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Tell Government Your Overseas Voting Experiences!
The Australian Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) is presently conducting an inquiry into the 2007 Federal Election. This is your chance to make your voice heard on voting and electoral matters as an overseas Australian, whether you voted in the 2007 election or not. Make a submission by the deadline of Friday 16 May 2008 using our e-mail submission template. We set out some ideas for your submission here.
Read our "What You Need to Know About Voting in Australia While You Live Overseas" brochure now. Download an A4 version here, and a US letter size paper version here.
For important current information on voting and enrolment, and links to the AEC website, as well as a summary of the SCG's advocacy work on the expat disenfranchisement issue to date, go to this page of our site.
Help us Extend the Right to Vote
How can we make sure that more Australian citizens overseas are able to exercise their democratic right to vote? The Southern Cross Group believes that work needs to be undertaken at two levels.
Firstly, we need to make sure that those people going overseas, and those who are already overseas, who do still have a right to vote under the law as it currently stands, know what they have to do to maintain their existing right while away. We set out our ideas on better electoral education for overseas Australians in a significant submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in June 2006 during its inquiry into civics and electoral education. Unfortunately that work was ignored in the JSCEM's report in that inquiry tabled in June 2007.
Secondly, we need to work for changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 so that any Australian citizen overseas can enrol to vote in Australian elections, no matter when they left Australia. See our page Current Limitations in the Law to understand the restrictions we presently face. Note that even though the JSCEM's June 2003 recommendation to change the two-year cut off to three years entered into force on 21 July 2004, this still leaves many Australian citizens already overseas who are not on the roll voteless, because they still don't qualify to enrol from overseas. Read our Media Release of 26 June 2003 here, and our Media Release of 18 June 2004, announcing the passing of the amending legislation, here.
Despite the extremely disappointing results of the JSCEM's 2002/2003 Inquiry, the 2004-05 Senate Inquiry into Australian Expatriates, and the 2006 JSCEM Inquiry into Civics and Electoral Education, it is still important for Australians overseas and in Australia to let politicians know at every opportunity that it is not acceptable to keep law in place which effectively disenfranchises several hundred thousand Australian citizens. The right to vote is one attached to citizenship. It should not disappear because a citizen is geographically outside Australia and has been away for more than three years. We encourage you to write to MPs and Senators. All their contact details are up on the Australian Parliament House website.
We will keep working on this issue. To make sure you are kept informed of developments, and given an opportunity to participate in future SCG lobbying, sign yourself up to our free e-mail bulletin list.
Maintaining the Right to Vote Overseas Where it Still Exists
On our pages Current Limitations in the Law and Are You Disenfranchised? we have explained what you need to do when planning to leave Australia, or within three years of leaving Australia, to maintain your right to vote.
The situation is more critical since mid 2006, when electoral law changed
so that for
the 2007 federal election and future elections, the electoral roll will close
virtually immediately the Prime Minister calls the election. The old
seven-day window after the calling of the election to get your enrolment in
order before the roll closes is gone. You must enrol or update your enrolment
details NOW. Don't wait until the election is called. It will be too
late.
Constitutional Questions
Our pleas to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in the Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2001 election largely fell on deaf ears. We repeated our calls to the Inquiry into Australian Expatriates conducted by the Senate's Legal and Constitutional References Committee, but they also fell on deaf ears. We made a major submission to the 2006-7 JSCEM Inquiry into Civics and Electoral Education, but the JSCEM ignored our submissions in their resulting report. What next?
Many people tell us that they believe that their right to vote is or should be a "constitutional right". We have considered taking this matter to the High Court of Australia for some years, to ask the Court to rule on whether the offending provisions of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 are unconstitutional.
Section 7 of the Commonwealth Constitution provides that Senators shall be "directly chosen by the people of the State". Section 24 provides that "The House of Representatives shall be composed of members directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth". The issue would be whether an Australian citizen overseas is within the "people of the State" and the "people of the Commonwealth".
Unfortunately for overseas Australians, the Australian Constitution does not include a specific right to vote, and we lack a Bill of Rights.
A case concerning the right to vote came before the High Court in 2007. On 30 August 2007 in that case, the High Court made an order that a 2006 law prohibiting all prisoners from voting was unconstitutional. The reasons for the Court's finding that those provisions are unconstitutional under Section 7 and 24 of the Constitution were published on 26 September 2007. Read the full High Court judgment here.
Vicki Roach, who brought the High Court challenge, is an Australian citizen of indigenous descent presently serving a sentence for a traffic incident in prison in Victoria. 2006 electoral law amendments provided that any person serving a sentence of imprisonment at the date of the election was not entitled to vote. Prior to the 2006 amendments, the position was that any person serving a sentence of three years or more was disqualified from voting.
Many of the arguments run in the Roach case are very similar to those that would be run were a disenfranchised overseas Australian to challenge the Electoral Act. To read more about the Roach case, including transcripts of the hearings in June 2007, click here.
The Roach judgment and its discussion of the meaning of "the people" in Sections 7 and 24 of the Constitution provides some hope that the three-year limit on enrolment from abroad might also be unconstitutional.
The Australian constitutional provisions can be compared to the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads:
Section. 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section. 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The US Congress has, over the years, enacted a number of pieces of legislation to protect the right to vote of US citizens, which you can read about on the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division website. We also highly recommend The Right to Vote: the Contested History of Democracy in the United States, by Harvard Professor Alexander Keyssar.
The Constitutional right to vote of all US citizens overseas is enforced by way of the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act of 1986. This requires the US States to make sure that members of the armed forces who are stationed away from home, and citizens who are living overseas, can register and vote absentee in federal elections. It is explained more fully on the Department of Justice's website.
Britain does not have a written constitution. However the rules enabling
British citizens to vote overseas provide a more extensive right to vote for
expatriates than those for Australian citizens under Australian electoral
law. British citizens living outside Britain can vote in UK and European parlimantary
elections in the constituency where they were last registered, provided it
is not more than 15 years since they left.
International Legal Obligations
Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) obligates Australia to ensure that:
Every citizen shall have the right to vote and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 2 and without unreasonable restrictions:
(a) To take part in the conduct of public affair, directly or through freely chosen representatives;
(b) To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors.
The Southern Cross Group believes that the current restrictions in the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 are not "reasonable" and therefore are in violation of Australia's international obligations under this treaty.
Australia's ratification of the First Optional Protocol to the ICCPR means that it would be possible for an individual to bring a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee if they believed that their right to vote under Article 25 was being infringed by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. Domestic remedies in the Australian courts would have to be exhausted first.
Our campaign on the right to vote for overseas Australians could be more
important in the long run than everything we have done so far to have Australian
citizenship law reformed. If we don't have a complete right to vote we will
always be less effective in our efforts to achieve change in Australia on
any matter for Australians overseas.
More Information
Other pages in the Overseas Voting section of our website will be of further help:
· Overview
· Current Limitations
in the Law
· Are You Disenfranchised?
· Direct Representation
for an Overseas Electorate
· Voting in Countries
Where You Are Not a Citizen
· Statistics
and Reports on Overseas Voting
Further documentation can be found in the Overseas Voting folder of our Archives.
