Candidates and party workers who harass voters at polling booths could be issued with on-the-spot fines under a proposal being floated by the Victorian Electoral Commission.
Appearing at a parliamentary inquiry into the conduct of the 2022 state election on Friday, the deputy electoral commissioner, Dana Fleming, said there was a threefold increase in complaints about the behaviour of candidates and party workers at polling booths since 2018.
“There is no doubt that the climate has changed over the past three elections and in particular this one,” she said.
“I’m going to read out what one candidate wrote to us in the election, that this was ‘one of the most bitter, divisive and antagonistic campaigns of my 16 years in politics’. I can only concur with that.”
Of the 2,000 complaints the VEC received, the most frequent (278) related to the “conduct of campaign workers, candidates or political parties”, according to the commission’s submission to the inquiry.
Fleming said candidates and party workers at the upcoming Warrandyte byelection were also unable to behave when asked to participate in a trial of low-sensory voting.
“I personally wrote as acting commissioner to every single candidate and party in relation to that … they were asked to not approach voters who were neurodiverse,” she said.
“I can only say that trial was a failure.”
Fleming said the experience made her doubt whether introducing a code of conduct for polling booths would help.
“If we can’t rely on good behaviour … for our most vulnerable voters, I must admit I would have some concerns about something as simple as a code of conduct unless there were consequences,” she said.
Instead, Fleming said the VEC will recommend empowering senior officials to issue formal warnings and fines.
“That would be much more effective,” she said.
There were also almost 150 complaints to the VEC about electoral integrity, which Fleming said mostly related to “unhappiness with the trading and preferences above the line and group voting tickets” or GVTs.
Victoria is the only jurisdiction in Australia that uses GVTs, which allow voters to choose just one party above the line on their ballot, after which their preferences are directed according to agreements between parties.
During the campaign, the so-called “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery made headlines after videos were leaked of him boasting that he had helped deny the Greens seats in 2018 to deliver the Labor government an amenable crossbench.
Guardian Australia also reported on a sting to undermine his preference arrangements.
Fleming said the media attention during the campaign helped bring the issue to the public’s attention.
“It does go to the integrity of the electoral process. We need the community to believe and trust that the electoral outcomes and the people who are elected to represent them have been done so properly,” she said.
“There is no doubt [there is] unhappiness in the community that this is the current system.”
Earlier, the inquiry’s chair, Labor MP Luba Grigorovitch, and deputy, Liberal MP Evan Mulholland, revealed Druery was asked to appear as a witness at its public hearings but declined.
“This is disappointing. There are important questions for Mr Druery to answer, given the prominent role he’s played in recent Victorian elections,” Grigorovitch said.
Mulholland said “multiple submissions to this inquiry” raised concerns about Druery.
Mulholland and fellow Liberal MP Brad Battin also used Friday’s hearing to grill the VEC director of communications, Sue Lang, for appearing on radio station 3AW after the commission referred an investigation into the then opposition leader, Matthew Guy, and his former chief of staff to the anti-corruption watchdog just nine days before the election.
During the interview, Lang said the commission “received no satisfactory response from anybody”, leading the Liberal party to complain of “unprecedented interference” in the election.
Lang said she told a 3AW producer she would not be commenting on the referral but was asked by the host, Neil Mitchell, regardless. Battin said Mitchell had provided him with a conflicting account.
Defending the decision to make the referral during the campaign, Fleming said the VEC “can’t press pause” on its responsibility to administer the Electoral Act. However, she confirmed the matter was under investigation.
