Latest news with #Bradfield
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Independent MP Nicolette Boele calls out parliament's lack of ambition in her first speech
Nicolette Boele, who sensationally beat Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian by just 26 votes in the seat of Bradfield, gave her maiden speech to parliament on Monday, saying Australia is moving towards a decentralised and more people-centred rather than party-centred democracy. She said there was 'widespread conviction' that politicians were 'incapable of dealing with systemic longstanding issues' such as regulating online media platforms, climate change, gambling and housing affordability, adding that unlike previous reform to gun laws, or the introduction of medicare, the parliament was not ambitious enough
The Guardian
21-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Decoding a voter's poor handwriting is subjective – let's enlist AI to help with the Bradfield recount
Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian has appealed her narrow loss to Nicolette Boele in Bradfield to the court of disputed returns. According to Professor Anne Twomey, no questions of law are raised in Kapterian's challenge. Rather, the court is being asked to determine more mundane questions. Is that 1 actually a 7; is that 6 an 8? and so on. Cases like this present an almost absurd disjuncture between the banality of the evidentiary questions – is a 1 a 7? – and the weight of the consequences: who shall represent over 100,000 citizens in parliament? Australian elections are global exemplars of fairness. All adult citizens are required to be enrolled and to turn out to vote. Ballots can't be hacked in Australia: they are tangible things, physical pieces of paper, with handwritten markings. Scrutineers from both sides carefully observe the count. The entire electoral process is administered by a politically neutral agency, the Australian Electoral Commission. The prospect of an Australian election being determined by competing subjective assessments about poor handwriting is jarring, at odds with the rigorous procedural fairness so valued and so manifest in Australian electoral law and practice. AEC officials no doubt do their best, and must make thousands of these judgments in the course of closely scrutinised counts like the one in Bradfield. Indeed over the course of a career, many AEC officials must become some of the most experienced handwritten-digit distinguishers in the world. Nonetheless, challenges to their initial judgments can be made under section 281 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act, reserving disputed ballots for determination by a more senior AEC official. Further challenges about the formality of these ballots can form the basis of a petition to the court of disputed returns. The last time the courts considered questions about ballot formality was in 2007 from the seat of McEwen. The resulting federal court case produced one of the more unusual judgments one will find in Australian law reports. Mitchell v Bailey (No 2) contains a lengthy tabular schedule, listing the disposition of 643 reserved ballots and – in 153 instances – reasons for Justice Richard Tracey's assessments about ballot formality differing from those of the AEC. Examples include comments such as 'Notations reasonably resemble numbers. In particular, three of them can be recognised as figures 7, 6, 5.' Why? How? Presumably, they just did to Tracey, just as they did not to AEC officials. No criticism of the late justice is intended; the point is to highlight just how subjective and hence seemingly unfair these assessments – and election outcomes – can appear. Tracey's observations and principles were adopted in their ballot formality guidelines. Given the rather exhaustive guidance provided by Mitchell v Bailey, what's left to dispute? Highly subjective judgment calls about handwriting is all that is left to fight over, something akin to Australia's version of the United States's unedifying hanging chad episode in the 2000 presidential election. Can we do better? Could an election really be decided this way? That one person's 7 is another person's 1? Here's a modest proposal. For decades we've been training computers to recognise handwritten digits, principally for making mail processing and delivery more efficient. Massive datasets of real, handwritten digits have become one of the touchstones of machine learning, test beds for refining algorithms and global competition among researchers. The best algorithms have 99.82% accuracy in recognising digits. And the AEC itself uses digital scanning to process Senate ballot papers. The outputs of digit recognition algorithms are probabilities, summing to 1 over the 10 possible digits, collapsing to a probability of almost exactly 1.0 on one candidate digit in most cases, but more spread out when processing poor, ambiguous handwriting. Algorithmically derived, rigorously validated on massive datasets spanning hundreds of thousands of handwritten digits, these probabilities could be a useful alternative – or at least a guide – in helping a judge determine whether a 1 is a 7, whether a 2 is an 8, and so on, and ultimately as to whether a ballot is formal or not. One simple decision rule might be to classify an ambiguous mark as that digit recognised with probability above 0.5, consistent with courts' reliance on the 'balance of probabilities' as a decision rule in many legal settings. Humans remain very much 'in the loop' in this process. The algorithms only assist in the hard cases: the ballots subject to dispute. Further, while digit recognition algorithms process single digits, ballot formality turns on whether a unique, valid enumeration of preferences or sequences of digits can be discerned, an assessment that considers not just individuals marks but the ballot as a whole. Surely this guidance could not only help the court in a practical sense (parsing hundreds of reserved ballots) but offer reassurance to the parties – and the voters of Bradfield – that the election is being finally decided rationally and with a degree of objectivity, consistent with the fairness integral to Australian elections. Simon Jackman is an honorary professor at the University of Sydney, specialising in elections, public opinion and data science
ABC News
16-07-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian petitions High Court over 150 ballots
