‘The risk of an election failure is now real’: Electoral Commissioner’s early warning

The Victorian Electoral Commission warned of a real risk of an election failure as results were being counted in the local government elections.

The warning came ahead of the VEC uncovering alleged ballot fraud in the council elections with suspected postal-vote tampering in two wards – Baird Ward in Knox City Council and Lalor Ward in Whittlesea City Council. Some voters appear to have lodged multiple ballots by mail.

Victorian Electoral Commissioner Sven Bluemmel gives a press conference on Wednesday detailing alleged ballot fraud. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

The two councillors who were elected in those wards – Peter Lockwood in Knox and Stevan Kozmevski in Whittlesea – have both denied any wrongdoing and told The Age this week they wanted to see a swift investigation into the almost 200 suspicious postal ballots.

In the VEC’s annual report tabled in parliament two weeks ago, Electoral Commissioner Sven Bluemmel said the agency faced a significant challenge in “safely” delivering elections with an increasing number of electors, elections and limited resources.

“The prescribed timeline for Victorian elections is the shortest in the nation,” Bluemmel said. “As electoral participation continues to grow, it is increasingly difficult to meet these timelines, and there is no longer any contingency for unforeseen disruptions or failures. The risk of an election failure is now real.”

Since 2002, the number of electors in Victoria has increased by 40 per cent from 3.2 million to 4.5 million.

In the annual report, Bluemmel said the VEC faced budget pressures with difficulty recruiting and retaining staff for events and a continued rise in the cost of services.

The VEC received $62.56 million in funding for 2023–24, significantly less than the previous year’s $140.6 million, however the VEC’s funding fluctuates over a four-year cycle depending on which years elections are held in.

Bluemmel said a comprehensive review of the Electoral Act was needed, and the VEC would have to make “tough decisions” about what to prioritise over the coming year.

“We are under significant pressure to safely deliver elections with existing resources and regulatory tools in current timelines,” he said.

Bluemmel said the switch to single-member wards for every metropolitan council except the City of Melbourne had also increased the workload for the VEC.

The controversial changes to Victoria’s council voting system were introduced by then-local government minister Adem Somyurek, a one-time Labor factional powerbroker.

In 2024, 456 wards or unsubdivided councils held general elections, up from 298 in 2020.

“This is a 50 per cent increase in the number of individual elections we have to deliver,” Bluemmel said. “Victorian elections are arguably the third-largest peacetime logistical event regularly conducted in Australia.”

In the 2020 election, which is the only other election conducted entirely by postal vote, the VEC uncovered vote tampering at Moreland Council, now Merri-bek.

The VEC could not identify any other instances of postal-vote fraud.

“We took several measures to strengthen our security measures after we detected the postal-vote fraud in Merri-bek City Council’s then North-West Ward at the 2020 local council elections,” a spokeswoman for the VEC said. “Our monitoring processes have been applied across all 424 individual contested elections. The fact we have detected these attempts in Lalor Ward and Baird Ward shows our measures are working as intended.”

Candidate for the Mornington Peninsula and former City of Melbourne councillor, Peter Clarke, queried the integrity of the postal-voting system.

Clarke said when he was distributing how-to-vote cards to houses in his electorate, there were many houses which did not have a letterbox, and he spotted ballot papers on the ground.

“I think the days of it staying as a postal ballot are numbered as less and less people put up a letterbox,” he said. “There are better ways to do it, it is just falling into disrepute.”

A spokeswoman for the VEC said some voters might have provided post office boxes instead of their addresses if they did not have a letterbox.

When asked whether she had confidence in the postal-voting system, Local Government Minister Melissa Horne said the VEC had moved swiftly to identify irregularities in two wards.

“Overall, they conducted 456 individual elections in this local government election period,” she said. “That’s predominantly because we’ve moved to a single-member ward system, and so that saw a vast expansion of just how many individual elections were conducted.”

Horne said the VEC had referred the alleged vote tampering to Victoria Police and said postal ballots occurred at every level of government.

“It’s something that is there to ensure that people can participate, that people have access to the system,” she said. “The VEC has conducted that part of the process with integrity.”

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