Factcheck: informal votes

The acting AEC commissioner, Jeff Pope, told ABC news breakfast this morning that part of the Commission’s role is to educate voters about how to cast their vote accurately (or rather, not to accidentally vote informally).

There’s good reason to be thinking about this as a problem. On average, informal votes (the technical term for votes that are invalid and therefore not counted) have been more common in recent elections than in the 1980s and 1990s.

The highest informal vote in recent years was in 1984, when new voting rules for the Senate had the unintended consequence of producing a much higher informal vote for the House of Representatives. (Informal votes shot up from roughly 2% to nearly 7%.) Informal voting tended to sit between 3% and 4% for much of the 1990s, but it has steadily increased in this century. Informal voting hit 5.9% in 2013 and was roughly 5.2% at the last election.

Some of these informal votes are deliberate – when an informal vote is defaced or has a message written on it, this is clearly intended as a kind of statement about their political opinions. But some informal votes are accidental, and showing those voters how to cast a valid vote ensures they are counted.

The best way to ensure your vote gets counted is to number every box in order of your preference.