Latest news with #GiseleKapterian


The Guardian
2 days ago
- 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

AU Financial Review
16-07-2025
- Politics
- AU Financial Review
Is that 1 or 7? What the judge will have to decide in Bradfield
Liberal Gisele Kapterian's claim that she belongs in parliament rests on a challenge to 151 questionable ballots, which a judge will now have to decipher one pencil squiggle at a time. Kapterian has applied to the Court of Disputed Returns alleging the Australian Electoral Commission committed 'illegal practices' wrongly including or excluding these ballots in a bid to overturn her 26-vote defeat in a recount that stretched on for more than a month after the May 3 federal election.

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.

The Age
15-07-2025
- Politics
- The Age
‘I am a fighter': Kapterian reveals why she is challenging the Bradfield result
Liberal candidate for Bradfield Gisele Kapterian says she is not seeking a byelection in the once blue ribbon northern Sydney seat but instead wants a judge to rule on some 800 ballots that she believes could swing the May election result in her favour. Kapterian on Tuesday lodged a petition in the High Court, which sits as the Court of Disputed Returns, in a bid to have the Bradfield result overturned by a judge. Teal candidate Nicolette Boele won Bradfield in a recount, with just 26 votes separating the pair. Kapterian, who has a frontbench position on hold for her in Canberra, said she was expecting a 'short and sharp' hearing which would come at no cost to the taxpayers. Kapterian has indemnity from the Liberal Party in the event of a loss, but Boele is a respondent so will likely incur costs. 'The refs on the field have made a call, and we're going to the video umpire. That's all this is, it is a pure extension of the count,' Kapterian told the Herald in an exclusive interview. 'We're just hoping to make sure that we give a voice to as many of those voters in Bradfield as possible, just to make sure that the count actually reflects those voter intentions. 'I don't anticipate a byelection to be the result of this challenge, and we haven't asked for one.' While Kapterian has not seen the ballots in question, she said between the initial count and the recount about 170 votes that were originally assessed as formal were ruled informal. This was one of the key reasons prompting her to pursue a court challenge. Her legal team, Melbourne-based barristers Philip Crutchfield KC and Dean Luxton, will be provided with access to the ballots once they are lodged with the court.

Sydney Morning Herald
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘I am a fighter': Kapterian reveals why she is challenging the Bradfield result
Liberal candidate for Bradfield Gisele Kapterian says she is not seeking a byelection in the once blue ribbon northern Sydney seat but instead wants a judge to rule on some 800 ballots that she believes could swing the May election result in her favour. Kapterian on Tuesday lodged a petition in the High Court, which sits as the Court of Disputed Returns, in a bid to have the Bradfield result overturned by a judge. Teal candidate Nicolette Boele won Bradfield in a recount, with just 26 votes separating the pair. Kapterian, who has a frontbench position on hold for her in Canberra, said she was expecting a 'short and sharp' hearing which would come at no cost to the taxpayers. Kapterian has indemnity from the Liberal Party in the event of a loss, but Boele is a respondent so will likely incur costs. 'The refs on the field have made a call, and we're going to the video umpire. That's all this is, it is a pure extension of the count,' Kapterian told the Herald in an exclusive interview. 'We're just hoping to make sure that we give a voice to as many of those voters in Bradfield as possible, just to make sure that the count actually reflects those voter intentions. 'I don't anticipate a byelection to be the result of this challenge, and we haven't asked for one.' While Kapterian has not seen the ballots in question, she said between the initial count and the recount about 170 votes that were originally assessed as formal were ruled informal. This was one of the key reasons prompting her to pursue a court challenge. Her legal team, Melbourne-based barristers Philip Crutchfield KC and Dean Luxton, will be provided with access to the ballots once they are lodged with the court.