This is a follow-up to Monday’s blog post, which explored the trends away from election day voting at the federal level, and how those trends have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
For this blog post, I’m splitting up the 2019 vote between votes cast on election day and those cast earlier, and looking at which seats have higher rates of early voting.
As a final part in my series on trends in people voting early, today I’m analysing differences in how people vote, depending on whether they vote early or vote on election day, using the categories established in yesterday’s post.
Ben is joined today by Ben Moffitt from the Australian Catholic University to talk about right-wing minor parties and their role in the federal election, and to profile the seat of Macquarie.
There has been a long term trend in Australian politics of voters shifting away from casting a ballot on election day, in favour of voting earlier in the campaign. This has usually taken place through two methods: an in-person pre-poll vote, or a postal ballot.
These trends have increased significantly in elections held since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
Tasmania’s upper house holds elections every year in May, with two or three out of the 15 electorates up for election each year, over a six year cycle.
Two seats were due to hold elections next Saturday, May 7, those being Elwick in the northern suburbs of Hobart and McIntyre in north-eastern Tasmania. A third seat will hold a by-election, in the southern seat of Huon. Former Labor member Bastian Seidel vacated the seat in December last year.
This election will see a record number of candidates on the ballot paper for the House of Representatives, with 1203 candidates running, up from the previous record of 1188 in 2013.
I was wondering recently about voting diversity within an electorate. I’m specifically talking about how much the vote varies from one booth to another across a local electorate’s geographic area. You certainly notice variation when looking at booth maps – some seats are very consistent, while others have some major differences between areas. But what happens if we try and quantify that variation?
I have seen a lot of commentary in the last week about the low polling position of both major parties, and whether that might make it impossible for either side to form a majority government.
Ben is joined by Duncan McDonnell and Marija Taflaga to discuss the closing of nominations. We discuss numbers of women and Aboriginal candidates nominating at the election, and the impact of increasing ballot sizes on the House informal vote. We also discuss the electorate of Lingiari in the Northern Territory.
Nominations were declared for the federal election yesterday, and we now have the final official lists of candidates.
We’ve seen a record number of candidates running for the House of Representatives, despite the number of parties running candidates falling to the lowest level since 2010. This is partly due to One Nation and United Australia running 300 candidates between them, leading to a big surge in total numbers despite less parties running.