The defeated Liberal candidate for the federal electorate of Bradfield has raised doubts about more than 150 ballots, in a petition asking the High Court to overturn the result. The first full distribution of preferences in the seat on Sydney's north shore had Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian ahead by eight votes, but a recount saw independent Nicolette Boele declared the winner by 26 votes. After almost six weeks, Ms Kapterian announced on Monday she would take the result to the High Court, sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns. "We are requesting a targeted final examination of a small number of 'line ball' ballots," Ms Kapterian said in a statement posted to social media. She has now lodged a petition, asking the court to overturn the result and declare her the winner. The petition claims the electoral officer wrongly rejected at least 56 ballots which favoured Ms Kapterian. This includes 22 ballots where the officer concluded certain numbers were not distinguishable from other numbers, and 34 ballots where numbers were deemed illegible. Ms Kapterian argues, taking the ballot papers as a whole, it was clear "that the voter intended to indicate a first preference for 1 candidate and an order of preference for all remaining candidates". Ms Kapterian has further identified at least 93 ballots favouring Ms Boele which she claims were wrongly admitted, despite similar issues. She argues a further two ballots favouring Ms Boele were admitted despite "having upon it a mark or writing … by which the voter could be identified." In her social media post, Ms Kapterian said in launching a legal challenge, she was not questioning the integrity of the electoral system. "This process has only served to reaffirm my faith in Australia's democratic institution," she said. The new parliament is due to sit for the first time next week, and Ms Boele has said she is preparing to deliver her first speech the week after. In her own social media statement, she said she would seek donations to fund her legal costs. "We can't rely on volunteers in the High Court, we need good lawyers and that is expensive," Ms Boele said. It is not yet known when the Court of Disputed Returns might sit to hear the case.
News.com.au
14-07-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
Liberal Party to reportedly launch court challenge to the result in seat of Bradfield
The Liberal Party will launch a court challenge after losing the blue-ribbon seat of Bradfield at the May election to community independent Nicolette Boele. Ms Boele defeated the Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian by just 26 votes in a recount that wasn't completed till a month after the May 3 election. On Monday, the Guardian reported the Liberal Party would launch the court challenge, asking a judge to recount some of the ballots. At the end of the recount conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission, Ms Boele had 50.01 per cent of the total vote, ahead of Ms Kapterian's 49.99 per cent. The news comes just a week before parliament sits for the first time since the election, with Ms Boele expected to take her seat on the cross benches.
News.com.au
08-06-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
Liberals still considering challenge on Bradfield election loss, says James Paterson
Coalition senator James Paterson says the NSW Liberal Party is still deciding whether to challenge the outcome of the prized Sydney seat of Bradfield, adding that he hopes Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian will be included in the 42nd parliament. Despite leading the initial count by eight votes, Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian lost to Climate 200 backed independent Nicolette Boele by just 26 votes in the ensuing recount. The state branch will have until 40 days after the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) returns the writs, which the body must do before July 9. Speaking to the ABC on Sunday, Senator Paterson said it would be a matter for the NSW Liberal branch as well as Ms Kapterian, and said no decision has been made as of yet. 'I understand the NSW Liberal Party is reviewing our legal options and I really hope that we can find a way to have Giselle Kapterian in the parliament in this term because she's exactly the kind of person that would make the Liberal Party better, the parliament better and our country better,' he said. 'She's got great insights, great professional experience, she's a person I hope to be playing a big role in the future of our party. 'But it will be up to the NSW division and then ultimately if we do decide to make any application, the Court of Disputed Returns to decide that.' Senator Paterson also said a potential challenge wouldn't necessarily result in a by-election. He pointed to the 2007 election result of McEwen where a Labor challenge at the Court of Disputed Returns focused on the validity of the informal ballots. However the Court ultimately dismissed the case and awarded the seat to then Liberal MP Fran Bailey. The former Salesforce executive has also been given the assistant shadow portfolios for communications, and technology and the digital economy, and her loss would trigger a minor shadow cabinet shuffle. As recently as Thursday, incumbent Bradfield MP Nicolette Boele confirmed she had yet to receive a concession call from Ms Kapterian. Considerations behind a potential challenge will be based on the difference in the total number of votes counted between the first and second count, and the fact about 170 previously informal ballot papers had been reclassified and allowed in the recount. A Liberal source also noted that the two counts produced two different votes, with the difference in both counts making up less than 0.02 per cent of the total number of ballots cast across the electorate. Speaking on Sky, Tim Wilson, who is the only Liberal challenger who won a seat from a teal independent, credited his campaign win to running a consistent 'big, bold and ambitious' three-year campaign. 'We captured their sense of hope and aspiration for themselves and their families, and we did it on the basis that people understood that they weren't just voting on the direction of the community … they were also deciding partly the future direction of the Liberal Party, (and) increasingly also the direction of Australia as well,' he said. Following his ousting from the Melbourne seat of Goldstein in 2022, Mr Wilson won the seat back from Zoe Daniels in a precarious count which saw both sides declare themselves the victor before the AEC finalised its count.
