Australian Living in the US Receives Multiple Mail-In Votes for Upcoming Referendum

On Oct. 14, Australians will go to the polls to vote on a referendum to alter the Constitution.

Two postal votes were received by an Australian voter currently living in Seattle Credit: Aisling Salisbury

Australian voters for The Voice, including a Victorian woman living in Seattle, claim to have received multiple postal votes for the upcoming referendum.

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) however, claims it has “strict roll checks” when postal votes are returned.

Aisling Salisbury told The Epoch Times she received two ballots this week directly from the AEC in the United States.

Ms. Salisbury is concerned about the integrity of the referendum.

“I mean I get the fact that the AEC counter would scan the barcode on the envelope and it could say, yeah this person has voted twice,” Ms. Salisbury told The Epoch Times.

“But if you have an activist they could still slip the ballot paper in if it favours their belief because there’s no barcode on the ballot paper itself. You would have to trust the system that the scrutineers wouldn’t allow that and that the electorate would go, wait there’s 50,000 votes and 40,000 registered voters.

“So that’s where I see it as, ”Well there was clearly a degree of fraud, we have to do this again".

Two postal votes were received by an Australian voter currently living in Seattle Credit: Aisling Salisbury

However, every returned postal vote is checked against the electoral roll and a voter can not cast more than one postal vote, according to the AEC.

“Once a person is marked off the roll with an accepted returned postal vote, any duplicate received for that enrolment record would not be accepted and the voter would be marked as an apparent multiple voter,” the AEC states.

Not the Only One

Melbourne voter Terry Guest and his wife also received two postal votes and were told by the AEC to “just disregard one of them and shred it if possible,” Daily Mail Australia reported.

A Victorian woman also said she received two postal ballot papers with different voting numbers last week under her name.

“I won’t be using them, I am an honest person, but it’s a bit of a concern,” the voter told 3AW radio.

In another instance, a voter claimed she received four postal votes. The woman said she had returned the postal votes and notified the local district AEC office.

“So, I just checked my post office box, and look what I found? Four postal votes. Only one for me. Three for other people. I could have had their vote for them,” the voter wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

In response, the AEC highlighted postal votes are checked against the electoral roll when they are returned and posted a link to its postal vote application integrity checks.

The Voice referendum will be held on Oct. 14, with early voting around the country already underway.

Voters are being asked “Yes” or “No” to altering the preamble of the Constitution to “recognise the First Peoples of Australia” and to also set up a near-permanent advisory body that will “make representations” to the legislature and executive.