After every election, Parliament's powerful electoral matters committee reviews that election.

Login or signup to continue reading

This time, it must be a top priority to deal with the rising number of votes that are struck out as informal.

People absolutely have the right to choose "none of the above" when they step into the polling booth, but there are just as many, if not more, who are attempting - and failing - to exercise their precious democratic right.

We need to do far more to make sure the rules are simple, consistent and clear.

That responsibility rests with everyone from schools, to the media, citizenship preparation courses, the political parties and the Australian Electoral Commission.

Why is nobody upset that an extraordinary 18,274 voters had their ballots excluded from the May election count in just one electorate - the south-western Sydney seat of Werriwa?

It was the highest number and greatest percentage of informal votes in any of the 150 electorates contested at the federal election.

Yet there is no outrage that 17.26 per cent of the voters in a marginal seat were not heard.

It was double the rate from the previous election and the number of ballot papers rejected was far greater than the eventual winning margin of 11,870 for Labor's Anne Stanley.

In some individual polling places in Werriwa more than one-in-four votes were struck out. In Ashcroft it was 28 per cent.

Werriwa was the worst, but it was by no means the exception. In a staggering 20 seats, the informal vote was larger than the winning margin.

Nationwide, almost 920,000 votes were excluded from the count.

In the nail-bitingly tight seat of Bradfield in Sydney's north, won by Nicolette Boele by 26 votes, there were 6656 informal votes.

In the Victorian seat of Goldstein, where Liberal........

© Canberra Times