The mother of 18-year-old twins who enrolled to vote in New South Wales has complained they will be unable to vote in the same-sex marriage postal survey because of discrepancies between the state and federal roll.
Rita Wright told Guardian Australia that her sons James and Michael turned 18 in May and she helped them enrol together and was “stunned” to learn they are not enrolled for federal elections after they did not receive survey forms.
The Labor party and the LGBTI rights group, Just Equal, have raised concerns that Australians will miss out on a vote due to discrepancies between the state and federal roll. Young voters are the most likely to be caught out because they will not have voted at a federal election and discovered they are missing from the roll.
Wright said she believed she had registered James and Michael on the federal roll with the AEC.
After she, her husband and daughter received their postal survey forms but twin sons James and Michael did not, she called the hotline on Monday and was told they were not in the system.
To qualify for the postal survey Australians had to have been enrolled on the commonwealth electoral roll or have made a legitimate application by 24 August and be eligible to vote in a federal election on that date.
Using the AEC website Guardian Australia has confirmed that James and Michael Wright are currently enrolled only for state and local elections, but not federal elections, suggesting they were enrolled with the NSW Electoral Commission not the AEC.
Wright said: “I had no idea that you’re not automatically enrolled on the federal roll if you’re enrolled in the state.”
“It stunned me, I’m a fairly well-informed person and I thought ‘gosh, what do I have to do?’.”
An AEC spokesman said it would not comment on individual cases but “ultimately it is the responsibility of every eligible elector to ensure that they are enrolled for electoral events”.
“There are different enrolment laws and activities in a small number of states that result in some electors not being enrolled for commonwealth purposes,” he said.
The spokesman said people who enrolled with a state electoral commission are sent notices alerting them that they are only on the state roll and need to contact the AEC to get on the federal electoral roll.
Wright said she was concerned that if her sons were now prevented from voting “it can happen to so many others”.
“With that generation: if right now in their first year of voting they aren’t allowed, if they don’t get the paperwork right, how motivated are they going to be next time? They’ll think it doesn’t matter.
“You might say it’s just two votes but they do count, it’s a big deal.”
Wright said she wanted to see marriage equality legalised because her husband’s cousin had been in a gay relationship for 26 years, the same length of time she and her husband had been married, yet they were not allowed to marry.
Just Equal spokesman Ivan Hinton-Teoh said it was “absurd” that enrolment with state electoral agencies would not flow through automatically to federal enrolment.
He said a group of Australians would be disenfranchised because of the discrepancy between state and federal rolls, which would “disproportionately impact” first-time voters.
The Labor party equality spokeswoman, Terri Butler, said it was “sadly unsurprising in an unprecedented exercise like this that there are concerns about processes and possible discrepancies [between the rolls]”.
“Labor calls on any person who thinks they’re entitled to a survey who hasn’t received theirs to immediately make inquiries,” she said.
“This is another example of why the government should have had normal legislative processes [to legislate same-sex marriage] not a bizarre national opinion poll.”
Butler said whatever the result of the survey, “there will be people that raise concerns about the legitimacy of the whole process, and I suspect there’ll be people that try to obstruct marriage equality”.
Voting for the postal survey concludes on 7 November, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics to announce the result on 15 November.
On Wednesday Guardian Australia revealed the case of Patrick Cairnduff, who enrolled to vote in February, but was refused a postal survey due to his birthday being incorrectly recorded on the federal roll. In response to the story the AEC and ABS promised he would get a vote in the survey despite the error.
