Polling booths at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. “Voting for us is a family occasion, a duty fulfilled, as often as not, on the way to the beach … an obligation, but a light one, a duty casually undertaken,” said writer David Malouf.Credit: Edwina Pickles

The letters arrive at the rate of a dozen a week, addressed to the headquarters of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) in Canberra but omitting the official title of the intended recipient, the Australian Electoral Commissioner, Tom Rogers. “When they write to me, they’ll write something like, ‘To the man Tom Rogers doing business as the fake election commissioner’ or ‘Tom of the family Rogers, the living man’,” he says. “They’re always signed with red thumbprints and use archaic language directly out of the US.”

Most are penned – and thumbed – by “SovCits”, as they are sometimes called. Activists aligned with the sovereign citizen movement, a loose group of extreme libertarians who disavow the very concept of the Australian state and who distance themselves from societal institutions. Many refuse to pay taxes or ­obtain driving licences. The idea of compulsory voting is repellent to them.

“Some are quite mad,” says Rogers. “If we’ve tried to enrol them, quite often they include an invoice for $20,000 for opening the letter from the fake government. It’s completely bonkers.”

Over the 11 years he’s been in charge of overseeing Australia’s elections, Rogers has witnessed a worrying uptick in what he calls “tinfoil hat-wearing” conspira­torialism. “On one level you think it’s only a dozen ­letters a week, frankly who cares?” he says. “But it’s a bit of a worry that I’m getting that much stuff.”

The world over, democracy is under attack. On January 6, 2021, a sitting American president, who hopes to become the next US president, incited an insurrection aimed at violently overturning the result of a clear-cut presidential election. In Brazil on January 8, 2023, supporters of the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro carried out a copycat attack in the country’s capital, Brasília, after this “Trump of the Tropics” had also been defeated at the polls. The war in Ukraine is an emblematic struggle between freedom and autocracy. The new cold war pitting the US against China is framed in the same ­epochal terms. Foreign interference, from bad actors like Russia and China, is where threats to democracy become threats to national security. The world’s ­richest man, Elon Musk, has become a super-spewer of misinformation through his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), a billionaire who has not only disrupted the economy but been accused of destabilising democracy. The rise of generative ­artificial intelligence will propagate the mind poison.

The body politic here is hardly immune. Adopting a Fortress Australia mentality, moreover, offers little protection from the contagion. Just consider what unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Melbourne, anti-lockdown protests paraded a gallows through the streets, seemingly mimicking the January 6 insurrectionists. Some pissed on the Shrine of Remembrance, the city’s holiest shrine. Right-wing politics in Australia has also become more Trumpian. Scott Morrison’s ­secretive multi-ministerial power grab flouted the Westminster tradition of open government. After meeting Donald Trump at Trump Tower in May, he posted on social media that the former president had been subject to a “pile on”, seemingly dismissing the rap sheet against him, ­including criminal charges ­relating to the storming of the US Capitol, the attempt to overturn the election.

Ahead of the Voice referendum, the present Liberal leader questioned the integrity of the poll. Peter Dutton complained the vote was being “rigged” because the AEC ruled that a tick would likely count as a “yes” but a cross would not be counted as a “no”. Yet the decision adhered both to precedent and the strict letter of ­electoral law.
Some conspiracy theorists claimed voting machines were heading for Australia. “You will know that we don’t use any voting machines,” says Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers. “Never have, never will.”

Some conspiracy theorists claimed voting machines were heading for Australia. “You will know that we don’t use any voting machines,” says Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers. “Never have, never will.” Credit: Getty Images

