Voters in the City of Melbourne will receive two separate ballot papers, one for the leadership team and one for the councillor team. A vote for “Team Kouta” councillors on the second ballot paper may lead to the council candidates on the ticket, including Liu and Ramani, getting elected even if Koutoufides does not succeed in his campaign for the lord mayorship.
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In the last City of Melbourne elections this led to outcomes such as Jennifer Yang and Arron Wood both failing to get elected as lord mayor but councillors on their tickets, CFMEU official Elizabeth Doidge and business owner Jason Chang, securing a spot.
Another anomaly in the City of Melbourne electoral process is rules giving additional votes to business and property owners.
Melbourne is the only municipality in Victoria in which businesses get to vote in council elections, and their power is increased at the ballot box: they get two votes apiece, compared to one per resident.
And property investors and business owners have yet another advantage: they don’t have to be Australian citizens to vote.
The result is an electoral roll in the 2020 election made up of 55.09 per cent business owners and out-of-the-area property owners, with locals making up only 44.91 per cent of the roll.
So much for one vote, one value.
A probe into the 2018 by-election for lord mayor found 6889 ballots were sent to voters “care of” real estate agents, with large real estate group MICM receiving 1700 ballot packs alone.
In the 2020 election the Local Government Inspectorate found that 20 real estate agents had illegally completed ballot papers on behalf of those landlords whose properties they manage.
Most of the owners lived overseas, “usually permanently and most commonly in China”, and some had “authorised their agent verbally or in writing to vote on their behalf”.
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The property owners generally “had limited English”, “were not interested in the election” and “communicated with their agents in Chinese through WeChat”.
The council unanimously passed a motion two years ago calling for an overhaul of the City of Melbourne’s voting system, but it has been ignored by the state government.
“The City of Melbourne electoral system is being held together with sticky tape,” Leppert says. “The distribution of ballot papers via property managers is an obvious fraud risk, identified election after election, that still hasn’t been adequately addressed.”
Group Voting Tickets that distort the will of voters are still used despite being abolished in nearly every other jurisdiction.
It adds up to a voting system which keeps council dominated by business and the wealthy and out of the hands of the people who live and work in Melbourne.
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