When Australians go to the polls on October 14th, they will not be voting for who they want to represent them in their local electorate in the House of Representatives, or even as their state member of the Senate, but rather they will be answering a simple YES/NO question to alter the Constitution in a referendum.
Even in the face of more than a century of stable elections and including elections where the ballots have been counted and recounted, or made to run again if the result was close, there are still conspiracy wingnuts who have successfully deluded themselves on the nonsensery coming out of other countries, that they are prepared to deny the reality which is in front of their own eyes.
I am all for questioning authority but there is a point where you're not asking sensible questions any more. If you remove all of the planks of logic and set them down in a bonfire or stupidity, then all that's left is a fire and after that an ashen mess. What is to be gained from eroding trust in the system if you have no sensible critique or alternative to that system? What we have in Australia is an election process which works well, as well as an independent Electoral Commission which is non-partisan; which in the grand scheme of election systems around the world is a blessing.
Rather than tear apart an individual conspiracy theory (because a disinformation campaigns has no real objective and what results is people's individual pick-n-mix of choose-your-own conspiracy theories), I am just going to address the common components of wingnuttery.
Firstly, we do not have voting machines.
Electronic voting is of itself a bad idea because whatever machinery is used can be hacked, manipulated, or the software can't be updated, or you have to trust that what goes into the machine comes back out of it and the results could be hacked or manipulated. That's impossible if there are no machines. Australia conducts it elections on paper and pencil; which immediately leaves a paper trail, can not be hacked centrally and doesn't respond at all to scalable attacks.
You can not go into a polling centre before polling day and upload some kind of malicious vote altering malware into the voting machines because the 'machines' that we do use are pencil and paper. Unless you are able to conjure up the power of haunted pencils, or use some kinf of subliminal mind control over the voters as they enter the polling place, then you can not alter the votes through software attacks.
Secondly, the votes aren't rubbed out.
On TikTok, X, and other social media platforms, some Cookers are filming themselves voting NO to The Voice. Some of them are suggesting the advice that one should use a pen and not a pencil. This is patently absurd and they should be alternatively laughed at and pitied.
We have volunteers, who are mostly either old ladies from the local Parents & Citizens Council, or psephological nerds who are really into voting and voting processes; and they simply do not have time to rub out votes. The scale of this attack would require scores of those same volunteers to be taken away from their job as a vote counter and spend their time rubbing out stuff. The suggestion that they are rubbing out votes en masse is gloriously stupid.
Thirdly, there isn't ballot stuffing.
I don't know if these conspiracy wingnuts have noticed but politics in this country has almost always been borderline toxic. When you have one of the political parties in their opening document openly stating that they are committed to fighting 'political warfare', then naturally this creates an air of permanent distrust.
Subject to that air of permanent distrust, at every election there is space allocated for interested observers to watch over ballot boxes and the counting of ballots. The mere existence of conspiracy wingnuts is more than enough reason to imagine that those same conspiracy wingnuts would also want to be objectionable nuisances in polling centres. The same self-interest which drives conspiracy wingnuts to say that an election is rigged, is also that same self-interest which drives political parties to look over polling and counting.
Fourthly, there isn't the time.
One of the benefits with paper ballots and hand counting is that there are meatbag humans who do the counting. These meatbag humans have all of the usual foibles and irritations that other meatbag humans do. They get thirsty. They occasionally need to go and do poos and wees. They want to be finished as quickly as possible, so that they can go and get pizza afterwards. I can guarantee that at every single polling centre in the country, there will be humans who want the job to be over so that they can get pizza. This almost guarantees that there isn't the time to mount coordinated attacks on the mechanics of democracy.
In every polling centre around the country, the race will be on to find out which polling place was the fastest at counting the voice and this is even before we find out what the answer to the question. They will want the fame and ovation of the other polling centres and while that might sound like a very small prize to win, I don't exactly see you sticking up your hands and wanting to officiate in the Festival Of The Vote for 2023.
Finally, the problem with conspiracy theories is that they must assume some level of organisation to steal away the result. Quite frankly the level of coordination required to change the result of a referendum, is beyond the personnel raising abilities of an imagined 'secret' organisation. The size and scope of the operation needed to pull this off would mean that the 'secret' organisation is so massive that it would be no longer secret. It is far easier to to what organisations such as News Corp have done, and just systemically rubbish everyone who is their enemy.
I can't really imagine what else kind of planks that someone has built their conspiracy out of but the chances are that they will usually involve one of these. What is curious about the conspiracy wingnuts in this referendum is that they will tend to think that the election is being stolen from them, while holding the position that nothing about the system of government or the Constitution should change. A conspiracy theory which defends an authoritarian/conservative position, is itself suspicious as it suggests that the establishment has been involved. Now there's a conspiracy theory.
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