Just over two weeks ago, just before voting commenced in this federal election, numerous analysts (including this author) made predictions about a record surge in voters casting an early vote in 2016, due to a long-term trend away from election-day voting and the unfortunate timing of this year’s election in the middle of school holidays in large parts of the country.
These predictions have largely come true. With just a few days to go, there has been a significant increase in pre-poll voting, and a more modest increase in postal voting.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has conveniently released daily data on how many people voted the day before, which allows us to track this growth day-by-day.
As of the end of Wednesday, over 2.15 million people had voted at a pre-poll voting centre. At the same point in 2013, just under 1.5 million had voted – which was a remarkable figure already. Almost a third of pre-poll votes were cast in the last two days in 2013, and you’d expect a similar surge in the final stretch of the campaign.
There has also been an increase in postal voting, although it is much more modest.
In 2013, just under 1.3 million applications for postal votes were processed, and over 1.17 million postal votes were returned to the AEC.
As of the end of Tuesday, almost 1.5 million postal vote applications have been submitted, a 13% increase since 2013. The AEC has reported that at least 800,000 postal votes have been returned, although we don’t know what the equivalent number was in 2013.
The AEC’s data also breaks down postal vote applications by source. Many applications are submitted to political parties, who forward them on to the AEC, but political parties have declined slightly as a source of applications in 2016.
Approximately 58% of postal vote applications were processed directly by the AEC in 2013, from three sources. This has increased to 64% in 2016. About 260,000 Australians are registered as “general postal voters” – they automatically receive a postal vote at every election. Almost 700,000 others applied directly to the AEC. This is up from 537,000 in 2013. About 29% of these people applied using a paper form in 2013, but this time around only 2.4% eschewed the online alternative.
All of the parties brought in significant numbers of postal vote applications, but the Coalition dominates this category. Labor’s applications dropped 23.5%, while applications from the Coalition only dropped slightly.
There’s also substantial variation in where people are casting pre-poll votes.
As of Wednesday evening, 2.15 million Australians had voted pre-poll, which accounts for 13.8% of the total electoral roll. The proportion of voters who have pre-polled varies significantly between states, with only 6.6% of voters pre-polling in South Australia, compared with over 16% in both Victoria and Queensland, which have now commenced school holidays.
Queensland and Victoria are also the only states where over 10% of the electorate has applied for a postal vote. Over a quarter of the population in these two large states has either voted pre-poll or applied for a postal vote. The equivalent statistic for New South Wales is just under 18%. Clearly school holidays are having an impact.
There is a general trend towards higher pre-poll voting in regional seats. In raw numbers, Hinkler (which covers Hervey Bay and Bundaberg in Queensland) and Indi in northern Victoria have both recorded almost 29,000 pre-poll votes. Presumably many of these voters are enrolled in other electorates and are in the area for holidays. The seat of Fairfax, covering parts of the Sunshine Coast, is second on 22,000 followed by Melbourne.
South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania dominate the bottom of the rankings, with most of the 20 seats with the least pre-poll votes in the three smaller states.
Check out the map below to see how much pre-polling is taking place in your seat. Click on your seat to see statistics about both pre-polling and postal voting.
