The trend of voters choosing to cast their votes has been progressing for a long time, but there was a major shift in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic moved a lot more voters away from casting their votes on election day.
The 2020 Queensland council elections were the first elections in Australia after the start of the pandemic, and there was a massive change in how people voted.
In this post I’ll run through the change in those trends over two decades, and the latest information about the numbers of people casting an early vote. This early voting data suggests there will be a decline in the numbers of people casting a pre-poll and postal vote this year, but not a particularly dramatic one consisting the big change in 2020.
This first chart shows the share of votes that were cast using each voting method. This is shown as a proportion of enrolment, which allows us to compare it with the data we’re currently receiving for the 2024 election.
Around 70% of enrolment had been cast as ordinary election day votes from 2000 to 2008. It declined gradually in 2012 and 2016, but collapsed in 2020. Barely 20% of voters cast an ordinary election day vote, just slightly more than the number of postal voters, and less than the number of pre-poll voters.
There was also a decline in the overall turnout in 2020 to under 80%.
The trend in turnout has not all been in the same direction, but in the long run it has been downward.
So with this information, what can we learn from the 2024 data?
The ECQ has published daily data on the number of pre-poll votes cast, and the number of postal votes returned. They’ve also published the number of postal vote applications, which is always larger than the number of postal votes recorded, since some voters either do not vote or choose to use a different method. Unfortunately we don’t have the equivalent data from 2020 so it’s hard to make a like-with-like comparison.
155,009 postal vote applications have been requested, which adds up to 18.3% of enrolment. This is lower than the 18.9% who cast a pre-poll vote in 2020, but still much higher than the 10.2% who cast a postal vote in 2016. As of Monday, 7.5% of enrolled voters had returned a postal vote, but this number will continue to grow.
Pre-polling is open for two weeks. As of the end of Monday 11 March, 10.7% of the electorate had cast a pre-poll vote. Usually more pre-poll votes are cast in week two, but the current trend suggests pre-polling will be less than the 23.7% in 2020, but still a lot higher than the 11.1% in 2016.
Both of these trends suggest a small decline in postal and pre-poll voting, but still much closer to 2020 numbers than pre-COVID data.
If you assume a slight increase in turnout and a slight decline in postal and pre-poll votes, the increase in ordinary votes wouldn’t be close to enough to return to 2016 levels.
It seems like voters with a taste of early voting mostly like doing it, and come back to do it again. While the extremes of the early pandemic are unlikely to be repeated again, the shift away from early voting, accelerated by the pandemic, isn’t going away.
I see the appeal of pre-polling now, especially now I am a retiree, but sometimes they are just if not more busy than on actual polling day. For once the pre-polling station is close to my home and on my way to the gym, so I should vote early. But this time I have decided to vote on the day. Maybe it was my local booth, but the last few votes I felt the magic of voting on the day and the coming together to act as democratic citizens is very perfunctory. No community groups running stalls and cooking the Democracy sausage. A reflection of the “Bowling Alone” syndrome – the decline of local community and social groups.
I am surprised that pre-polling numbers are not stronger than what is reported here.
I made the mistake of prepolling on the first day in 2022. There were hundreds of people and I ended up waiting almost an hour in the queue. This time I did it on a wed/thurs, can’t remember which, and had like 3 people ahead of me. I spent about 20 minutes looking for the place and 5 minutes in the voting booth. I’m probably going to prepoll at every election from now on.
Did my voting for Macgregor ward this morning. There’s only one prepoll booth per ward and ECQ stuffed up in a major way with location for this one and apparently for Chandler. Given that they’ve known the date for the past 4 years it’s very odd. It wasn’t very busy but they were trying to shoehorn Exit and Entry through a standard door into a room that wouldn’t have been much larger than the average garage.
Anyway, 1 ALP at the entry, 1 LNP halfway along the hallway, 1 ALP, 1 GRN and the LNP Councillor at the end next to the lift. 2 ALP Mayoral signs at the front with an LNP “Just Vote 1” stuck between them, 1 LNP sign along the hallway and 1 ALP and LNP sign at the end. Didn’t see a Greens sign anywhere. The ALP sign was double-sided but the side with the mayoral candidate was facing a brick wall.
Almost forgot – one odd thing was that they were printing the Councillor voting papers individually from a laser printer on the Returning Officer’s desk. The mayoral vote was in the standard perforated book. First time I’ve seen that.
From what I’ve been hearing, there are issues with the Postal voting. I applied for a postal vote several weeks ago and am yet to receive mine. A few people I know working at pre-poll have told me they’re hearing similar stories from people on the ground as well. Looks like I’ll be doing pre-poll on Friday!
At the end of the day, local government elections are becoming increasingly irrelevant to people, and voting needs to be made as easy and available as possible for people to participate or they’ll just cop the fine and not bother.
A little birdy gave me this. Not sure of the source
🚨 BRISBANE LORD MAYOR POLL 🚨
🟦 Schrinner (LNP): 46.7% (-1.0)
🟥 Price (ALP): 25.8 (-5.1)
🟩 Sriranganathan (GRN): 21.6 (+6.2)
🟩 Brazier (LCQ): 3.1
⬜️ Holmes (IND): 1.4%
⬜️ Tanti (IND): 1.4%
2PP:
🟦 Schrinner (LNP): 57.7% (+1.4)
🟥 Price (ALP): 42.3 (-1.4)
🧵 1/2
That’d be this one
https://demosau.com/schrinner-on-track-for-re-election-in-brisbane-city-council-lord-mayoral-race/
Surprised Schrinner hasn’t lost more PV, but is good to finally have some real data that the Greens campaign has been making some of the inroads they’ve been claiming.
There’s really not much between Price and Sriranganathan there. It wouldn’t take much more for JS to make the top 2, assuming preferences from the three also-rans don’t just exhaust.
Well done Nostradamus, just about bang on. You and your friend lived up to your name.
Why are you praising someone for simply reporting the results of a poll? You should praise DemosAU for collecting information so accurately.