Tara Murray
Two-time Hume Mayor Carly Moore has hit back at accusations of any wrong doings in her Hume council re-election campaign.
Several candidates and Facebook pages have raised concerns about Cr Moore’s how-to-vote cards, which vary depending on which suburb they are distributed in.
Cr Moore admits she does have two different how-to-vote cards, saying it is common practice and she wasn’t breaking any laws under the electoral act.
All cards were authorised by a third-party and registered with an election officer.
“I am aware of at least seven other candidates in the Hume election that have different types of HTV cards,” she said.
“Those people claiming any laws have been broken are totally wrong and again, I question their motives. Registration of HTVs is only required at attendance voting, but all the same you can register several HTV versions if you wish.”
On Cr Moore’s how to vote cards, she preferences Chandra Bamunasinghe and Ravinder Kaur number two and three, with the order dependent on which location the cards are distributed to.
She said she wanted to support both candidates and decided to support both of them by distributing different cards.
She said any accusation that either were just dummy candidates is disappointing.
“Chandra and Ravinder also had this difficult decision and did the same,” Cr Moore said.
“These accusations are very hurtful to both Chandra and Ravinder who are running highly successful campaigns that they are self funding.
“For example, Chandra has previously served as a councillor and deputy mayor of Hume City Council. Any suggestion he is doing anything other than trying to get himself elected is quite frankly ridiculous.”
Cr Moore, who was the first person elected in the Aitken ward last election, said the election campaign had been nasty, with many of the comments coming from anonymous social media pages.
She is looking at pursuing the appropriate action for online content that she believes is defamatory. She said she wasn’t sure why she was being targeted.
“I am a working mum with four children,” she said. “I feel I have been deliberately targeted including with the online lies.
“There is a husband and wife who are running in the same ward, with one of them indicating to preference the other. There is a candidate in another ward who is authorising another candidate’s material that suggests putting him number two. There are two candidates in another ward using identical word for word slabs of text who are preferencing each other one and two.”
