Think this election’s ageing voter problem was bad? It’s only going to get worse

It was the brilliant American journalist Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame) who supposedly came up with the term that “democracy dies in darkness”.

Though today the phrase adorns The Washington Post, of which Woodward is an associate editor, the way the Jeff Bezos-owned publication has behaved in recent months suggest the proprietor has a slippery grasp of what constitutes as democracy and darkness.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

For his part, Woodward’s primary fear was what happens, and what is missed, when we don’t shine a light on the mighty and powerful who treat democracy as a speed bump on the way to more might and power. But what if the more mundane elements of democracy were a little shaky?

This has been in my mind since I started work on the story that graced our front pages earlier this week – the extraordinary and literally unbelievable surge in informal votes collated by the Australian Electoral Commission’s “special hospital teams”, staffers deployed by the Commission to collect ballots across our hospitals, aged care centres, residential mental health facilities and homes for the disabled.

We are talking astounding numbers. According to the AEC, the rate of informal votes collected by its teams has almost tripled since the 2022 election.

The single special hospital team in the northern Sydney seat of Berowra had an informal vote of almost 70 per cent. In Lyons, which traces the northern regional parts of Tasmania, the informal vote rate in one of the teams was 54 per cent.

In other words, these two teams collected more informal than formal votes. The informal rate across both divisions was less than 7 per cent, yet somehow in these two cases the informal rate was at least seven times larger.

There’s very little similar about the voter profile of Lyons and Berowra, so it can’t be the demographics (which is usually associated with high informal levels). And, if the electoral commission’s hospital teams are being given the same instructions around the country, how do you manage a situation where in New England (Barnaby Joyce’s seat in NSW’s northern inland), where the informal rate among each of its hospitals and aged care facilities fell?

New England, in which the informal rate among its hospital teams was just 4.7 per cent, abuts six other electorates. Every one of them recorded large increases in informal rates among their hospital teams (some more than 30 per cent) as well.

The informal rates for these teams were 13.9 per cent in Parkes, 14 per cent in Hunter, 16.7 per cent in Calare, 17.6 per cent in Cowper, 18.7 per cent in Page and 21.3 per cent in Lyne.

In those six seats, we’re talking almost 900 votes that were declared informal when normally we’d be talking less than 200. Clearly, something has gone wrong.

There’s been a variety of reasons offered, including the aforementioned demographics, confusion with the recent NSW state election (which has a slightly different preferential voting system) and the increasing number of people with health issues in our aged care facilities.

But each one of these fails as an explanation. The jump affected widely different communities (from the well-heeled of Melbourne’s Goldstein to the battlers of Perth’s Burt).

While the NSW election could be an issue, that doesn’t account for the big increases in informal votes outside of the state. In Hindmarsh, for example, which covers Adelaide’s western suburbs and is represented by Health Minister Mark Butler, three hospital teams had informal rates of more than 20 per cent. Unless the residents of Alberton and Henley Beach have a deep and abiding interest in NSW state politics, that reason doesn’t hold water.

And while there has been a lift in the number of people in aged care facilities (dementia became the second-largest cause of death of Australians last year for the first time), the increase hasn’t been large enough to account for informal rates lifting by 10 or 20 or 30 per cent.

There’s also huge differences between informal rates between the House and Senate. In Berowra, for instance, the House informal rate approached 70 per cent. Yet, it didn’t get above 6.5 per cent for Senate ballots.

A scrutineer from a regional centre in Victoria contacted me about the issues she has seen at aged care centres and hospitals in her electorate. This includes an aged care administrator binning election information from a particular party, AEC staff not having how-to-vote cards on hand to offer to prospective voters, and a case where an electoral official wandered off to collect completed ballots from voters in their rooms by himself.

In some cases, she said, there seemed to be a lackadaisical attitude held by staff of institutions and electoral staff towards the voting intentions of elderly or sick people, she told me.

“They may be frail, but these people are still switched on. They want to have a say, but they’re not being helped.”

This is not a problem that is going to disappear. The cold hard truth is that it’s only going to increase as more people, particularly with our ageing population, find themselves in aged care facilities.

They have just as much right as anyone to have a say in how this country is governed. In a country where it’s compulsory to vote, we should be going out of our way to make it easy to cast a valid ballot.

We’ve already had sore losers complain about preferential voting because they didn’t get the result they wanted. But what’s infinitely worse is a breakdown in our voting system affecting some of the most vulnerable people in the community. That’s when democracy starts to dim.

Shane Wright is a senior economics correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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