In our last editorial, we wrote that Electoral Reform Australia had made a submission to the Commonwealth Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) in relation to a proposed change to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 which would mean that all ballots in a prematurely opened ballot box would be excluded from the count.
\nWe are pleased to say that the JSCEM took our concerns into consideration in their final report, which referred to our written submission and the oral evidence given by Electoral Reform Australia Vice President Stephen Lesslie. (The minority report also drew heavily on our submissions.)
\nAs a result, the new section 238B requires the AEC to include ballots from a prematurely opened ballot box, unless they are satisfied that the ballots have been tampered with.
\nThis new provision ensures the integrity of the electoral system is maintained, but does not result in the unnecessary exclusion of ballots that could have occurred under the initial draft legislation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In our last editorial, we wrote that Electoral Reform Australia had made a submission to the Commonwealth Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) in relation to a proposed change to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 which would mean that all ballots in a prematurely opened ballot box would be excluded from the count. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/electoralreformaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}