So at a time when the electoral process is coming under assault on so many fronts, both foreign and ­domestic, maybe we should be grateful that the ramparts of Australian democracy are manned by a former soldier. Rogers, who grew up on Sydney’s lower north shore, is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and served for 20 years as an officer in the Australian Army. For a time he ­commanded a UN peacekeeping mission in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Both a strategist, peering at the horizon for long-term threats, and a tactician, ­responding to ­day-to-day attacks, Rogers draws ­inspiration from Australia’s most revered military commander, General John Monash. He tells the story of how, during the Great Depression, a group of ­disgruntled veterans urged Monash to lead a military coup. “He shot them down straight away,” says Rogers. “He said the future of Australia relies on the ballot box and an educated ­electorate. I’ve always thought of that, and the two components of that. Not just the vote, but providing citizens with the information they need to vote.”
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Combating misinformation and disinformation now consumes much of the Commission’s bandwidth. Ahead of the 2022 federal election, the AEC had to rebut claims that Dominion Voting Systems voting machines would be used to rig the vote. “THE ELECTION STEAL – FIX IS IN,” read a post on Facebook in October 2021, from an account called Seaman John, which got dozens of shares and more than 100 reactions. “AEC to accommodate the utterly corrupt and discredited Dominion Voting Systems – in our next National Election.” It was a local iteration of the Trump conspiracy theory that had been libellously amplified by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, which had to pay the Colorado-based company a staggering $US787 million to settle the defamation lawsuit before it went to trial. Yet as Rogers wearily points out: “If you have ever been into an Australian polling booth, you will know that we don’t use any voting machines. Never have, never will. It would be unlawful and illegal.”

Another canard put out by conspiracy-mongers was that the AEC was using outsourced vote-counting ­software vulnerable to manipulation. Yet every vote is counted by AEC staff at designated AEC venues. Also, there were allegations of voter fraud, after rumours spread that ballot papers had been found near rubbish bins in Port Macquarie. The concocted image, sent to a radio station in Sydney, featured some bona fide AEC ballot papers, which might have been discarded by people who chose not to vote. Others, however, were clearly fake – photocopied on the wrong shade of green paper.
Of all the conspiracy theories, perhaps Rogers’ ­favourite was the furphy that voters should not use pencils because the AEC would erase their votes. It came on social media with the hashtag #usepen. “I had some gigantic rubber that I was going round after hours erasing 17 million votes,” laughs Rogers. “These are nutty mad conspiracy theories that people pick up overseas and smear across what you are doing.”
Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers says some of the letters he receives are “quite mad”.

[]Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers says some of the letters he receives are “quite mad”.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

It was around 2013 that Rogers first noticed an ­escalation in conspiratorialism, which he ascribes to the rise of social media platforms such as Twitter, as X was then known. In 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s shock victory, his concerns grew about the threat from misinformation. Not only was it a question of safeguarding Australia against foreign interference from countries such as China, Iran and even India, but ­foreign infection from its closest ally, the United States. Protecting the reputation of the AEC became paramount. “What they were seeing overseas was not a failure of electoral administration, it was a failure of reputation. People were deliberately sowing doubt about the validity of electoral results. I’ve got this very strong view that elections are part of ­national security. Trusting election results is what democratic legitimacy rests upon, so we really went to town.”

Going to town meant establishing the electoral equivalent of a special forces detachment, the Defending Democracy Unit, which was tasked with protecting the AEC’s reputation. Around the world, the AEC is seen as the gold standard in electoral administration, and within Australia it is widely regarded as unimpeachable. Nine out of 10 citizens say they trust how it carries out its work.

At the heart of its reputation management strategy is pre-bunking, as opposed to debunking – countering ­conspiracy theories before they take flight. The AEC set up a disinformation register, rebutting every fallacious claim that appeared on its radar. It raised its game on social media, that cesspit of disinformation. In 2019, it also set up its own YouTube channel, AEC TV. “It sounds very grand,” says Tom Rogers. “It’s effectively a series of videos filmed in a cupboard with a backdrop. Where we see one of these conspiracy theories online, we will immediately cut one of these videos with one of our experts talking about the actual facts, bang it online straight away and promote it on social. You’ve got to do it quickly. That’s the thing.”
Australia’s way of voting – including mandatory participation – has been praised worldwide.

Australia’s way of voting – including mandatory participation – has been praised worldwide.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

By responding rapidly – counter-attacking, in effect – during the Voice referendum campaign, Rogers was able to quickly refute Dutton’s dangerous ­comments about vote-rigging. In robust terms, the AEC “completely and utterly” rejected the claim it was acting unfairly, and complained the criticism was “based on emotion rather than the reality of the law”. When I raise Dutton’s comments, Rogers treads ­gingerly. “I think we’re all responsible for our own statements” is all he will now say.

