Over the last few days a video has been circulating around the socials in which a woman explains how to magically sack the government using this ONE WEIRD TRICK GOVERNMENT EXPERTS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!
“Vote to sack the government,” this message explains. “You draw a line through every name on the ballot paper, and you write at the bottom of it ‘no suitable candidate to follow my will’ and you put it in the ballot box. That is a vote to sack all the governments, every representative and ever senator, it is a valid vote.”
Except no, it’s not. Not even a bit.
Rachel Alex you and Tommy guns will probably like this. I know I have learned something new today
Posted by Marco Paolo Bergamaschi on Wednesday, 3 April 2019
You can’t sack the government by crossing everything out and writing other stuff on a ballot paper. And the conspiracy theorising toward the end is… OK, that’s a whole other strongly-divorced-from-reality issue. Let’s just deal with the first bit.
Writing silly things on a ballot paper has a name: it’s called informal voting and applies to submitting any ballot which isn’t correctly filled in (ie: by numbering the candidates as per the directives on the form).
Section 268 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act (1918) makes clear that your vote gets put aside if:
- the ballot paper is not marked at all
- the ballot paper has writing on it which identifies the voter
- in the case of an absent vote, the ballot paper is not contained in the declaration envelope
- in the House of Representatives, the voter has not completed a full preferential vote
- in the Senate, if the voter has not filled at least six boxes above the line or at least 12 boxes below the line
Such ballots do not count toward the government of the day, they do not carry a powerful message to the politicians (the only people who even see them are Australian Electoral Commission staff who at best might have a little chuckle at your gullibility) and they sure as hell do not have the magic power to dismiss all governments, as though that’s even a thing.
That’s not even remotely true, makeup weirdo.
And let’s just think about that: if there was somehow a law that magically forced every government in the country to be “sacked” (and replaced with… um, elves, or something?) don’t you think the governments might have repealed such a law as literally the first item of business the second that inaugural parliament sat?
It’s hard to think of a single thing that would have more bipartisan support from politicians than “remove this fizzing hand grenade from blowing up our jobs”.
And if anyone ever says “…it’s in the Constitution!” then you can check for yourself: our Constitution is pretty short and readable because it was only written about 120 years ago and therefore isn’t filled with arcane and impenetrable language.
And spoiler: there’s no such provision in there. Turns out that the Constitutional Convention didn’t decide “hey, as we forge the founding document of this new nation, should we maybe include a way to immediately throw everything into absolute chaos by invoking what amounts to a magic spell?”
Voting is a big deal and a lot of people went to great lengths, including losing their lives, in order that you might be able to cast your vote and have some sort of method of holding power accountable.
Don’t throw that power away because some unsourced stranger on the internet made up weird lies about it.