Mickey Mouse could hold the key to the motivation behind Pauline Hanson email forger Sean Castle, with an exclusive interview revealing the Glendenning teacher is influenced by a body of thought associated with an eccentric lobby group convinced Australia’s voting system is corrupt.

Speaking to the media for the first time since admitting to the ruse in the NSW Supreme Court ten days ago, Castle revealed his supreme mistrust of the electoral system — one possible motivation for the stunt purporting to shine a light on the internal processes of the NSW Electoral Commission.

Although prevented by a court order from discussing the specifics of the case, Ratter offered his general take on the apparent corruption at the heart of Australian democracy.

“Why don’t you look around how easy is it for people to go and vote in someone else’s name?,” Rattner told Crikey, when contacted on his home number.

“You know, all they have to do is know a person’s name. There’s no identity checks. There is an old saying amongst a political party…you know, vote early and vote often. You’ve got to ask yourself there’s lots of flaws but like, you know who I am. People know who I am now and people can easily find my date of birth and my address through court documents which are public files.

“At the next election there’d be no problem for some smart a-se to go and use my details and go to seven or eight polling booths and say ‘I’m Sean Castle, this is my address, this is my date of birth’ and they just go tick on the manual piece of paper because there’s no database that says that a person has voted on the day. Maybe in a few months time I’d start getting fines.”

Until now, the motivation behind Castle’s elaborate experiment — in which he fabricated emails from two electoral officials claiming “1200” votes for Hanson had been misplaced, and posed as a Daily Telegraph journalist to get embargoed access to the progressive upper house vote — has remained shrouded in mystery.

But while Castle has stayed mum, the media is also yet to twig that his pseudonym “Michael Rattner” is a direct reference to “Mickey Mouse”.

The big-eared Disney star has a storied history when it comes to allegations of voting fraud that all lead to the same source — the HS Chapman Society, its president Dr Amy McGrath and its secretary — the former Liberal member for Macquarie and 1996 Fred Nile Senate candidate Alasdair Webster.

The Society’s central claim — that Australia’s voting roll is corrupt and that elaborate checks are needed to prevent fraud — gets regular play from Coalition MPs like Andrew Southcott and Sophie Mirabella. Many of its recommendations fed into the Howard government’s controversial 2006 reforms to the Electoral Act (now reversed) that banned prisoners from voting and closed the roll on the dates writs were issued. Its most prominent media backer is shock jock Alan Jones.

The coincidences between the Ratter case and HS Chapman’s view of the world are striking.

Between March 13, 1998 and July 8, 1999 a “Michael Raton” (Raton is Spanish for mouse) was fraudulently enrolled at a Woodford address, deep in Alasdair Webster’s former Macquarie electorate. According to oral evidence given by Amy McGrath to the Joint Standing Committee into Electoral Matters in 2001, Raton had been placed on the roll to “test the system” against fraud.  Later that day, then JSCEM chair Christopher Pyne sent out an erroneous press release breathlessly reporting McGrath’s evidence.

The Raton case echoed another famous instance in which a fraudulent feline  — “Curacao Fischer-Catt” — was enrolled in 1990, also in Macquarie, while Webster was a sitting MP.

After a ‘welcome to the electorate’ message was sent by Webster to the cat’s owner, Justine Fischer, Fischer responded with a nudge-nudge wink- wink letter stating that “under the Australian Constitution cats are not allowed to vote” and a follow-up letter to the editor in the Blue Mountains Gazette with the headline “going co-co for votes”.  The case was referred by Webster to the Macquarie Divisional Returning Officer who passed it on to the Australian Federal Police.

Castle denied he had ever attended a HS Chapman Society meeting. When probed specifically on the glaring link between Raton and Rattner he referred to the court order.

“It’s best that I don’t comment on that because it could open up a whole new range of stuff for me if I talk about that sort of stuff,” Castle told Crikey.

“You can draw your own strings from that.”

According to the Australian Electoral Commission’s response to the 2001 joint standing committee, it was of “some significance” that the Raton and Catt cases “both involved individuals ‘testing the system’ by enrolling as ‘pest exterminators'” in Macquarie while Webster was a political player there.

Webster was Liberal Member for Macquarie between 1984 and 1993 but switched to Fred Nile’s Call to Australian party (later re-named the Christian Democratic Party) for the 1996 Senate tilt. He also represented Nile’s group at the 1998 Constitutional Convention.

Webster told Crikey he had only heard of Sean Castle through media reports. Amy McGrath is in the UK and did not respond to an email requesting comment.

There is little evidence of systematic voter fraud in Australia. In a report to Parliament in 2002, the Australian National Audit Office concluded that “the Australian electoral roll is one of high integrity, and that it can be relied on for electoral purposes.”

But after nearly every state and federal election for the past 25 years, McGrath — the wife of retired NSW judge Frank McGrath — and her associates give voluminous oral and written evidence to parliamentary inquiries alleging the system is fatally flawed. Each time they do, the AEC or the equivalent state body is forced to debunk the claims in fastidious detail.

In a piece for Inside Story last year, Swinburne University’s Peter Browne and Brian Costar explained the genesis of the voter fraud movement, arguing that the group’s underpinning raison d’être was a hostility to compulsory voting, translating in practice to a hostility towards people who support the Labor Party.

But could Castle have had a secondary motive, drawn from the Nile camp’s desperation to ensure the Greens failed to snag a 5th upper house seat? The answer probably lies deep within the murky online tributaries of the NSW right.

Castle teaches history at Toongabbie Christian School, whose fundamentalist statement of faith would seem firmly in Nile’s orbit. And bear in mind that an innocuous April 3 email from a Pauline Hanson scrutineer that kick-started the ruse must have been seen by Castle for him to dream up the intervention — suggesting he was in touch, perhaps in a peripheral way, with the broader Hanson camp.

A Hanson victory in the upper house would have delivered the fringe Right 5 seats with the Shooters and Fishers Party and Nile’s CDP — one more than the Greens, who without Hanson foe Jeremy Buckingham would have been marooned on 4.

Hanson’s principle barrister Peter Lowe told Crikey that Nile’s name had never come up in the course of the investigation and Castle is currently prohibited from commenting in that kind of detail.

Meanwhile, all parties to the case are eagerly awaiting tomorrow’s 9:30am judgement, with suggestions that magistrate Peter McClellen may refer false affidavits in the case to the NSW Attorney General or the NSW parliament. Hanson’s legal bill of around $100,000 is expected to be absorbed by the taxpayer.