But when the Australian Electoral Commission's remote voting team on Thursday travelled to Binjari — she cast her vote anyway.
"They told us if we don't vote we get a fine — I didn't want to, it's hard to vote for someone that's not supporting us," she said.
Over the past couple of weeks, the AEC has been attempting to pull off one of the country's biggest logistical events in the vast outback electorate of Lingiari.
It is a seat with a landmass double the size of Texas, taking in roughly 99 per cent of the Northern Territory and all the jurisdiction's remote Indigenous communities.
In boats, planes, helicopters and 4WDs, remote polling teams have trekked thousands of kilometres to reach voters like Ms Raymond, living in a part of the country with the lowest voter turnout.
Voter participation in remote Indigenous communities is in decline, and has been lower than the national average since First Nations people were granted the right to vote in 1962 — but this year, they've faced even more challenges.
Some remote communities have had just a couple of hours to cast their ballot, while most urbanites have had access to pre-polling centres for weeks.
Certified interpreters have been scarce and some smaller homelands have missed their chance to vote altogether.
Northern Land Council Chair Samuel Bush-Blanasi — who recently accused the AEC of "failing" Aboriginal voters by not engaging more people in the bush ahead of the election — said the AEC should be spending more time in remote communities.
The 2021 Senior Australian of the Year, Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann, said she was disappointed in the "hiccups and confusion" that played out across the Territory, hindering Aboriginal votes.
She said her community in Daly Rivers had no access to interpreters when the remote polling team set up booths, and pointed to the government's failure to close the gap on issues like health and education as reasons why Aboriginal voters felt disengaged.
"The majority of people were confused and wanted someone to sit with them to explain the system," she said.
Stranded polling teams
Residents living in two homelands on the outskirts of Gapuwiyak were left with no other option than to drive hundreds of kilometers to a voting centre, after an AEC team travelling in a helicopter was stranded at a remote outstation last week.
"They didn’t have sufficient fuel … so the helicopter pilot returned to Gove, left the AEC staff on the ground and it must have got too late in the day and the weather was bad, so the helicopter wasn’t able to get back in," Lynne Walker, a former senior Labor politician, said.
"They had a little bit of food between them … and were provided with some sheets and sleeping space on the verandah, but apparently it was a pretty uncomfortable night.
"So of course it wasn't going to be possible for that team to get to Raymangirr and Gurrumuru the next morning.
“There was no plan to send an alternative team.”
Ms Walker said residents of the homelands received no communication from the AEC, and were left feeling "disappointed and disenfranchised".
“Yindi djama [a phrase commonly used by Yolngu people] means big job and that’s certainly been the case for everyone on the ground … but for the years that I've worked on Federal and Territory campaigns around Northeast Arnhem, it's probably been one of the most disrupted remote area polling schedules that I've seen."
Lack of interpreters could lead to informal votes
Rob Roy, who lives in Kalkaringi, a community 480km south-west of Katherine where the main spoken language is Gurindji Kriol, said while lots of people turned up to vote, once they had their pencil in hand, the process became a minefield.
He said there was no credited translator there to help people navigate the ballot.
“Most old people take their grandkids to help them,” he said.
Dr Greg Dickson, a linguist and interpreter in Ngukurr, said he was roped in to provide in-language assistance at the last minute when the remote voting team visited the community of around 1000 people.
This year, the AEC has relied on recruiting local assistance where it can, instead of engaging the Aboriginal Interpreter Service's certified interpreters, who are trained to be impartial.
In the seat of Lingiari, where around 40 per cent of voters are Aboriginal who often speak multiple languages, Dr Dickson said the void of interpreters could have resulted in scores of informal votes.
"I was flat out pretty much all day," he said.
"Almost everybody here in Ngukurr speaks Kriol as a first language … federal voting only happens once every three, four years … it's a weird thing that requires literacy, requires understanding of the electoral system, requires a bit of basic numeracy.
"It's something that people need assistance with.”
Challenges 'absolutely unprecedented'
The Australian Electoral Commission's NT manager Geoff Bloom said that with voting teams travelling to 193 locations, "finding interpreters across that whole spectrum was very challenging".
He conceded it was "not a great outcome" that an interpreter was not present at Ngukurr.
"The Remote Area Mobile Polling challenges that we've had in this election are absolutely unprecedented," he said.
He said COVID presented immense challenges to staffing and listed the lack of charter flights as a big driver hindering the team's ability to reschedule visits.
In 2017, the federal government slashed funding to the Australian Electoral Commission's Darwin office cutting 16 staff to three, and axing the Indigenous Electoral Participation Program, which was only reinstated last year.
A spokesman for the AEC refuted claims the cuts have been detrimental to polling in the NT, but Charles Darwin University researcher, Michael Hartwig said it had created apathy in communities.
"Many communities don't see a representative or an AEC employee from one election to the next," he said.
He said a quick visit to a community days before the election just would not cut it to increase voter participation, and that instead it would take "days in there winning the confidence of the people, convincing them that voting is important".
