The applicant has not made any kind of request under the Freedom of Information Act. The letter to the Australian Electoral Commission is, in reality, a suggestion for a new policy. Is Right to Know the place for proposals for policy?

We can expect the answer from the Australian Electoral Commission. It will be short and will say the letter from the applicant is not valide under section 12.

The AEC has a policy to not provide access to this information in a timely fashion. But that is the case for all Government departments that do not want to be held to account. The information requested is a public document and is subject to FOI

The AEC has since published copies of the data requested, but it should be published and made available to scrutineers during the counting process.

had this information been published in a timely fashion scrutineers would have been able to properly scrutinise the validity of the vote.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to scrutinise a data-entry count without access to this data file.

The information that has now been published raises a number of issues as to the data quality and the systems in place. had this information been published in a timely fashion these votes could have been identified and rechecked

It is not until the information is made available that these issues become apparent.

Writer's most recent email says a "detailed reply and response to this request is outstanding". That is simply true; there is yet no reply. But the AEC is not late. They do not have an obligation to reply because the FOI Act does not apply to writer's original email. It was not an FOI application! Maybe they will not ever reply.

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