Australia starts voting

Pre-poll voting centres across Australia opened this morning, 11 days in advance of the federal election being nominally held on 3 May. You can find your nearest one here. Most of them will be open for nine days, being closed this Friday (Anzac day) and also on Sunday. At the last election, in 2022, about 5.63 million out of the total of 15.46 million voters took advantage of pre-polling; about another 2.21 million lodged postal votes.

We’ve noted before (as have others) that this shift, to a situation where the votes cast on the day represent only about half of the total, was not deliberately planned. As I put it six years ago, “no-one argued beforehand about whether or not it was a good thing to have a third of the electorate voting prior to election day, because no-one realised that was what was going to happen.”

But the clock is not going to be put back. The ABC’s guide to the subject last week answers the question “Can I vote early?” with a simple “Yes.” It goes on to explain that “technically, there is [sic] eligibility criteria for voting early” and lists them, but the reader is given to understand, quite correctly, that they should not be taken too seriously. Both the electoral commission and the major parties, for different reasons, like early voting, and there is no stomach for screening out those (probably the majority) who are not actually eligible.

Some would like to go further. My friend Chris Berg last week published a Substack post titled “Vote as early as possible.” His argument is that early voting disrupts the incentives faced by politicians and pushes them away from the destructive game of releasing policies at the last minute:

Early voting is a strategic move available to voters to realign political incentives, increase the information quality of election campaigns, reduce the appeal of policy-on-the-run for campaigners, and to discipline their own thinking about the performance of political parties throughout the full parliamentary term.

I don’t think this is a bad argument, but it’s important to note the downside as well. While early voting may eventually change political behavior, until it does, those who vote early are making their decision with incomplete information. It’s also bad for ballot security – the extra fortnight multiplies the opportunities for ballot papers to go missing or be tampered with – and the need to staff pre-poll centres imposes a disproportionate burden on minor parties and independents. More intangibly, there’s a sense that people getting together to vote at the same time is an important part of the democratic experience, and that without it something has been lost.

It’s reasonable to think that the upward trend in pre-poll voting will continue this year, but just how much further it might go is entirely unknown. The biggest jump in pre-polls came not, as you might have expected, with the post-Covid election of 2022, but three years earlier in 2019. Here are the numbers for the last four elections:*

2013: 2.32 million
2016: 3.12 million
2019: 4.78 million
2022: 5.63 million

It’s worth noting, however, that 2022 was the year that the pre-poll period was reduced from three weeks to two. While that failed to halt the growth of pre-poll voting, it did apparently slow it a bit. This year, although there’s been no further change to the rules, the presence of two public holidays has shortened the available window from 11 days to nine.

A source from the Liberal Party has posted the AEC’s advice for Victoria as to expected numbers of pre-poll votes at each voting centre. The total adds to 1,560,764, an increase of just 5.5% on the 1,478,857 recorded in 2022. [But see note below] That seems remarkably small to me; it looks as if the commission is betting on the public holidays making a big difference, and perhaps also assuming that some of the increase last time was a temporary Covid bump.

Even if there’s little change in the total, the loss of two days means that the daily totals will be higher, which will put more pressure on the logistics. More pre-poll centres are being opened, but there may also be an element of wishful thinking in the commission’s assumption that the increase will be a modest one. We’ll know soon enough whether they’re right.

Finally, the usual reminder about the political behavior of pre-poll voters (discussed at length in this 2020 post). We know that pre-poll and (even more so) postal voters lean towards the Coalition, and everyone assumes, without being able to prove, that this is just a matter of what sort of voters they are rather than of the pre-poll experience itself affecting the way that they vote. But the fact that 2019, the year with the big jump in the pre-polls, also saw a quite unexpected swing to the Coalition is enough to arouse a slight suspicion.

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* These figures are not easy to find; you have to go to the “downloads and statistics” page for each election (not the virtual tally room) at the AEC website and download the individual spreadsheets. Here’s the 2022 one, for example – scroll down to “pre-poll voting”.

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NOTE Added Thursday Morning: Patrick Clearwater points out to me that the figure given above for expected numbers in Victoria is only the ordinary pre-poll votes and excludes the “declaration” pre-polls, which would add about another 160,000. That brings the expected increase up to a little over 16%, which is more realistic than the 5.5% cited above but still seems very modest.