Bathurst returning officer Stuart Evennett confirmed he had received an official report about the incident last week but would not comment further to the media.

And the NSW Electoral Commission’s media department would not elaborate either, only saying there had been a report lodged by the officer in charge at the Lithgow pre-polling station and that the police had been informed.

Calls to the Western Advocate claimed Matt Martin had become abusive after being made aware that volunteers representing the Nationals had been handing out unregistered how-to-vote material.

But while he confirmed he had brought the unregistered material to the attention of the pre-poll officer-in-charge, Mr Martin flatly rejected any claims he had behaved badly.

He said the claims were “what you would expect from the Nationals”.

“It was brought to my attention that National Party volunteers were handing out how-to-vote material that was not registered,” Mr Martin said.

“I went down and saw the National Party people who were standing there and asked to see the material.

“They were trying to describe the poles and wires privatisation as a leasing and we reject that.

“The material was not registered so I saw the officer-in-charge to let them know it should not have been handed out.”

Mr Martin said he did not wait for the officer-in-charge to finish a phone call seeking advice on the matter and said he had been at the pre-polling station for just a few minutes.

Mr Martin said he had kept a copy of the offending material which was titled “Talking Points For Powerlines and Poles Leasing”. He said it appeared to be material distributed internally by the party to help volunteers answer questions put to them by voters but he was in no doubt the material was also being handed out to voters.

“Any suggestion that I behaved in any way other than impeccably is utterly refuted,” he said.

“This is just them [the Nationals] being sprung doing the wrong thing and trying to turn it around on to me.”

Nationals campaign director Peter Pilbeam confirmed Mr Martin had been handed the poles and wires talking points by the volunteer.

“That was a mistake – and it was a mistake for us not to properly train our polling person not to hand that to him,” he said.

But Mr Pilbeam said as far as he was aware there was just a single copy of the talking points and the material had not been handed to any other voters.