Rates of early voting have been increasing for a long time, but reached a record high level of 2022, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. I most recently summarised these statistics at a federal level in this blog post.
For this blog post I’m going to summarise the statistics on how many people are voting early as of the end of the short 3-day week between the Easter and Anzac Day long weekends. The short answer: early voting seems to be holding steady at the record high levels seen in 2022.
The early vote crossed over and made up a majority of votes cast for the first time in 2022. Generally postal voting had been fairly steady while pre-poll voting was continuing to grow, but postal voting also experienced a big surge in 2022, growing from 8.5% of the total to 14.6%.
Similar trends have been evident at state elections. The vote categories vary between states, so it's easiest to measure the share of voters who cast a normal election day vote.
The examples from Tasmania and Queensland suggest that the collapse of election day voting has mostly slowed down, but it has not reversed, and indeed has slightly increased for those states to have held a second post-COVID election. Unfortunately the WAEC has made it harder to distinguish election day votes from pre-poll votes as of 2025, but I will try to make an estimate after the federal election.
So what about the federal election?
The first thing to note is that this period has been significantly disturbed by three public holidays being held during the key campaigning period, two of which are on days when pre-poll voting would have been expected. It also means that this week has been a peak time for people to take off work, as three days of leave can give you ten days off. This makes it a bit hard to compare like-for-like with 2022, when the election was held about three weeks later.
If we look first at pre-poll voting, it's worth noting that up until 2019 there was three weeks of pre-poll, but it has been two weeks since 2022.
The rate of pre-poll voting always starts slow and speeds up, but this year we've had a running start. Over 500,000 people voted on Tuesday, and this reached almost 650,000 people on Thursday. Overall 1.78 million people voted this week. There have only been four other days of pre-poll to ever register more votes than yesterday: the last three days in 2022, and the Friday before the 2019 election.
But the voting period has been compressed, and it is possible this simply reflects people who would otherwise have chosen to vote today or on Monday being squeezed into three days. Once you factor in the zero number of votes to be cast today, the total cast by the end of the Friday eight days out from the election will be slightly higher than 2022 (by about 140,000 votes) and slightly lower than 2019 (by about 143,000 votes).
Overall I think this suggests that pre-poll voting will remain at the high levels we saw in 2022, and could end up a bit higher, but it would be a mistake to assume that the numbers being significantly higher day-by-day this week means that the numbers will be much bigger than in 2022.
The other major source of early voting is postal voting.
For postal voting we get two statistics - the number of people who request a postal vote (PVA) and the number who return the postal vote. The number of returned postal votes won't be final until two weeks after the election, but some have started to come in. PVAs will close on Apriil 30, and they have already slowed to a trickle. Last-minute applications may not turn around quickly enough for the vote to be counted.
It's also worth noting that some PVAs may never be returned. It is perfectly legal to request a postal vote and then decide to use some other method of voting.
The number of PVAs is very similar to 2022. It was a bit ahead of 2022, but fell behind at the start of this week.
The number of actual votes is a long way behind 2022. I assume this at least partly due to the long weekends, and we will see the rate catch up this week, but it's also possible that more postal vote applicants have decided to use a different voting method.
Overall I think we are on track for a similar outcome to 2022, when a slight majority of the country voted early. But I'll do another update next week.
Ben I think that pre-poll will increase on 2022 based on observations & figures so far. Normally tomorrow would be a biggy but with people away probably less so. The big day is set to be Monday.Departing from previous history it is not an RDO so trades people will be back.