Pre-poll voting should be changing the way political campaigns are run

A voter arrives at a pre-polling centre in Melbourne on May 17 in the seat of Kooyong.

Rates of pre-poll voting, either in-person or by postal votes are at all-time highs in this election.

For years the rate of postal voting ran at around eight per cent of total votes cast. At this election it looks like being somewhere just shy of 20 per cent.

Applications for postal voting close at 6.00pm on Wednesday 18 May. As of Monday 16 May, the rate of postal votes as a percentage of voters in each electorate is running on average at around 16 per cent. Some of those postal vote applications won’t be cast. People may decide to vote in person pre-poll or on the day. Regardless, there is still a huge difference compared to the previous election.

It means the result of the election almost certainly won’t be known on Saturday night. Postal votes are not counted on election night.

If we look at the seats in play, some have postal vote applications running at more than 20 per cent (Ryan and Brisbane in Queensland, Chisholm in Victoria). 16 per cent of voters in the crucial seat of Reid in western Sydney have applied for postal votes. In Bass in Tasmania, it’s 17 per cent. In Boothby in South Australia, it’s 18 per cent.

Postal votes tend to favour the major parties who have the resources to support postal votes. The LNP in Queensland are known to be very good at it. We might remember that on midnight on election day 2016, Labor was in front in a number of Queensland seats deemed too close to call but when the postals were counted, the LNP went on to win these seats by relatively large margins due to a high rate of postal votes going their way.

Obviously, pre-poll in person votes are counted on the night. But what we are seeing in this election is a big increase in those who want to vote early.

The major parties’ involvement in postal voting can be a bit murky. At this election both Labor and the Coalition have set up websites where people who wish to vote by post can apply directly to them. That’s to say, applicants will give them important data about themselves; name, address, date of birth, telephone number and email before directing people to the AEC. website Both parties have helpful little reminders, online prompts and possibly SMS texts just in case you forget to pop your ballot back to the AEC in the prepaid envelope.

In snail mail form, the majors are set up to pass on your application to vote postal with the AEC but include forms for their own keeping that include too many personal details than it is wise to give almost anyone these days.

Either way, it’s a massive data harvesting exercise. Those who go onto the major party databases can expect to receive gumpf of every possible partisan description, including requests for donations, until the end of days. It’s not illegal but it probably should be. But guess who makes the laws voters and the AEC have to live by? That’s right. The major parties.

It does give the major parties a distinct advantage over the minors and independents, and this will lead to a form of bias when the postals are counted. So, if we see neck and neck battles between a Liberal candidate and an independent candidate or let’s say, Labor and the Greens in an inner-city seat like Brisbane, you can feel pretty confident that the result will skew towards the major party once the envelopes on postal votes are ripped open.

At this point and with the clock running down, it is worth reminding any voter wishing to vote postal that all they have to do is apply directly to the AEC. Not only is it smoother and less time consuming, the AEC will never hit them up for a sneaky donation. Go to the AEC website. It is simplicity itself.

Obviously, pre-poll in person votes are counted on the night. But what we are seeing in this election is a big increase in those who want to vote early. As of last Friday, almost ten per cent of voters had scrawled away with the nub of a pencil at a pre-poll booth. This has and will continue to intensify up to polling day.

As of Monday 15 May, almost 25 per cent of voters have pre-poll in person voted in the hotly contested seat of Gilmore on the south coast of New South Wales. The figures of those who have already voted tend to be larger in regional seats.

Independent candidate for Goldstein Zoe Daniel (L) speaks to voters at a pre-polling centre in Hampton.

People don’t like queues. I get it. We might bemoan the death of the democracy sausage and sympathise with the cake stall volunteers flogging their wares usually for the benefit of the local primary school but the process of voting should be made as easy as possible for voters.

Overall though, it means that with postal votes and pre-poll in person voting combined it is likely less than half of the votes cast in this election will be cast on polling day. Thus any profound shifts in voting behaviour are less likely to have a major impact.

It does make me wonder why the Liberal Party held their campaign launch six days out from the date of the election. Labor launched their campaign a fortnight earlier. These events are generally rah-rah the flag exercises designed to boost the spirits of the faithful and generally speaking are unlikely to sway swinging voters one way or another. But there is going to be a diminished influence on voters where major policy announcements are made. As Scott Morrison announced the policy of allowing first home buyers to use some of their super to enter the housing market, he did so with 23.4 per cent of votes already cast in the traditional bellwether of Eden-Monaro and 19.6 per cent already tucked into the ballot boxes in the crucial Queensland Coalition-held marginal of Longman.

Let’s not even get into the deep and abiding mystery of why the major parties continue to call these events launches when they’ve been on the hustings for weeks.

We can attribute some of the sharp rise in pre-poll voting to the receding pandemic and perhaps driven by that, it is becoming behavioural and in elections to come is likely to become the norm. It won’t change the integrity of our elections although some of our electoral laws may need a bit of tweaking.

It should change the way political parties approach campaigns but so far as I can tell, both the majors and the minors remain stuck in a style of campaigning that leads to their messages being ignored by an increasingly larger group of Australians.