In 1975, following the dismissal of the Whitlam government, Harcourt and fellow statistician Malcolm Clark noticed irregularities in the distribution of party ordering on the Senate ballot papers for the 1975 federal election which was determined by drawing envelopes from a box, with Coalition parties holding one of the first two positions in every state. Harcourt and Clark made a submission to the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform, which resulted in a 1984 amendment to the "Commonwealth Electoral Act" to introduce a more rigorous double randomisation method. Harcourt and Clark published a paper about their analysis and recommendations for the "Australian &amp; New Zealand Journal of Statistics" in 1991.