The Great Postal Vote Scam And How To Do Something About It

I've mentioned before that the major political parties have exempted themselves from the Privacy Act. I think it’s section 7c. In 2006 Natasha Spot Destroyer (remember her) introduced a private members bill to remove this exemption but of course it’s failed to gain any serious support and last I heard it was dropped, reintroduced, and then put on indefinite hold.

Why don’t they want to drop the exemption? 

Because I suspect it favours the major parties. The ones who can spend the big $$$ building up huge databases on anything they can find out about us.

And of course it allows them to get away with this latest travesty I’m calling the “Great Postal Vote” scam.

Maybe you’ve received an envelope recently addressed to you that had something written on the outside like “IMPORTANT Postal vote information for the 2013 Federal Election.”

If you opened it up you will find an application form for a postal vote, a reply paid envelope, and you may also be surprised to find a letter from your local member of either of the major parties. I’ve only got the Liberal one but I understand that Labour are up to the same trick, albeit slightly more transparently.

This letter of course has nothing to do with the Australian Electoral Commission and has in fact been completely prepared by the political party in question and mailed out en masse.

The trick is, the address on the reply paid envelope is not the Australian Electoral Commission but is instead controlled by the political party in question, albeit disguising itself, in my case, as the “Postal Vote Centre”.

This allows them to copy down your full contact details, the date by which you need to vote by, your security question the AEC uses to confirm who you are, and your signature, before of course forwarding on the form to the correct AEC address. If you weren’t looking carefully, you might have been none the wiser that the political party was even involved. They certainly do their best to hide the fact.

To rub it in the application form includes an AEC privacy statement assuring you everything is above board. In fact candidates (not the party) are entitled to your name, date of birth and residential address. However they are not entitled to your phone numbers, your email, and especially not your secret security question and answer.

No doubt if pressed the parties will say “No… this is not deceit… this is providing an essential service to remind people who will need to postal vote…”.

Seriously politicians, you don’t believe this rubbish, why on earth do you expect us to believe it.

It’s obvious by the deceit they have used to gather this information that they cannot be trusted with it.

If ever an argument was needed political parties should not be exempt from the privacy act, this is it.

However, here’s a good payback. Grab the application form and instead of filling it out, write in big red letters, “I WOULD NEVER VOTE FOR A PARTY AS DECEITFUL AS THIS!”. Don’t give them any details. Put the form in the envelope and mail it back to them. The good news is, they have to pay for the postage, and you get to tell them first hand you’re not happy with them for pulling this stunt.

If enough people do this it will hurt them on the $$$ and they might just reconsider. The really cool thing is that they can’t just ignore them because there just might be someone’s genuine application form in there that they are now responsible for forwarding on.