00:01Sven Blum, welcome to Stateline.
00:04Avi Yemeni's pro-Israel group have registered the name Free Palestine Party.
00:10The pro-Palestine people haven't been able to grab that name for a party.
00:15Do you think voters are being duped?
00:18That's not a matter for me.
00:19What's the matter for me is whether a party has fulfilled the criteria
00:23for registering a political party under the Victorian Electoral Act.
00:27That requires 500 people who are members.
00:31It requires a party constitution.
00:32It requires the name and address of a registered officer.
00:35And it has to be a name that meets the criteria.
00:39Now, the criteria do not go to what the policy position of the party is.
00:45That's not for me to decide.
00:46I can only decide whether a name either is offensive, is too long,
00:52or resembles the name of an existing registered political party.
00:58They're my considerations.
00:59But the pro-Israel group is using the name Free Palestine.
01:03The pro-Palestine group can't use the name the Palestine Party.
01:08Doesn't that erode our faith in the system?
01:10I have to administer the law as it stands.
01:12As it currently stands, once a party or an applicant to be a registered political party
01:17meets all the criteria, I have to register it.
01:20If another party then that hasn't yet satisfied those criteria
01:23comes along with a similar name, once the first party is registered,
01:26I can't register the second one.
01:27The person behind the Free Palestine Party has told me he wants to dupe voters.
01:33Are they being duped?
01:34The important thing here, I think, is to empower voters.
01:37As a voter, do that research.
01:40Find out what the party stands for.
01:42Find out what the candidate stands for.
01:44And always come to the VEC's website to see who's registered, who's behind it.
01:49That's all publicly available.
01:50The names of small parties matter more when people are able to harvest votes through preferences.
01:56Do we need to get rid of that?
01:58Well, we have a current system in Victoria which is called the Group Voting Ticket,
02:02which means you can place just one number above the line on your upper house ballot paper.
02:06Where that vote then goes, in terms of preferences,
02:10is determined by something that's lodged by that party, group or person.
02:14There is currently law before the parliament,
02:16it's already passed the lower house, to abolish that.
02:19We're the last jurisdiction in Australia that has the so-called Group Voting Ticket.
02:23What that would do is basically bring Victoria into line with other Australian jurisdictions.
02:27Elections are getting more fractious each time we have one.
02:31Do we need security guards at voting booths?
02:34It is becoming more fractious, but the important thing also to bear in mind
02:38is that we've got 4.6 million voters going to the polls here.
02:42There's sometimes a party atmosphere at elections.
02:45The world envies us for our elections.
02:47Yes, there is sometimes a very small cohort of people who wish to undermine that.
02:51We're aware of that.
02:52We take steps to make sure that our voting centres are as safe as they can be.
02:56For us, the important thing is this is a workplace.
02:59It's a great Australian tradition to draw on a ballot paper.
03:03Is there more of that?
03:05Does that increase at each election?
03:07So we have about 5% of ballots that are cast at a general election
03:11tend to be what we call informal,
03:13which means that they can't be admitted to the count
03:15because they're not correctly completed.
03:18And there's two very different categories.
03:20There's the unintentional one, which is where people lost count
03:24or maybe they didn't know how to complete it, but they tried.
03:27They wanted their vote to count.
03:29The other cohort, they clearly want to make a statement.
03:32That's fine.
03:34But I would then remind that cohort
03:37that a very small number of votes can turn an election.
03:41Don't throw your vote away.
03:43What sort of things do people draw on their ballot paper?
03:45Oh, it varies.
03:47One of the categories that one of our researchers refers to
03:49is anatomical drawings.
03:51And anatomical drawings is what I think it is?
03:53I don't know what you're thinking, but it probably is.
03:56And just finally,
03:57do you think people have got faith in the vote in our democracy?
04:02Yes, I do think that.
04:03In fact, our data shows that.
04:05We check this quite frequently.
04:06We do surveys.
04:07We look at how people feel about our electoral system.
04:11And in that, I distinguish the system, the voting system,
04:15the electoral system.
04:16And then there's the political system, which builds upon it.
04:19That's not my mind to worry about.
04:21Mine to worry about is the infrastructure of the system.
04:24In that, the data is very clear.
04:26Australia has a very strongly trusted electoral system.
04:30Victoria is no exception to that.
04:31But we can't take that for granted.
04:33We mustn't take that for granted.
04:37It doesn't take that for granted.
04:37That allows people to receive theirselves in their transition.
04:37So how that is, here is an opportunity for us to get هذا of a problem.
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