Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian has appealed her narrow loss to Nicolette Boele in Bradfield to the court of disputed returns. According to Professor Anne Twomey, no questions of law are raised in Kapterian’s challenge. Rather, the court is being asked to determine more mundane questions. Is that 1 actually a 7; is that 6 an 8? and so on.

Cases like this present an almost absurd disjuncture between the banality of the evidentiary questions – is a 1 a 7? – and the weight of the consequences: who shall represent over 100,000 citizens in parliament?

Australian elections are global exemplars of fairness. All adult citizens are required to be enrolled and to turn out to vote. Ballots can’t be hacked in Australia: they are tangible things, physical pieces of paper, with handwritten markings. Scrutineers from both sides carefully observe the count. The entire electoral process is administered by a politically neutral agency, the Australian Electoral Commission.

The prospect of an Australian election being determined by competing subjective assessments about poor handwriting is jarring, at odds with the rigorous procedural fairness so valued and so manifest in Australian electoral law and practice.

AEC officials no........

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