AEC sticks with ticks for Yes vote, says Dutton is wrong
The AEC #TheAEC
When Australians are given their ballot paper for the referendum, they will be instructed to write Yes if they support changing the Constitution to support incorporating an indigenous Voice to Parliament, or No if they are opposed. There is a single box to record their vote.
Electoral commissioner Tom Rogers said this week a tick in the box instead of a word would be counted as a Yes vote, but a cross would not be accepted as a formal No vote.
No campaigners seized on Mr Rogers’ application of the rules. Mr Dutton said it “stinks” and demanded changes.
“Normally the approach of the AEC is that if somebody’s intent is clear, then they acknowledge that as a vote, but what we’re seeing here is quite a departure from that,” Mr Dutton said on Friday.
“Just make it a fair process instead of trying to load the system and trying to skew it in favour of the ‘yes’ vote.”
But the AEC said such criticism ignored that the law regarding vote formality in a referendum was long-standing and unchanged through many governments, parliaments and multiple referendums.
Legal advice from the Australian government solicitor had been consistent for three decades and across six referenda about the use of ticks and crosses, the AEC said.
“The longstanding legal advice provides that a cross can be open to interpretation as to whether it denotes approval or disapproval: many people use it daily to indicate approval in checkboxes on forms. The legal advice provides that for a single referendum question, a clear ‘tick’ should be counted as formal and a ‘cross’ should not.”
The AEC added it was important to keep the lack of scale in mind, noting that at 1999 Republic referendum, 99 per cent of votes were formal and “even of the 0.86 per cent of informal votes, many would have had no relevance to the use of ticks or crosses”.
“This is why the level of formal voting at previous referendums has been so high and why the AEC expects the vast, vast majority of voters to follow those instructions,” the statement said.
Yes23 campaign director Dean Parkin said the AEC was a “very trusted institution”.
“We will just continue to follow the directions of the AEC as we’ve always done, and and leave these important decisions to them,” he said.