[LINK] postal vote oddity

[Karl Auer]

Hullo Linkers.

As many of you will by now know, several parties - certainly in my
electorate of Eden-Monaro - are doing odd things with postal vote
applications.

We received a letter recently from Gary Nairn (Lib). It contained a
cover letter saying how great he was, and a postal vote application. The
application was not a standard AEC one; it had the same wording and
requested the same information, but included Nairn's photo and an
exhortation to vote for him. There was a panel that said, in large
letters, "Need more information?" and gave a phone number and an email
address @liberal.nsw.org.au. This panel was at the end of the postal
vote form, NOT on the page with Nairn's photo etc. In other words, it
looked exactly like a helpline for postal voting, but was in fact
contact details for the Libs. In *extremely* tiny type, there was the
"authorised by" stuff. The AEC contact info, which in the AEC forms is
highlighted, is not highlighted in this version of the form.

The letter was in an envelope marked "Important Election Information",
had the Australian crest on it, but nothing to suggest it was from the
Liberal Party. It also enclosed a prepaid envelope for the application,
pre-addressed to the "Eden-Monaro Postal Vote Centre". This address is
not an AEC address (I rang the AEC to check) - it is a Liberal Party
address.

I contacted the AEC, who said that this was all legal, that the parties
would forward the applications to the AEC, and that postal vote papers
would be sent direct from the AEC.

We later received a similar letter from Mike Kelly (Lab), but his made
it quite clear that the Labor Party was involved - the return address
and the prepaid envelope all mentioned the Labor Party and the
application form contained all the original bolding of AEC contact
details. The toll-free contact number provided on the last page was
identified as "the ALP Postal Vote Office" (though a second occurrence
of the number on the same page in larger, red letters had no such
information).

So my question: What do the parties get out of this? Sending the
application is an excuse for more junk mail, it gets their message into
the household. But what do they get out of forwarding postal vote
applications?

In puzzlement, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)