Federal Election 2022: What is donkey voting and how will it decide Boothby and Sturt
Voters in SA’s hotly contested seats are among the nations’ most likely to give democracy a big fat middle finger and use their ballot to draw male genitalia.
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If voters in South Australia’s most marginal seat had refrained from drawing rude pictures and numbered their ballots correctly, they may have flipped the outcome of the last federal election.
In 2019 the number of informal, or donkey votes cast in Boothby outnumbered the margin between eventual winner and the runner up.
The difference in two-party preferred voted between incumbent Nicolle Flint and challenger Nadia Clancy was just 3047 votes, while 5453 cast votes were deemed ineligible to be counted.
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Boothby was among 22 divisions across the country in which informal votes could have changed the fortunes of the winning party candidate.
The seat faces a renewed battle in 2022 but recent polling conducted by The Messenger indicated the 4.7 per cent of voters who filled out an informal vote could grow on May 21.
Of voters surveyed 16 per cent said neither Scott Morrison or Anthony Albanese was capable of running the country.
Two male voters, who were polled but did not want to be named, said they would not vote instead opting to “cop the fine”.
“I’m completely disillusioned with it all. There is no dignity in either of them (Mr Morrison or Mr Albanese),”one said.
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Sturt’s informal ballots would not have proven to be as influential but a higher percentage of voters either deliberately or accidentally made errors on their voting paper.
Liberal MP James Stevens soared to victory over Cressida O’Hanlon by more than 15,000 votes, but the 6221 informal votes could have at least given him a bit of a fright.
With Sturt forecast to be sitting on a knife’s edge this year, those voters could hold the key to whether the seat held by the Libs for 64 of the last 67 years.
A pre-polling exit survey conducted by The Messenger in Sturt showed most voters still favoured sitting MP Mr Stevens, but Labor challenger Sonja Baram was likely to increase her party’s first choice vote from 29.86 per cent.
In the regional electorate of Grey, sitting Liberal member Rowan Ramsey strode in with a margin of 27,561 votes but 7684 votes were left in purgatory in 2019.
There’s every likelihood they could play a huge part in the federal election result, but thousands of voters in SA’s most tenuous seats hold more power than they know.
Informal votes can change the election
At every election, about a quarter of a million Australians give democracy a big fat middle finger, intentionally casting a blank or defaced ballot rather than numbering candidates and having their say.
These ballots, along with those unintentionally filled out incorrectly, are classed as “informal” by the Australian Electoral Commission – and there were 835,223 of them in 2019.
Political commentator and Griffith University Associate Professor Paul Williams said people were more likely to throw away their vote if they believed it would not make a difference anyway.
“(Most) informal ballots are unintentional – people who do not understand how to fill out a ballot for the House of Representatives,” he said.
“(The rest) are deliberate spoilers of ballots.
“They feel there is no choice in Australia, that one vote can’t change anything, and they are just going through the motions so they don’t get a fine.”
An AEC analysis of the 2013 election revealed as many as two in five ballots were intentionally sabotaged.
This included about 21 per cent that were left completely blank and 15 per cent with “scribbles, slogans and other protest vote marks”.
However, the most common reason for a ballot to be deemed ineligible was because the voter put a one against their favourite candidate, but did not number the rest of the boxes (29.5 per cent of all informal votes).
About 11 per cent used ticks and crosses rather than numbers, 14 per cent used non-sequential numbering, and 1 per cent featured handwriting so messy the numbers could not be discerned.
So, why does this matter? Isn’t drawing dicks and middle fingers on a ballot paper all just a bit of fun? Don’t the vote-counters have a giggle when they see I wrote “Myself” and drew a box and ticked that instead?
In 2019, there were 22 electorates where the number of informal votes was higher than the margin between the two most popular parties, meaning if all of those ballots had been correctly cast and for the runner up, there would have been a different result.
Even if only the intentional protest ballots were redirected to the runner up (assuming a third of informal votes fit this category), there are still six electorates that would have had a different result — Eden-Monaro (NSW), Blair (QLD), Macquarie (NSW), Cowan (WA), Chisholm (VIC) and Bass (TAS).
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