More than 50,000 ACT residents have voted in the federal election so far, with less than a week of campaigning to go.
The 11,647 ACT postal voters, plus the 39,138 who voted during week one of pre-polling, are among the more than 3 million Australians to have had their say early.
Canberra rushed to vote when pre-polls opened on Monday, with more than 6400 voting on the first day. While enthusiasm waned slightly on Tuesday (6294) and Wednesday (5773), it picked up at week's end.
More than 8140 Canberrans voted on Saturday, with Old Parliament House seeing 1155 in the door.
Eden-Monaro's Natalie Clark was among them.
"I specifically picked this place for what it represents in Australian politics and history, and just for the experience to vote inside there," she said.
Eden-Monaro was the electorate with the fourth-highest proportion of pre-poll voting when locations closed for the week, with 19 per cent of the 116,468 enrolled to vote having done so.
Gilmore, which runs from Moruya down south to Kiama in the north, had the largest number of pre-poll voters at close of business Saturday, with 20 per cent of the 127,780 enrolled voters having done so.
Early voting has increased at each state and territory election throughout the pandemic, the Australian Electoral Commission reports, and has been on the rise since the 2019 election.
While COVID has likely contributed, Frank Bongiorno, a professor of history at the Australian National University, said the trend was taking off well before the pandemic.
"I imagine one driver is simply that weekends aren't quite what they were a few decades ago," Professor Bongiorno said.
He said with more businesses now open on Saturdays, many people are required to work, meaning voting early was just easier.
Professor Bongiorno said people were more mobile now too, travelling out of town on weekends.
"Once it's made easily available, of course, it will simply take on its own momentum as yet another domain in which people exercise choice," he said.
Evan Ekin-Smyth, the Australian Electoral Commission's digital engagement director, said the first five days of pre-polling this election was almost triple the first five days of 2019.
Mr Ekin-Smyth said postal voting had also dramatically increased this election, from 1.5 million total votes in 2019, to more than 2.5 million applications so far.
Of the 15 per cent of enrolled Australians who've applied to date, 6 per cent of votes were in by Sunday, ahead of the June 3 deadline.
With the postal vote count beginning on May 22, the record number of postal votes could impact the time it takes for a winner to be announced.
Mr Ekin-Smyth said any delay would depend not just on the amount of postal votes, but where those voters were enrolled and how close the margins were.
"If we've got 15 divisions that can't be decided, because there's too many postal votes, or if the margin in the House of Reps between the majors is less than 15 divisions, nobody's gonna know who's going to form government," he said.
"If the margin in the House of Reps is only one seat, and we've got two seats that we can't decide because of postal votes, well that's an issue as well."
Mr Ekin-Smyth said the matter of whether it might be time for Australia to ditch the concept of election day in favour of an "election month" was for Parliament to decide.
"We have more than 7000 polling places across the nation on election day, [with] 105,000 staff across those polling places, and the whole electoral system is resourced around and legislated around a single day," he said.
As the Australian Electoral Commission's media and engagement director, Mr Ekin-Smyth is headed up a team which has come into favour in 2022, particularly among Twitter users.
Since the start of the year, the @AusElectoralCom Twitter follower count has risen from 19,100 to 48,100 users, likely a response to its unique engagement with the public, using expertly delivered humour to debunk misinformation online.
Mr Ekin-Smyth said using a social media voice that is very different to what users would normally expect from a government department had generated some predictable blowback.
"Our approach and our ability to take this approach is really a reflection of the fact that we are truly an independent agency," he said.
"The Electoral Commission is incredibly engaged in how we're communicating this election."
