The election of a new government means an opportunity to fix some of the things that have been going wrong with Australia’s electoral system. Australia has been making it harder to enrol and vote, and easier for private money to influence electoral outcomes. Read the Audit's priorities for electoral reform.

With the Rudd government looking at making changes to the Electoral Act, Peter Brent places automatic enrolment as a high priority. In this paper, he highlights the mass of database information which the Australian Electoral Commission has access to, but cannot efficiently use for updating the electoral roll. Brent calls for the AEC to be...

The rejection rate for voters who applied for a provisional vote in the federal election was far higher than normal, rising from about 50 per cent to about 86 per cent. Peter Brent comments on the causes and impact.

Nearly one million Australian adults are not enrolled to vote. Peter Brent and Brian Costar look at why.

Peter Brent looks at above-the-line Senate ticket voting and the practice of 'preference swapping', which proved controversial at the 9 October election, and asks: how can we justify these practices in terms of democratic values and respect for the preferences of voters? He sheds some light on how a party with only 1.9 per cent...