False election fraud claim confuses uncounted votes with missing ballots
Soofia Tariq
May 05, 2025
WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Six million ballots are missing from the federal election.
OUR VERDICT
False. The ballots were yet to be counted, not missing.
AAP FactCheck – Six million ballots are not missing from the 2025 federal election, despite social media claims of electoral fraud.
The ballots in question were in one media outlet’s tally of uncounted votes as of Sunday, and the Australian Electoral Commission has confirmed that they are not missing.
The claim appears in Facebook posts made after Labor won the majority of seats and retained government in the May 3 election.
“There is 6,174,086 ballots missing. The total number of votes reported at The Guardian is 11,924,711 but the registered voters at AEC is 18,098,797?” the posts read.
The posts include links to the Guardian Australia’s live election results and the AEC’s enrolment statistics.
The posts appear to have subtracted the number of votes counted in the live tally on the Guardian website from the 18,098,797 registered voters on the AEC’s electoral roll.
However, the Guardian’s tally at the time of the writing says 22 per cent of votes were yet to be counted, meaning even fewer votes had been counted when the posts were made.
An AEC spokesperson saidthe posts are “wildly inaccurate” and said six million ballots have “definitely not gone missing”.
They said the six million figure also did not correspond with the number of pre-poll, postal or declaration votes that were yet to be counted.
“The AEC has robust security measures in place to track the location of every ballot paper, no matter whether it is blank or has been filled out,” the AEC spokesperson told AAP FactCheck.
The AEC Tallyroom also showed the count was ongoing at the time of writing and had increased from 11 million votes counted since the Facebook posts were made.
The Facebook posts also questioned why The Guardian’s election map showed so much of Australia as blue, signalling the Coalition had won the seats.
“Why do the heat map on the election vote shows a majority blue Liberal and National and Labor won??? We need a recount of the ballot. This election is rigged,” the posts read.
However, the map showed every electorate in the country, with some rural seats much larger in geographic area than urban seats, even though they all have similar numbers of voters.
The AEC said electoral division boundaries are drawn to keep the number of voters in each electorate roughly equal.
“For this reason, rural electorates (in which voters are very spread out) are always going to be geographically larger than metropolitan electorates (in cities, voters live closer together),” the AEC spokesperson said.
However, hex tile maps representing each Australian electorate as the same size and shape, such as this ABC map, clearly show that Labor won more seats than its rivals in the election.
AAP FactCheck is an accredited member of the International Fact-Checking Network. To keep up with our latest fact checks, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, BlueSky, TikTok and YouTube. (AAP)
