With more than a million early votes, experts say this is the new normal

George Long is accustomed to voting early but that was usually down to his retail work — Saturdays are often busy at the supermarket.

But polling day this time around falls on his birthday week and he thinks there may be a special surprise trip planned for the weekend of May 3. 

He’s one of more than a million Australians who have already voted.

Pre-polling opened on Tuesday.

By Thursday night, more than 1.78 million people had cast their ballots, according to the Australian Electoral Commission.

The AEC said the public holiday may have had an impact on early voting numbers, but the early figures indicated a 39 per cent increase from the 2022 election.

In that election, more than 5.5 million people had voted by the time polling day came around.

Pre-polling is closed for Anzac Day.

What’s driving people to vote early?

There are a couple of factors why more Australians are voting before polling day, according to La Trobe University’s Phoebe Hayman.

Ms Hayman, whose research focuses on political participation, said it often came down to convenience. 

She highlighted the series of public holidays, school holidays and long weekends during the election campaign, which may have influenced some voters to vote early.

“We are also just seeing the norms here changing,” she said.

“So previously, despite the fact that this has always perhaps been a more convenient choice, early voting has not had the same scale as we are seeing in recent elections.”

The way Australians are voting is starting to change but Ms Hayman says recent research has highlighted that some voters are more likely to vote early than others.

“We see that earlier voting is higher in districts where polling places are fewer and further between … they are more likely to take up early voting options,” she said.

“We see in safe districts, so those where voters think that they know how the elections are going to go, they’re more likely to cast an early ballot.”

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In contrast, Ms Hayman said voters in more marginal seats often waited for polling day.

Julie Newman lives in the safe Liberal seat of Flinders, on Victoria’s southern Mornington Peninsula, and voted early just before jetting off to see family in Western Australia.

There was a big line, she said, with many people declaring they already knew which way they would vote.

“Everybody I spoke to agreed that you’re not voting for who you want in parliament. You’re voting from the bottom up of who’s the worst ones to vote for,” Ms Newman said.

That’s why Ms Newman doesn’t believe last-minute campaigning is what decides people’s votes.

She said people just wanted to get their vote out of the way.

“[Let’s] have parties that actually give a bit of truth about what their policies are,” she said.

“To not have a rule where there’s no punishment for false statements prior to elections, people have lost so much faith in government.

“Everybody’s angry with the government and rightfully so.”

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Polling day is now just the last day to vote, expert says

Zareh Ghazarian, a political scientist at Monash University, said political parties had not updated to the shift in voting behaviour because their campaign strategies were often linked to past practices.

“When we think about the sorts of campaign approaches that they’ve taken, they can no longer sort of provide voters with a steady flow of information throughout the campaign, because people are voting early,” he said.

“Over a million people have already cast their vote. And if we’re talking about seats that are going to be decided by a handful of votes across the country, then those sorts of voters have already slipped through the nets of the parties.

“Voting day is now just the last day to vote, rather than voting day as it was in the past.”

It’s an experience Shaun Plant understands well.

He decided to early vote because he doesn’t like crowds.

He avoided the first day of early voting to beat the rush, but Wednesday was just as busy, he said.

But in deciding to go early, Mr Plant said the lack of policy detail released had affected how he voted.

“You don’t vote for something you don’t know. I mean, Dutto said it best during the referendum: ‘you don’t know, vote no’,” he said.

“I’m not a supporter of either Labor or Liberal. I don’t belong to a party. I vote purely on policy and that has turned into voting like Greens or Labor my entire life. I don’t particularly like them.”

Early voting is the new normal

Christen Bingham, who is volunteering with the Greens, will be voting in her first federal election.

She is planning to vote early over the next week because it means a more accessible experience.

She said the flexibility to vote early meant people like her could think more clearly about their choice, rather than worrying about how terrible they may feel, or if they were about to faint.

“A lot of people might be able to stand up, but they can’t stand up for long periods. There’s a lot of voting centres that have stairs and they don’t have wheelchair access,” she said.

The added accessibility and flexibility with pre-poll was why Dr Ghazarian said voting habits had been shifting for the past two decades.

For example, in 2004 more than 80 per cent of Australians voted on polling day, while during the last federal election, almost half of them cast their ballots early.

“People have been voting early so parties can’t say that they were blindsided by this, or they were caught off guard by this, because the writing has been on the wall,” Dr Ghazarian said.

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