Federal Election 2022: Why Australians must stop casting joke votes and blank ballots

Many Aussies may cast an informal vote — but this has serious consequences for the election result. See the six seats where the winner needs more than blank and defaced ballot papers.

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.

There were 835,223 of them in the 2019 polling, with the highest rate recorded in the western Sydney seat of Blaxland, where about one in eight ballots (13.3 per cent) were ineligible, compared to about one in 20 ballots (5.5 per cent) nationally.

Other divisions where the rate was at least double the average included the NSW electorates of Fowler, (13.1 per cent), Watson (12.6 per cent), McMahon (12.1 per cent), Werriwal (11.6 per cent), Lindsay (11.1 per cent), and the Victorian electorate of Mallee (11.2 per cent).

Meanwhile, Queensland’s worst offender was Hinkler (7.8 per cent), Tasmania’s was Braddon (7.1 per cent), Western Australia’s was Pearce (7 per cent) and SA’s was Grey (6.9 per cent).

The NT and ACT both performed better than average in all seats.

Griffith University’s Dr Paul Williams said some voters just went through the motions to avoid a fine.

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 federal election revealed as many as two in five informal 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 1 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).