Mr. Joseph Burke:

In my experience, personation is not a big issue or an issue at all. The evidence that supports that, to go back to one of the questions asked by Senator Fitzpatrick, is that there is a procedure in place. I referred to the inspectors compiling a report but there is a procedure in place whereby the presiding officer, if he or she is satisfied that somebody has engaged in an attempt at personation, is required - and this is set out clearly in the manual - to fill in on the back of the ballot paper account form details of the name of the person and his or her number on the register. That is returned to my office and it is picked up in the review afterwards. I do not have any of those and have not had any in the recent elections or in any of the election events that I have been involved in. There is a provision for personation agents to be appointed and in the two most recent events there were no personation agents attending at any of the polling places. If there was a concern out there that there was a problem with personation, I would expect that political parties would be aware of it and would be appointing personation agents to attend polling places.