With two days of pre-poll voting to come, the statistics so far suggest that a clear majority of voters will cast their ballot before election day.
The VEC is publishing daily updates on the number of people voting at pre-poll, applying for postal votes and returning postal votes. Antony Green has been maintaining an excellent blog post running through the daily figures, with charts comparing the figures to their 2018 equivalents, so I won’t duplicate that work.
Applications for postal votes closed overnight with 586,208 total, up from about 385,000 in 2018. By my estimate that’s an increase from 9.3% of enrolment to 13.3% of enrolment, or a 43% increase.
There have been 1.37 million pre-poll votes cast so far, or 31.2% of enrolment, compared to 970,000 at this point in 2018 (23.4% of enrolment). Almost 420,000 votes were cast in the last two days of pre-poll in 2018, for a total of 1.39 million. Comparing like with like, that’s a 33.3% increase so far.
It’s also worth noting that, while there has been a larger number of postal vote applications, they seem to be returning more slowly. Antony reported earlier this week that the proportion of postal votes returned so far has halved, and it is even lower as a percentage of enrolled voters. So it is possible there has been some change in postal voting behaviour with more people requesting an application but eventually voting using another method – or they may just come in later.
We can use these increases to project how many votes will be cast in each of these categories, as a proportion of enrolment. Note we don’t know how many people will vote, so we can’t calculate it as a proportion of votes cast, so these numbers include the 9.8% of enrolled people who did not vote.
| Vote category | 2018 share | 2022 projection |
| Ordinary votes | 43.5% | |
| Pre-poll votes | 33.1% | 44.2% |
| Postal votes | 6.8% | 9.7% |
| Absent votes | 6.0% | |
| Other votes | 0.6% | |
| Did not vote | 9.8% |
This projection suggests that those voting early won’t just make up a majority of votes, but a clear majority of enrolled voters.
Indeed if turnout remains steady on 90%, pre-poll votes will make up almost half of all votes without including postal votes. And if these numbers prove to be accurate, this leaves just 36% of enrolment left to vote on election day, down from 49.5% in 2018.
So if a Bidenesque computer turns up it’s all too late?
One questions the merit of any point in time voting system.
I don’t know what “Bidenesque computer” means.
There has always been a point where it’s ‘too late’ to influence voters because they’ve already cast their vote. That’s just been moved forward slightly.
When are these votes counted
Harry, I think for the pre-poll votes most will be counted on election night although the high volume means that those votes are probably tallied and verified after 10pm. For absent and postal votes, those may be counted in the days after the election and hence why in close contests those votes become critical and can change the outcome if a seat has a sub 1% margin.
J knight, for Australia it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference in relation to turnout if all voting was required to be done in one day since we use weekends. But many people now work on weekends, and some may be busy with other duties or may even be travelling interstate/overseas on polling day. Hence having adequate pre-poll or other options is useful.
Which party does this benefit?
Traditionally, pre-poll and postal votes have skewed liberal while same-day votes have skewed Labor
Probably doesn’t benefit anyone really. In the past, the prepolls have skewed conservative, partly because of pensioners etc voting mid-week. Then certain seats like Macnamara federally, where the early/postal votes skew heavily to the Libs because of the large bloc of Orthodox Jewish voters who can’t vote on Saturday when they’re keeping Shabbat.
But as the number of prepolls continues to increase, it evens out a bit – people aren’t going to change their vote just based on which day they’re there.
I’m looking forward to voting on the day at my grandson’s primary school; I’ve driven past, but never seen inside!
Also a good chance to donate by spending money at their stall 🙂
Our local school’s sausage sizzle has been cancelled… Not enough volunteers as everyone has already voted, plus people don’t want to risk standing around all day if the cookers start showing up.
Don’t fancy raw sausage. All in favour of cooker
I think more people voting early means a hung parliament is more likely than not, and a worse than expected outcome for Labor due to people voting early may signal people want Andrews out and they were sick of waiting, so they voted early. Labor should easily win the “On the day” vote, but substantially lose the early.
The question is will it be enough, and I still expect Labor to win more seats than the coalition. Probably still 10-15 more.
43-44 seats would be a hung parliament, but there is no other alternative government on those numbers. Labor would form a minority and if Andrews doesn’t want to work with the crossbench. He will be replaced as Labor leader.
Andrews will work with the crossbench – see the last four years of the LegCo for an example of how it would happen. He may play the indies and Greens off against each other though.
Expat
The current upper house cross bench is very much Daniel Andrews creation through the retention of Group Voting. By his keeping GVT, he keeps them alive and they know it. Should there be a hung parliament, He may have a more recalcitrant group – though at best he may rely on the Greens to survive. On the other hand, he may dangle ministries before a sympathetic independent depending how far off he is.
Redistributed, if any of the ‘teals’ win then some may be willing to back Labor. Ali Cupper (an ex-Labor candidate) may also be open to supporting her former party if she wins re-election in Mildura.
Yoh An – my thoughts precisely. My feeling is that the Teal candidatures in Caulfield and Kew are all a bit ‘cute’ … !!
Sorry – meant Hawthorn not Kew
The growth of non-ordinary votes, combined with the growth in non-traditional contests (not ALP vs LNP), means that it may take longer to declare or even predict seat winners in the future. Think back to Macnamara at the federal election of 2022.
You can not compare th3 pre-poll to previous elections, You can only make an overall comparison to the electorate summary.
Northern Metro – Upperhouse, Looking at the registered tickets I can not see the Victorian Socialists being a contender for the 8th seat in Northern Victoria. At best they will come in 8th lace. ALP 2 (3) LN 1(2) Grn 1, Maybe Reason or DLP.
Quota 16.7% Greens will not have a surplus. ALP Surolus likely to be in the wasted quota basket
VicSoc have been the most obnoxious. Where is their funding coming from. In 29018 Steve Jolly delivered votes from Richmond. I expect there vote to decline.
IN the Federal Election the Greens increase their vote by 1% the Animal Justice arty down 1 oercent.
The Polls are closed. AT the Drill Hall polling booth, near Queen Vic Market, most of those in the queue were absentee voters. The Socialist Party Were handing out HTV cards for Melbourne which most of those voting were not able to use. Watching their financial returns might be interesting IN 2018 They managed to get 0.5% statewide. I can not see them climbing the tree on fold up. less than. The Greens wll not have a surplus and will need to suck votes from their feeder parties , 2 ALP 1 Green 1 LNP the last seat should go either ALP/ or DLP. Eraly figurars will flow in after 7:30,Mel
Women Candidates will have a 3 to 5% margin advantage, For this reason and the order of the ballot paper I give the ALP an overall advantage in Albert Park. Prahran. will be the Greens weakest intercity held seat. They need to secure the top two places to hold on. Melbourne sadly will be a challenge Labor should poll top or second., The Liberal Preferences being the decider. The Greens have poll position being just below the Liberal Party on top pf the ballot paper. We shall see.
One thing i will say about early voting is that whilst it’s necessary, the large increase and growing trend of early and postal voting by those that would be able to vote on election day is annoying for someone like me who likes to look at certain booths in certain areas and how they previously voted in federal and state elections. It can be annoying as it means the booth results don’t actually represent the voting patterns of the area. For example in Nepean The Mccrae booth in 2014 had 733 votes and voted 65% Lib TPP whereas in 2022 it had 192 votes at 54% Labor TPP with a 4% swing to Labor on TPP.
Comments are closed.