(Transcript from World News Radio)
Federal parliament's electoral matters committee is investigating what went wrong with the recount of the 2013 Senate election in Western Australia that's led to another election having to be held,
The committee will aim to come up with measures to ensure such an event will never happen again.
The missing ballots have resulted in the Court of Disputed returns ordering a re-run of the West Australian Senate election on April 5, which could affect the Abbott government's ability to deliver key election promises.
Sacha Payne reports.
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The recount of votes following the Senate election in Western Australia last September resulted in the revelation that almost 14-hundred ballot papers had gone missing.
Former Federal Police chief Mick Keelty was hired to try to find out what went wrong.
But he says he's been unable to identify where the missing votes went, or whether criminality might have been involved.
"So many elections have happened and so many elections appear to have gone well. So it's hard to strike a balance with this. This was a disaster."
The fiasco claimed the jobs of Australian Electoral Commissioner Ed Killesteyn and WA electoral officer Peter Kramer.
The transport contract for moving ballot boxes in WA had expired two months before the election, and pallets with boxes of ballot papers were found, Russian doll-style, near rubbish bins.
Mick Keelty says ballot papers were moved by car and handled very casually, but he can't conclude whether the missing ballot papers were accidentally thrown out with the rubbish or stolen by criminals.
He told the the chair of the federal parliamentary committee, Tony Smith, that more care needs to be taken in handling voting papers.
"Keelty: I mean it's very Australian to have a ute pull up in a place in the middle of the night and throw boxes from one ute into another ute. I mean there's probably no other way to do it but it needs to be lifted into 2014. It's a century old system that's now in 2014. Smith; Yeah Someone said to me after our first public hearing that there was more security at the Brownlow* votes on Brownlow night"
Mr Keelty has dismissed a suggestion the Federal Police should investigate further, saying any evidence was likely to have been destroyed.
He says the solution lies in treating every ballot paper as sacrosanct and accounting for them through the barcoding of boxes so they could be tracked.
The former Commissioner says the Electoral Commission also has a culture that favoured the House of Representatives count because it was seen as more urgent and important than the Senate count.
He also says he can't rule out corruption in the upcoming Senate election in WA if people know the election results could be tight, particularly because of the thousands and thousands of volunteers that are used in the process.
"You could easily imagine with the money involved with some of the parties with some and the importance of the Senate. I mean the importance of the Senate in the last couple of decades has really, just as an outsider, has grown immensely. So if you could foul up the outcome, and think about the people who are involved in this, we are talking up people who are lower income earners, I'm not being disparaging but I am saying the opportunity for something corrupt to happen is there. I don't think, I had no evidence of corruption in here whatsoever. But the problem is I can't hand on heart stand here and say it didn't happen because the system was so parlous."
Acting Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers will appear before the committee next week to talk about improvements for the election re-run in Western Australia.
