Some Australians voting on gay marriage were in for a shock when they received their postal vote in the mail.
Under the barcode there is a randomly selected series of letters and numbers but as you will see from Jess Wheeler’s tweet below, the letters ‘BUMSEX’ appeared among the characters.
His caption ‘I don’t think you guys are taking this thing seriously’ couldn’t be more appropriate, but the same can’t be said for the mistake.
Up to 15 million people are voting on whether or not to allow same-sex couples to get married.
The result won’t be known until mid-November and it’s non-binding.
According to The Sunday Telegraph, Jonathan Palmer, deputy statistician for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, apologised for the error saying:
The ABS acknowledges that in issuing 16 million barcodes it did not check and remove words and phrases that may be offensive.
The ABS apologises to the survey recipient and will issues a new form if requested.
The codes were issued using an algorithm generating more than two quintillion combinations of letters and numbers in order to generate highly secure barcodes.
The ABS will check newly issues barcodes.
Palmer also urged Australians not to compromise their privacy and security of their response by publicly displaying the barcode.
But seriously, ‘BUMSEX’. That can’t have been random!
