By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
THE narrative fed to us by mainstream media in recent weeks is that One Nation is soaring in popularity because the major parties are on the nose.
But in South Australia, the narrative has gone awry. A simple adding up of voter preferences as posted by the South Australian Electoral Commission on Sunday reveals a massive “anomaly” that is denying the majority of non-Labor party voters in the state representation in Parliament.
The South Australian Electoral Commission website showed the Liberals at 18.8% of counted votes, only 3.1% behind One Nation on 21,9% in provisional results posted on Sunday by the SAEC, with 56% of the vote counted.
The big “anomaly” is that Labor has won 38.4% of the vote thus far to be leading in 33 seats, while the combined vote of One Nation and the Liberals is 41%, to give this majority of non-Labor voters just 10 seats for the Liberals and one for One Nation. Something in South Australia is more than anomalous, it stinks.
One Nation made history by claiming its first lower house seat in the state, with its candidate Robert Roylance winning Hammond in south-east South Australia. Pundits say the party could win two more in the Lower House.
Labor’s overall vote was also down but that didn’t matter, and according to “projections” they will increase their number of seats in the Lower House of Parliament to at least 32 seats from 27 before the election.
Media was calling it a “landslide win” and not asking any questions about how a minority of voters can win vastly more seats than the majority of voters. But the reason, apparently, is the state’s “Golden Boy” Premier Peter Malinauskas, who cannot put a foot wrong. That is pure mythology.
The only other seats to be provisionally called as won, was four seats that went to independents.
Something is certainly smelly in South Australia, where the Labor Party has a long tradition of presiding over “anomalies” on election days. Given this current anomaly involving short changing of the majority of voters, we can only assume the state’s electoral system is thoroughly rigged through the preference system.
United Voice Australia candidate Mark Aldridge noted that the SA Electoral Commission computers went down at the opening of voting. That is always a sign of something suspicious afoot. Federal Electoral Commission staff were also called in to “help with the complicated count” apparently due to the record number of candidates.
Aldridge said he also encountered Labor Party people coaching Asian people (presumably recent immigrants) standing in lines on “how to vote legally by filling in your card like this”.
And then there was the problem of One Nation’s no-preference voting cards. These are wide open to abuse and where uninformed voters don’t mark their own preferences.
They could also be altered to redirect preferences to Labor, not that Labor would need to do that, given the massive rigging in the system that has already given them a massive majority of seats from a minority of votes.
But now comes the part almost no one is talking about. South Australia has a little known feature in its electoral system: The vote savings provision. This provision allows ballots that would normally be informal, whereby a voter simply marks “1” alongside one party, to still be counted if the voter’s intent is clear and a valid preference structure exists via a party-supplied preference ticket registered with the electoral commission.
One Nation encouraged voters to vote “1” and then number as they wished. Many voters appear to have stopped at “1”. Ordinarily, that would cost votes. But not necessarily here. Because One Nation has lodged the required registered ticket, those ballots can be rescued and added back into the count. And that changes everything.
In tight seats, the margin between One Nation and the Liberals is razor thin. If even a small number of these “1-only” votes are recovered, then One Nation’s primary vote rises, and the Liberals fall behind. Suddenly, Liberal vs Labor becomes One Nation vs Labor; a complete rewiring of the contest.
Aldridge has seen it all before and has found massive anomalies in previous elections involving thousands of misplaced voting papers turning up unaccounted for. But media and election officials aren’t interested because vote rigging “doesn’t happen in Australia”, despite evidence to the contrary.
This is the same type of clever preferential vote rigging that occurs at a federal level, where a little more than a third of the electorate voted Labor as first preference, but then Labor ended up with two thirds of the seats.
The best we can hope for is for Labor to lose control of the Upper House, the Legislative Council, but they will employ every dirty trick in the book to maintain complete power.
