By Jeremy Sollars
MORE than 5000 voters failed to register a vote in the 2016 Southern Downs Regional Council election and nearly one third of all votes returned were informal, a council report has revealed.
Council officers recently conducted a review of the 2016 election and their report, to be forwarded to the Electoral Commission of Queensland, was tabled at the November council meeting in Stanthorpe.
It shows a staggering 31.7 per cent of postal votes for the eight councillors returned were informal, largely due to confusion over the documentation.
And out of 25,254 registered voters in the council region 5424 – or 21.5 per cent – failed to return any vote at all.
The figures essentially mean the current councillors were elected by just over 50 per cent of the region’s voters.
The report does not detail the number of informal votes in the mayoral ballot.
The report recommends postal voting be scrapped and electronic voting be examined as the preferred option for future elections, using the system introduced in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) in 2001.
The ACT model involves voters visiting a polling booth on election day and entering a barcode on a standard personal computer.
The council report says the voting PCs in the ACT are linked to a “secure local area network” as opposed to the internet.
Electoral rolls in the ACT are still manually marked off by polling booth workers and polling places which do not have electronic voting capability paper ballots are still used.
Another electronic voting option noted in the report is online using a “web-based secure site” accessed in any location on a PC, laptop or mobile device, noting this method could cause “community mistrust” over privacy and online security.
The report states that “local government authorities have the capacity, experience and capability to run local government elections” and recommends the responsibility for running elections be handed over to local councils.
The Free Times is seeking comment from the SDRC – more to come.
