The Australian Election Commission is recording a steep rise in postal vote applications so far during the campaign, a trend which could delay results in closely fought seats.
Real-time data shows the AEC has received 1.54m postal vote applications already in the election campaign. It received about 1.5m in the entire 2019 election campaign.
Here is what the postal vote applications per day are looking like for the 2022 election compared to recent past elections. Looks like we're in for pretty huge postal vote numbers if all of these people postal vote. pic.twitter.com/7PLOMaMnXe
— damon muller (@damonism) May 2, 2022
Analysis by Damon Muller, an elections expert with the parliamentary library, suggests the trend cannot entirely be explained by increases to the population since 2019.
The number of postal vote applications as a proportion of enrolled voters is also higher than past elections, though not as significantly.
Here is the same chart as a proportion of enrolments for that election. It's not just that there are more people voting this election, more of them are applying for postal votes (but the difference is not as dramatic). pic.twitter.com/UVMrfmzW73
— damon muller (@damonism) May 2, 2022
The AEC media director, Evan Ekin-Smyth, said comparisons between different elections had been complicated by the way the major parties were collecting and submitting data about postal votes sent in through their various platforms, which was making the analysis of data in real-time difficult.
But he said the AEC’s data did clearly show an increase in postal voting applications during the 2022 campaign, compared with the three prior elections.
Ekin-Smyth said the AEC was initially surprised at the scale of the increase.
“The general gist of it is – it’s more,” he said.
“But if the curve for how many people are applying for postal votes flattens out, like it usually does through an election period, it’s not that much more. Early on, it was tracking double, so early on it was opening our eyes a bit.
“Our eyes have closed a little bit more. We got about 1.5m postal vote applications last election. If the curve does flatten like we think, maybe that will end up at something like 1.7m to 1.8m this election, which is not a remarkable increase.”
Postal votes have remained relatively static in recent elections, hovering at about 8% of total votes, the AEC said.
Ekin-Smyth said Covid and the way political parties are distributing postal voting forms to Australians this campaign could explain the change.
“You’d have to think Covid plays a part in that, but the real spamming of party postal vote applications that’s occurred this election – which occurs every election, but it was a little bit different this election – could have contributed,” he said.
“They sort of evolved their tactics by using websites and text messages and emails, rather than just putting them in letterboxes, and given that some elections have been wholly postal in Covid times, there could have been people receiving these things and thinking ‘well it’s a wholly postal election’ and doing it for those reasons, or thinking it was the preferred method.”
The AEC has already expressed concern at the way the parties are distributing information about postal voting, warning it is “potentially misleading”. Parties this election are sending out forms to voters where they can register with the AEC to vote by mail. But the forms are sent back via the political parties, raising concerns about privacy and data harvesting.
The AEC wrote to parties warning them over reports of incorrect forms being distributed to voters in one division and the AEC’s official purple colouring being used on other forms.
“While we haven’t seen unauthorised postal vote applications, the use of colour and wording means someone who doesn’t examine the material in detail could mistake it for a piece of AEC communication,” the AEC said.
Labor have set up howtovote.org.au and the Liberals have established postal.vote to target voters. Neither site has significant party branding. Political parties are also exempt from privacy law, meaning there is no visibility or certainty on how they are using the data collected from postal votes submitted through their platforms.
“People have a right to know who they are handing their data over,” Ekin-Smyth said. “If they think it’s the AEC, well we operate under the privacy act, and the parties don’t.”
Any additional postal voting puts more pressure on the count and has the potential to delay results in close seats.
“Any additional votes in envelopes is tricky,” Ekin-Smyth said.
“We don’t count any postal votes on the night. And if you have some close seats, you’ve got less votes counted, you’re less likely to get an indication on them.”
