Books on
Potential Fraud in Elections
<
back
The Frauding of Votes? - Version1
Author’s
Foreword
How did I
happen to write this book? By accident. I had written up an
old story I knew, about old clashes of arms leading to fraud
and forgery in union elections 50 or more years ago. I
launched it under the title of The Forging of Votes
in April this year. Far from launching myself into the world
of old people with old memories far off-stage from the
action of modern political theatre, I found myself
precipitated into a new world with new troubled memories
very much onstage. This was the new world of recent
parliamentary elections.
I heard
yarns and stories of election rivalries, challenges and
rorts. The Blue Mountains Macquarie electorate, where I had
a holiday home, was bedevilled with electoral melodrama.
Nearby electorates were beset with marginal seat crises and
firebombing of electoral offices. Character assassination of
exceptional vehemence and dubious logic waged against rival
candidates. The assassination of John Newman in Cabramatta.
New versions of the old vicious left-right war of ALP branch
stacking I knew..
Where was
the sustained debate on our electoral system that seemed
warranted by all these ripples on the surface of our
indifference, of my indifference? I, like everyone else, had
my head in the stand. I went to the State Library to bone up
on fraud and forgery in elections. To my astonishment I
found almost nothing. Little in academia. Less in the press.
In general a thunderous silence or rejection. Election fraud
in Australia? Impossible! It could not happen here.
I found
disbelief rife among those who want to believe this New
World of ours a Utopia free of the vices of the Old World
left behind. The truth is it never has been. It has always
been the creation of all manner of refugees, among them
terrorists, rebels, recusants, dynastic poachers and
rustlers, prisoners but also men who braved the most hostile
reaches of this land to transform it into a land admired
world-wide.
I, the
granddaughter of such men., now brave that disbelief with
this book The Frauding of Votes; I, affiliated in
early years to the ALP, but now of no political party, who
cannot be accused of running with the Liberals, Nationals,
the League of Rights or any ‘isms’ such as feminism or
fundamentalism.
The
problems of exposing fraud and corruption in elections are
manifold. For example, out of 15,000 multiple or plural
votes cast in the 1993 federal election against a name on
the roll, the Australian Electoral Commission could find no
explanation for 5,000. A few of these admitted the crime.
The rest did not. Their votes could not be withdrawn for who
would know for which candidates they had been cast? And
where were they concentrated – in marginal seats?
I no
longer have illusions about Australia as the Great Democracy
in regard to our elections. Our electoral system is
currently a dangerous farce, obscured by jargon and
whitewashing practice. No democratic country can afford the
luxury of an electoral system based wholly on honour and
trust. History is replete with lessons of warning. Why do we
ignore them?’’
|
