Queensland voters were wrongly turned away from polling booths in Australia’s first experience of voter identification laws, a leading community legal advocate has told a state parliamentary inquiry.
Director of the Queensland association of independent legal services (Quails), James Farrell, told the inquiry on Thursday the introduction of such laws for federal elections would be an unnecessary and unfair barrier to voters.
Farrell said vulnerable members of the community “including older people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and people with disability” were disproportionately affected by the laws.
The Queensland government introduced the laws after the state electoral commission’s referral of one person to police for casting multiple votes in the 2012 state election.
Farrell’s evidence suggested that some booth officials failed to follow the protections in the act, which allowed voters to make a “declaration vote” on the day and produce identification later.
“On election day in January this year, voters were turned away from polling booths for not having ID, or for having ID that didn’t match their details on the electoral roll,” Farrell said.
“Some were sent home to collect their ID if they did not have it. This is contrary to the protections that were supposed to be included in the new law, which should have given voters the option to cast a declaration vote.
“The law was unnecessary, and in practice it acted as a barrier to Queenslanders exercising their right to vote.”
University of Queensland law professor Graeme Orr said in a submission to the inquiry that 16,450 voters – equivalent to one electorate – turned up without ID and cast declaration votes.
Orr said voter turnout was down 1.1%, which was “a bit odd, as with a very close election one would expect voter turnout to rise, not fall”.
A parliamentary committee examining the 2013 federal Senate election in Western Australia this week recommended the laws be adopted federally.
But the low voter turnout in Queensland was cited in a dissenting report by three Labor committee members and the Greens senator Lee Rhiannon.
