Matthew Abraham: They’re already struggling to find enough polling booth sites and volunteers

Even if the Premier got off his high horse to recall parliament, there won’t be a magic fix for 20,000 voters effectively under house arrest, writes Matthew Abraham.

What if they held an election and nobody came? Is it still an election? This is a twist on the timeless puzzle: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”.

They call this a “philosophical thought experiment”. I call it a headache, just like the big headache in store for South Australians simply wanting to elect our next government.

The March 19 election is approaching faster than Omicron cases on a flight from London. It will be our first, and please God our last, state election held during the Covid-19 pandemic.

We don’t have much time to solve our riddle. Is an election really an election if not everyone who is eligible to vote, can vote? Is it a free and fair election?

The Marshall government is scrambling to find an acceptable fix after it emerged SA Health’s onerous Covid isolation regime might deny more than 20,000 South Australians a vote. Fellow columnist David Penberthy revealed in The Australian on Wednesday that SA’s Electoral Commissioner Mick Sherry had delivered the bad news in a private briefing to MPs.

Thousands of South Australians with Covid are banged up at home until they get the magic SA Health all-clear, as are thousands of “close contacts”.

Presser

Commissioner Sherry told MPs that if the current figure of 30,000 people in isolation was repeated in the days before the election, after the cut-off for postal vote applications, roughly 20,000 of them would be eligible voters banned from leaving home to vote.

Can you imagine the shock and awe when Commissioner Sherry rolled this hand grenade down the rabbit burrow? Little wonder the “private briefing” didn’t stay private. It came as a shock just to learn we had so many citizens effectively under house arrest.

With the exception of Labor’s 2006 Rannslide, most elections in SA are now won or lost on handfuls of votes. The 47 House of Assembly seats each has around 27,000 enrolled voters, so 30,000 is one whole seat, plus spare change. In the upper house, politicians can be elected to a cushy eight-year term with a few hundred votes.

For some weird reason, Australians love voting early. To qualify for a postal vote, you need a “legitimate reason”, such as being more than 8km from a polling booth, illness, religious beliefs or work commitments. In the real world, many get postal votes with a “dog ate my homework” excuse. It’s easy to download the forms from the Electoral Commission SA website. And what’s a little fib among friends?

Mr Sherry warns the problem is even more complicated because nobody really knows how many people will suddenly find themselves banged up in isolation on election eve, after the postal vote cut-off.

The word is SA Health may allow close contacts out of the house to vote on polling day in a drive-through set up.

How are they going to handle these votes? With barbecue tongs? Maybe they can get a nose swab at the same time.

It’s not like this headache has snuck up on the government. Legislation allowing telephone voting is sitting in the empty House of Assembly. It can’t be that hard to call a special sitting to rush it through. Even if Premier Steven Marshall hopped off his high horse and agreed to recall parliament, telephone voting isn’t a magic fix.

Telephone voters need a special code and their vote must be verified by a witness and an electoral commission staffer sitting on the other end of the dog and bone. Even if it got the go ahead, it’s questionable whether the system could be geared up to handle thousands of phone votes before election day. They’re already struggling to find enough polling booth locations, and volunteers to staff them.

Maybe it suits the government if Covid-carrying voters don’t vote. If you’re in iso, you’re hardly likely to be in a forgiving mood toward the mob that put you there.

If it all seems too hard – and it’s starting to look that way – it’s entirely possible thousands of perfectly healthy voters may risk the $135 fine and choose to stay home, just as thousands of us choose not to go to pubs and cafes, even though we can.

The good news is if you do turn up to vote at a booth, you’ll have a clean pencil. Commissioner Mick Sherry has purchased one million wooden pencils from IKEA for use on March 19. That’s the sound of a million pencils falling on deaf ears.