The Australian Electoral Commission is scrambling to secure more voting locations in flood-ravaged Lismore after residents raised concerns that just one prepolling site, which has accessibility issues, is open.
Residents also called for better communication from the AEC to tell people that their usual polling place may have been “washed away” in the floods, and to help them find a new location to vote at in the 21 May election.
Lismore resident Clare Kearney, who watched her beloved city go underwater in February and March, said residents needed to have their say and that the AEC needed to be doing everything it could to make that as easy as possible.
The only early voting in Lismore this week. Not where the map takes you, just a classroom number listed for a whole university campus, inaccessible by car via the road advertised, two sets of stairs and absolutely zero signage on campus. I am so sick of fighting for everything. pic.twitter.com/3calEjP3bb
— Clare Kearney (@wordsfromrobin) May 9, 2022
“There’s a lot of people that have a lot of strong feelings about the way the recovery has been handled,” the small business owner said.
“These people have been already disfranchised in so many ways. Everything is so hard for people here right now. You have to jump through so many hoops to do anything.”
Kearney lives near Southern Cross University – where the only polling booth in operation is located – and said it was hard to find. It would be near impossible to access “if you had any sort of [physical] disability”, Kearney said, noting many people had lost their cars and transport was an issue.
Another local, Rose Harvey, understood that people making decisions from Sydney might not understand how challenging life still is for people in Lismore. But she said there should be more help for residents who are “feeling powerless” to exercise their democratic right to vote.
“People are going to turn up to where [the polling booth] used to be and it will have washed away,” she said.
“This has shocked people to their core and that means that they aren’t thinking straight.
“It’s been a real letdown … the AEC has had months [to prepare] and they haven’t done enough.”
In response to answers posed to them on Twitter, the AEC said it was doing what it could but they have been limited when “plan after plan gets interrupted”, referring to the two major flooding events this year and the impact of the pandemic.
“If we could have had more prepolls, and more accessible options, we would have,” the AEC said on Twitter.
“[The] local team have worked really hard to stand up services we could.”
The AEC’s media director, Evan Ekin-Smyth, said the university booth had taken about 1,000 votes in the first two days since opening. A second prepolling venue at Carrington Street, which will open at the weekend, has “better accessibility”.
“We’d encourage anyone who needs particular accessibility requirements to visit that venue if they need to prepoll,” Ekin-Smyth said.
He said venues for election day were still being finalised, with hopes to lock in seven to match the city’s 2019 offering.
“With regard to voting venues generally, they are not our premises and there are not suitable premises just sitting around for us to occupy,” he said.
“Venues we had planned [to use] could no longer be used and we had to change. We also had alternative venues become unavailable as well forcing very late change.”
He urged people unable to vote in person to use postal voting, for which about 10,000 people in the electorate of Page have applied.
“People can access a postal vote if they can’t make it in person and this can be delivered to a nominated address rather than an enrolled one,” he said.
“For instance, if people are temporarily displaced then a postal vote can come to a hotel or caravan park.”
