Free Speech Space with MJ - Bruce Crocombe

MJ: Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Free Speech Space with MJ. Today we’re talking with Bruce Crocombe and he’s been doing an audit on our voting system for the last three years. He’s retired out of the scientific area, so data sets is something that he knows all about and has been doing all of his life. Now... The million dollar question, is our voting system actually safe from manipulation? Bruce.

BC: Well, I started this off after the last election, not being that confident with some of the numbers that were coming out. The first problem is, or the first problem I noticed with the Electoral Commission is we’ve basically got a, it’s not a corporation, it’s an independent, independent crown entity. But. It’s coming out under the guise of being independent. However, when you look at it to begin with, we’ve got a corporate government employing a corporate governor general, who in turn is employing the three upper echelons of the Electoral Commission, and they in turn are employing people, they are putting systems in place to run the election processes, and they are also the owner, or according to them, they own the electoral management system, or the system which is actually used to tabulate the results for our election. To me this is a very dangerous situation because basically it goes back to someone who has control over what is it owned. And I can see the Electoral Commission as being in a very dangerous position because they own the whole system. They control the whole system and they basically are un-auditable or they restrict your ability to audit any of the procedures.

BC: Take the process, those first two days. You’ve got the preliminary count, which occurs on voting day, and that’s counting all the votes that were made before voting day. And then you’ve got the voting day count, which counts on the day. There’s two forms produced, or two forms plus many other forms that are produced. However, when you ask the commission for copies of the blank form,Or, for that matter, some of the procedures that they use within the Electoral Commission, such as the Returning Officer’s forms or their operations manuals, these forms, you find it very difficult to get a hold of them. Now... one of the candidates sent away for three documents. You’ve got your scrutineers manual and the candidates manual, which are online, but then there are other manuals which are used in-house within the returning office and not online. He asked for the, this candidate asked for these documents, plus he asked for the blank documents from various parts within the process, and he basically got told that the commission was too busy to be providing those forms until I think it was the 10th of October. So basically you’ve got the Commission within the candidates handbook saying the procedures that we are showing you are not necessarily abide by the law and you need a lawyers advice before you complete them, at the same time, here you have them saying, we’re not going to give you the time to actually scrutinise our documents. And the thing was, the excuse they got back was, there’s too many documents and it was too difficult…..

BC: When you talk to them and say, how do we know that, you know, this is the commission, if we talk to the commission and say, how do we know that this is honest? The electoral management system is audited by us and we are comfortable that the people that we’ve employed to audit it are honest. It’s a bit like asking the fox with a chicken feather in his mouth coming out of the henhouse, how many chickens were in there when you went in and how many were in there when you came out.

MJ: So when we talk about getting access or to the actual information, so that means that there is no effective audit being done.

Bruce C (33:42.482) No, I’ll use the word public audit. There is no audit which is being done by the people. It is only being done by the electoral management system and by their own admission on the electoral management website. They have total control over every aspect of the voting system. And again.