On early voting

The campaign rolls on for another 10 days, but high levels of early voting means more voters will stop following

The AEC reported on X this morning that over half a million people cast their ballot yesterday, a record for the first day of pre-polling. The roughly 542,000 people who have already cast their vote represent the equivalent of about four electorates out of 150.

At the same point in the 2022 election roughly 660,000 people had voted, but that was after two days of pre-polling compared to just one thus far.

If yesterday’s trend holds, we would expect over half of Australians to have cast a vote before election day on 3 May.

Australians are no longer voting together having watched an election campaign in full.

In last year’s Queensland election Labor lost government on a 7.0% swing against them, taking only 46.2% of the two-party-preferred vote. However, they suffered a much smaller swing from votes cast on election day, actually winning them with 50.6%. To some extent, this reflects a tendency for early voters to be more conservative. It’s also the case that voters on polling day saw more of the election campaign, particularly on the issue of abortion rights which heated up in the last week of Queensland’s poll.

It is difficult to imagine some transformative event in the final strait of this campaign, but ten days is a long time in politics. Next week Albanese and Dutton are lined up for their fourth debate, and last-minute policy announcements are still on the cards. Australians who vote early lose the opportunity to take these into account.