Early voting for the disengaged

I note that one of the more significant issues to come out of the recent Victorian State election in Australia (apart from the landslide Labor win and its consequences at the Federal level) has been the number of people who did not wait for polling day to cast their votes.

Some 1.4 million voters had performed their constitutional duty before the actual election date on November 24 — out of 4.2 million who were enrolled.  This continues a trend in other recent State elections and in the last Federal poll in 2016.

Because voting is compulsory in Australia, with fines for those who fail to vote without a very good reason, successive Governments have found ways of making it easier to cast ballots, mainly through the establishment of numerous pre-poll stations operating for up to a month before the actual election.

The system was set up in 1984 for those who would be physically unable to reach a polling station on election day, but with no way of checking it became obvious that vast numbers were using this as an excuse and more recently restrictions have been quietly dropped.  

This has led to the various parties wondering how they should run their campaigns in the future — what is the point of leaving juicy, vote-catching policies to the last week when half the electorate will have already made its decision.

Campaign ‘launches’, often left to the week before polling day in the hope of getting a late ‘bounce’ are being re-thought. One researcher has attacked the whole concept of pre-poll voting, saying that it breaks with a key tenant of democracy — that everyone should vote at the same time “as this confers equality on the contest”.

My view is that all this is a fuss about nothing, because in more than a half century of reporting and studying elections I have found that up to 60 per cent of any electorate rarely, if ever, change their votes.

When asked their views, these rusted on supporters of whichever party usually resort to ancient and questionable slogans: “Labor is the party for the working man”; “business always does better under the Liberals”; Nationals have the farmers’ interests at heart”.

Almost certainly it is these voters who are making increasing use of the pre-poll system. Their minds have been made up, not just for the current campaign, but for all campaigns in which they have ever taken part.

To them, the issues are irrelevant and they see no reason to waste their Saturday leisure time waiting in line to cast their vote.

They form the solid platform from which their parties launch their arguments to capture a majority of the remaining 40 per cent.    

In the usually stable Western democracies it is this 40 per cent of swing voters that determine who governs, and it is this 40 per cent who are most likely to follow the issues and the policies, saving their vote until late, perhaps even until polling day itself.

What is happening in Australia is a simple evolution of the way voters engage, or choose not to engage, with the democratic system. There will be those who find it deplorable, yet there is little any party, or Government can do about it.