Federal election 2022: Mallee voters are twice as likely to cast informal votes

Mallee voters are more likely to draw rude pictures or write profanities rather than numbering candidates and having their say.

Voters in the rural seat of Mallee are among the most likely to give democracy a big fat middle finger, using their ballot to draw rude pictures or write profanities rather than numbering candidates and having their say.

These ballots, along with ballots unintentionally filled out incorrectly, are classed as “informal” by the Australian Electoral Commission — and Mallee voters are twice as likely to cast one as the average Australian.

In this seat — which is in the state’s north west — about one in 10 ballots at the 2019 federal election (11.2 per cent) was deliberately or inadvertently thrown away, compared to about one in 20 ballots for the nation broadly.

A lack of interest among Mallee voters may also stem from the fact the National Party has won the seat in every election since 1983.

Mildura’s Colleen Lewis said people were “over it”.

“It is always the same people getting in and nothing ever changes up here so I think people are just over it,” she said.

“People don’t really think their vote matters.”

Colleen Lewis at a polling booth in Mildura.

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 almost half a million informal votes in 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.

Other Victorian divisions with high rates of informal voting include Calwell, in Melbourne’s outer northwest fringe (9.2 per cent) and Nicholls in northern Victoria (7.5 per cent).

So, why does it 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).