Politicians harvesting Australians' data through opaque postal voting application letters could be a thing of the past if independents have their way.
Independent MP Kate Chaney is pushing to ban political parties from mailing postal ballot applications that trick Australians into thinking their data is being sent to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) directly.
"Our democracy is precious and fragile and we need to do everything we can to protect it," Ms Chaney told the House of Representatives on Monday when introducing her private member's bill.
"Australians want fair and transparent elections; they place their trust in our election processes and that includes postal voting."
Political parties, candidates and third parties are allowed to encourage voters to apply for a postal vote, including via the distribution and collection of postal vote applications.
In the 2025 federal election, the Australian Electoral Commission received just over 316,000 paper applications from third parties, making up almost three-quarters of all paper applications.
There was also a rise in the number of people navigating the commission's postal application form from third-party websites.
Political parties often send out unsolicited campaign material in bulk during an election.
This includes letters that encourage a person to apply for a postal ballot without clearly identifying that the application isn't being sent back to the electoral commission directly.
"This is when it gets dodgy," Ms Chaney said.
"The processing centre is not the AEC. If they were being transparent, the processing centre should be called the politicians' data harvesting centre.
"Unknowingly, the voter is sending to a political entity their name, address and date of birth, their phone number, their email, their security question and answer and a copy of their signature."
Ms Chaney's crossbench colleague Monique Ryan questioned whether voters would have returned the postal ballot applications if they had known their data was being scraped by political entities.
The electoral commission issued a warning during the election campaign about using unsolicited third-party forms due to privacy concerns and processing delays.
More than 2.5 million people applied for a postal vote at May's federal election, and 2.3 million people mailed their ballot back, according to the electoral commission.
