Fifteen months ago I asked the Australian Electoral Commission questions around election integrity. I was expecting to have my questions answered and to be reassured our elections were safe. Instead I had bland assurances everything was safe and elections were audited. Proof of those audits was never provided.

After spending all of 2021 pursuing the AEC, One Nation presented our Electoral Legislation Amendment (Voter Integrity) Bill 2021 to the Senate. Special Minister of State Morton finally realised we did have a problem and the government passed a suite of bills to address our concerns. My questions on Tuesday to the Australian Electoral Commission covered the only area the Government was not able to fix because of opposition from the ALP and the Greens – voter ID. The need for voter ID dates from 1995 when the AEC stopped residency checks, which is a way of auditing the voter rolls.

Out of date voter rolls allow dishonest players to vote multiple times, at multiple booths using a different name from the voter roll each time. These are the names of voters who have left the country, passed away, moved away and so on, plus human and data-matching errors at the AEC The only way to ensure every vote comes from a properly registered voter, voting once under their own name is to ask for voter ID.

The answers to my questions to Tom Rogers, the Electoral Commissioner were far from forthright. I will be resuming this matter in the new Parliament. I urge all Australians to enrol to vote, and to exercise your right to vote in the next election.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for attending again today. Can I start with a compliment to your social media team? It has a nice balance of humour and information in what is sometimes a very hostile environment. That’s reassuring and pleasing.

I’d also like to compliment Minister Morton for his voting integrity bills and for acknowledging the work that I did informing those initiatives with my integrity of elections bill, which preceded them. It’s very important for people to understand, and for voters right around the country to be assured, that their vote will not be wasted and that there is no reason to not vote. There is every reason to turn up now, because we’ll be having audits of the election processes.

My first question today is as a result of multiple reports from constituents who went into a booth in previous elections and were told they had already voted. This may have been human error by the poll worker, yet I think it’s the only issue that Minister Morton’s electoral integrity package failed to address that my bill did.

For clarity, there are two types of multiple voting: one where a person votes multiple times under their own name, and another where a person votes multiple times under different names. The first one, multiple voting under one’s own name, has been well examined, and the conclusion seems to be that it does not make a tangible difference, because we’ve now got electronic rolls in most booths—not all, but most. So let’s turn to the second one, people voting multiple times under different names. Has the AEC done any work on this issue?

Mr Rogers : We look at the entire voting process at the end of every election. We put, as you know, a submission in to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, where we raise issues that we think have been flagged during the conduct of the previous election. Many of those observations are our observations, and many of them have also been passed to us by others. The issue of multiple voting was dealt with in those submissions previously and in supplementary submissions. What you’re referring to there is impersonation, and that’s not something that we’ve had any evidence has had any sort of impact on the election at all. It’s not something that was raised with us in any formal way previously. It’s not something that has been put into a submission to the joint standing committee at all, to the best of my memory. So that’s not something we’re looking at, at all.

The other thing with impersonation is that those sorts of things do become known, because, if someone was doing impersonation on a large scale, we would get feedback from a range of different sources that that would be the case. Don’t forget that many of these polling booths are actually community polling booths, where people know other people in the community as well. It’s not something that’s been personally raised with me. I’m not sure, Deputy Commissioner, if it’s been raised with you.

Mr Pope : No, that’s correct. I would add that there’s another category that is what we call ‘apparent multivoting’, which is actually an administrative error where someone has been marked as having voted, on a paper certified list, and they have put a wrong mark against a person’s name. Sometimes it can be seen as being something else, but it is simply an administrative error.

Senator ROBERTS: Is there a phone number or a way of reporting occurrences in order to further investigate the problem, if there is a problem?

Mr Rogers : On our website, there is a—

Mr Pope : fraud email reporting process—

Mr Rogers : and people are welcome to use that.

Senator ROBERTS: The AEC stopped residency checks last century, in 1995. When was the last time the AEC audited a sample of the electoral roll to get an idea of accuracy?

Mr Rogers : We use a whole range of tools to check the accuracy of the electoral role, and we conduct internal audits on that. I think the ANAO also conducted an audit of the electoral roll. I’m not sure if anyone remembers when that might have been—there are a lot of shaking heads—but we could find that out for you fairly easily. So it’s been audited even by the ANAO. In fact, now that I’m warming to my theme, I think it may have been audited twice. I’d have to check that for you. If I’m wrong, I apologise to the ANAO, but I think they came back to check the results of the initial audit. I’m happy to come back to you on that.

Senator ROBERTS: Okay, if you could, please.

Mr Rogers : So there’s more than one way of auditing the accuracy of the roll. The second thing is when we get data on someone’s residence from more than one data source, which is what we do—we effectively triangulate that data to make sure that it’s accurate—we also do, as I mentioned before, our own internal checks of the accuracy of our data entry to make sure that that is an accurate process.

Mr Pope : We do. And we match our data with a range of other data sources, and we also do an annual quality assurance process.

Senator ROBERTS: So, although you say that you haven’t had any evidence or you don’t see much possibility of it, this is surely a case where voter ID would stop someone from voting multiple times under different names or from voting under the names of people who are no longer voting themselves. I know what you’re saying about the community, but sometimes people rock up to a booth that’s not in their community.

Mr Rogers : I might perhaps repeat what we said at the last estimates. I’m loath to get involved in the issue of the voter ID process. I think that’s a highly political issue. It is a matter for parliament. I’m genuinely trying to be right down the centre here. I understand the arguments on both sides of this, but it has become a very polarising debate in places where this has been implemented. So that’s a matter for parliament. What we’re reflecting on here is the processes that we put in place to assure the vote within the legislation that’s currently valid. That bit about voter ID is something that I think I said a little flippantly last time, ‘We have a definite policy not to have a policy on,’ because we’re going to get dragged into that process.

Senator ROBERTS: I can see that. I accept it. It is ironic, Minister, that we need an ID to get into a pub but that we don’t need an ID to get in to vote. That’s just a comment.

Senator Birmingham: Your comment’s noted, Senator Roberts. The government would wish that there had been, or were, broader support for some of the ID measures that, as you acknowledge, Minister Morton had brought forward.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you, Chair.