Yet another countermeasure is the Stop and Consider campaign, introduced ahead of the 2019 ­federal election, which Rogers says was “shamelessly stolen” from Sweden. “They ran a campaign, ‘If it makes you angry, it is probably fake.’ I really liked that as a tag line, and we did some testing and it didn’t quite fly. So we came up with Stop and Consider.” This public education campaign, promoted on all the AEC’s social media platforms, urges voters to be wary of what they are seeing, reading and hearing. Is it from a reliable source? When was it published? Could it be a scam?

“It’s about getting citizens to consider how they ­consume information, especially at election time,” says Rogers. “We need to raise the level of digital competence among our citizens to give them the skills they need to work through this. Voters need to understand what is going on in the information ecosystem. We’d be foolish to think in Australia we are immune to these global trends that we have seen in other countries. That’s being ­turbocharged by the rise of artificial intelligence.”

The rise of AI unquestionably elevates the threat level. A recent report from NewsGuard, a US-based organisation which counters misinformation, found that between May and December 2023, online sites misleadingly hosting mostly AI-generated articles ­increased from 49 to more than 600. Deepfakes – AI-generated video, images and audio purporting to be real – have already been deployed in the US presidential election. Ahead of the New Hampshire primary in January, voters received phone calls fabricating the voice of President Biden. Fake Joe told them to stay at home rather than vote.

“I think we’re operating at the cutting edge of where our legislation is,” says Rogers, “but I’ve also gone ­public and said that new developments, such as AI, are complex, and that the Election Act is not set up to deal with that. And technically, internally, we don’t have huge computers here in the basement where we are able to detect AI.” It speaks of the asymmetrical nature of the battle. AEC TV up against AI feels like a David versus Goliath mismatch.

In his scorching 1964 polemic, The Lucky Country, Donald Horne not only complained that Australian politicians were second-rate but that the country’s democratic system was second-hand. “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck,” is the quote that has echoed down the decades. But it was the beginning of his largely neglected next line that got to the nub of Horne’s thesis: “It lives on other people’s ideas.” Horne bemoaned how Australia was lazily imitative, inheriting and mimicking Britain’s system of governance. As he later explained: “I had in my mind the idea of Australia as a derived society.”
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Canberra appeared to prove his critique. Though the nomenclature of the House of Representatives and Senate was imported from Washington, much of the furniture looked like it had been shipped in from Britain. The green-and-red leather benches in Parliament House were modelled on those of the Palace of Westminster. As in Britain, Hansard provided a ­verbatim record of parliamentary proceedings. Old Parliament House could boast a near-replica of Augustus Pugin’s Speaker’s Chair in the Commons, replete with arm rests incorporating timber from Horatio Nelson’s HMS Victory and a royal coat of arms hewn out of oak from Westminster Hall. To this day, a golden mace, gifted by King George VI, is ­carried in procession ahead of every sitting day by the Serjeant-at-Arms, who used to don on ceremonial ­occasions a pair of white gloves, a shirt with a butterfly collar, silver-buckled shoes, stockings and knee-­breeches. The full Bridgerton.

For all the ceremonial and procedural similarities, however, Horne’s thesis was too self-belittling. Rather than being imitators, Australians have been the ­inventors of an emphatically homegrown version of democracy. In 1902, with the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act, Australia became the first country where women could stand for parliament. Secret ­voting, through ballot papers and closeted ­voting booths, was taken up in America in the late 19th century, where it was called “the Australian ­ballot”. Though it initially copied the first-past-the-post system used in UK parliamentary elections, in 1918 preferential voting was adopted for the House of Representatives. On October 10, 1924, compulsory ­voting was signed into law. As the historian Judith Brett has written in From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting: “In the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Australia led the world in electoral reform.”
An election-day tradition. “Australia has succeeded in creating a culture of celebration around elections as full-community affairs,” writes one international observer.

[]An election-day tradition. “Australia has succeeded in creating a culture of celebration around elections as full-community affairs,” writes one international observer.