Bluemmel said a comprehensive review of the electoral law was needed and the VEC would have to make “difficult decisions” on priorities in the coming year.

“We are under significant pressure to deliver elections safely with existing resources and regulatory tools within current timelines,” he said.

Bluemmel said the move to single-member districts for every metropolitan council except the city of Melbourne had also increased the workload of the VEC.

Controversial changes to Victoria council voting system were presented by the then Minister of Local Government Adem Somyureka former power broker for Labor factions.

In 2024, 456 unsubdivided wards or councils held general elections, compared to 298 in 2020.

“This represents a 50 percent increase in the number of individual elections we have to hold,” Bluemmel said. “The Victorian elections are arguably the third largest peacetime logistical event regularly held in Australia. »

In the 2020 election, which is the only other election conducted entirely by mail-in ballot, the VEC discovered vote tampering in the council of Moreland, now Merri-bek.

The VEC was unable to identify any other cases of mail-in voting fraud.

“We have taken several steps to strengthen our security measures after detecting postal voting fraud in the North-West district of Merri-bek Municipality during the 2020 municipal elections,” said a VEC spokesperson . “Our monitoring processes were applied to all 424 contested individual elections. The fact that we detected these attempts in the Lalor and Baird neighborhoods shows that our measures are working as intended.

Mornington Peninsula candidate and former Melbourne city councilor Peter Clarke has questioned the integrity of the postal voting system.

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Clarke said that when he was distributing voting cards to houses in his electorate, many houses did not have letterboxes and he spotted ballot papers on the floor.

“I think the days of mail-in voting remaining counted are numbered because fewer and fewer people are putting up a mailbox,” he said. “There are better ways to do it, but it just falls into disrepute.”

A VEC spokeswoman said some voters might have provided PO boxes instead of their addresses if they didn’t have a mailbox.

Asked if she had confidence in the postal voting system, Local Government Minister Melissa Horne said the VEC had acted quickly to identify irregularities in two wards.

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“In total, they held 456 individual elections during this local election period,” she said. “This is mainly because we moved to a single-member district system, which led to a vast expansion in the number of individual elections held.”

Horne said the VEC reported the suspected vote tampering to Victoria Police and postal voting took place at all levels of government.

“This is something that is there to ensure that people can participate, that they have access to the system,” she said. “The VEC conducted this part of the process with integrity.”