the 
HS Chapman Society have some good news to share!  

Introduction to the proof of identification (POI) on enrolment - Australian Electoral Commission.

Frequently asked questions on the new laws relating to identification required from the 
Australian Electoral Commission from 16 April 2007.

Note: This type of POI has been required by the Roads and Traffic Authority in NSW for many transactions and by Australia Post to collect 
postal articles for some years. 

Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters
Notice of Enquiry

An excerpt from the government website:

"On 28 March 2007 the Special Minister of State, The Hon Gary Nairn MP, asked the Committee to inquire into and report on aspects of administration of the Australian Electoral Commission on or before 17 September 2007.

"The Committee invites interested persons and organisations to make submissions addressing the terms of reference by 4 May 2007."

The comprehensive enquiry will include matters relating to the status of the Divisional Returning officers, their location, staff and ability to maintain an accurate electoral roll.

H.S. Chapman 1803-1881