There’s been a lot of angst in recent times about the way that technology has fragmented what used to be shared experiences. Instead of browsing in bookshops, we order books online; instead of going to the movies together we immerse ourselves in our home entertainment systems; instead of meeting real friends we get a simulated version on Facebook; and so on.
I think most of this concern is overblown, although there are some valid issues there as well. But it’s interesting to compare them with a change in the way elections operate. We don’t have electronic voting in Australia (for very good reasons, although that’s another story), but we do have a trend away from the communal experience of everyone turning up to a polling place on a particular day to cast their vote.
Given compulsory voting, it’s reasonable that governments do what they can to make that duty less onerous. Voters who are unable to get to a polling place on election day can apply beforehand for a postal vote, and nowadays they also have the option of going in person to a voting centre in the fortnight before polling day to cast a pre-poll vote.
The trend of both these methods is upwards, although not uniformly so.
In 1993, the first federal election with pre-poll voting, postals and pre-polls amounted to 6.1% of the total vote; last year that figure was 9.8%, down from 13.7% in 2007.
The unusually high number in 2007 could have been due to the election being in November, when people are perhaps more likely to be on holidays than they are in August, or it could have been a function of the greater enthusiasm generated in that election. But even with the lower 2010 figure, there’s something surprising in the idea that one voter in 10 is unable to be reach a polling place at any time on the Saturday.
In reality, although to get a postal or pre-poll vote you have to declare that you are unable to vote in the ordinary way, it suits the convenience of the electoral commission not to enforce or check this in any way. So much so that most discussions of pre-poll voting – for example, David Rood in last Friday’s Age — leave the impression that this is just another option voters have, with no restriction on eligibility.
The figure that stimulated Rood’s piece is from last year’s Victorian state election, where postals and pre-polls jumped to a remarkable 23.7% of the total, driven mostly by a doubling in the number of pre-polls. That’s certainly noteworthy, but as with anything to do with voting one should be careful of reading too much into a single result: it may signal a shift in the trend line, but it may just be a one-off.
If early voting does continue to grow, then I think there’s a legitimate concern about losing some of the communal experience of democracy. But if we’re going to depart from the one-day-for-everyone model of voting, then our pre-poll voting system is a good way to do it. Unlike with postal voting, people still vote in a public place, which removes concerns about intimidation, and they do so with conventional paper ballots, reducing the opportunity for fraud.
Moreover, because there are a lot fewer early voting centres than there are election day polling places, traffic at those centres is quite high — particularly in the last couple of days. So party workers come out with how-to-vote cards and something of the election day atmosphere is recaptured. Perhaps in time even sausage sizzles will be scheduled.
The fact that pre-poll is mostly concentrated towards the end of the period also means that any difference in their voting behavior due to having less complete information is likely to be very slight. Indeed, if more voters end up being immune from the tricks of the last week of campaigning, that might not be such a bad thing.
Of course it’s true that early voting shows different political patterns. Pre-poll and (especially) postal voters are better for the Coalition and worse for Labor than ordinary voters, since they tend to be wealthier and better-educated. (Pre-poll voters are also more likely to vote Green, but postal voters less likely.)
But that doesn’t mean that increasing their numbers makes a political difference: correlation isn’t causation. Voting early won’t alter your political views, but it might make you feel a bit less central to the democratic process.
“losing some of the communal experience of democracy”
you’re going to have to explain this to me. I suspect it’s bullshit.
I doubt that technology has fragmented shared experiences so much as changed them. The rise of the internet has coincided with the rise of people socialising in fancy coffee shops, and has also prolly coincided with the rise in the sale of home cappuccino machines.
It depends what is meant by ‘electronic voting’, but I see no objection and plenty of benefits from replacing pencil and paper ballots with entering one’s vote on a computer in a polling booth. If ATMs can be made secure enough to transfer tens of thousands of dollars around the world an electoral ATM could be readily introduced.
@Wilful: Well yes, maybe it is bullshit, but the idea is that if voting is something we just do from our own homes, or from a kiosk in the shopping centre when there’s no one else much around, then something has been lost – we’re no longer citizens acting together to choose a government, or at least not as much so; we’ve lost the social aspect of it. People differ about how important that is, but I don’t think it’s a meaningless concern.
@Gavin: The problem with electronic voting in a polling booth is the lack of transparency – you have to trust that the programmers & administrators are honest & know what they’re doing. With banking that’s not so much of a problem, because you’ll notice if money suddenly disappears from your account, but there’s no way you’ll know if your vote has been recorded wrong. To overcome that you need to have a complete paper trail: the machine prints out a confirmatory ballot, which you put in a ballot box, & they can be manually counted if there’s a dispute. If you do that I don’t have a problem, but in that case it’s not clear you’ll be saving much.
By the way, Antony Green points out to me that the figure of 9.8% I gave for early voting at last year’s federal election is a good deal too low, because the AEC has changed the way it records pre-poll votes: pre-polls cast within one’s own electorate now count as ordinary votes (which means the federal and Victorian figures are no longer comparable). Apologies for not realising that before, but it actually increases the importance of the issue since the trend to early voting is even stronger than I thought.
Of course votes must be verifiable, but the issue is by whom and how. I do not verify myself that my paper ballot has been counted correctly or at all. I rely on the system of scrutineers, without even knowing whether my ballot has been scrutinised or not.
So all I need is assurance that the electronic voting system is open to scrutiny by any appropriately registered person or party. Presumably the major parties and the Greens would scrutinise the system and that should be enough assurance for any reasonable person.
It is a classic flaw of systems analysis to expect an electronic system to replicate a manual system.