Postal vs attendance voting

Postal voting

All voters receive a ballot paper through the mail. They are required to complete the declaration and return their vote through the mail.

• Easier for mobility-impaired voters.

• Is $200K cheaper, more money can be spent in the community.

• Easier for multicultural English-challenged voters. They have day rather than minutes to seek advice and help from family and friends

• Increased window to vote. Some voters forget to return their voting papers.

• More likelihood of “dummy” candidates being used to direct preferences to main candidates. This has been mitigated somewhat by candidate preference lists no longer included in the vote pack.

• Public perception that votes are easier to manipulate than attendance elections.

Attendance voting

All voters are required to attend a polling booth on the election data. Other options are early voting (aka pre-poll), or voters can apply for a postal vote.

• More likely to be person-to-person contact. Candidate might be at polling booth (note that there are around 9 voting booths per ward).

• Local schools can run fundraising BBQs on election day, colloquially known as democracy sausage.

• More difficult for genuine grass-roots community candidates to run a campaign. Newer candidates find it hard to staff around 7 polling booths from 8am to 6pm on polling day.

• Some voters feel intimidated by having to “run the gauntlet” of people handing them how-to-vote cards outside the polling booth.

• Waste of paper. A lot of paper is used for candidates’ how-to-vote cards.

• Voters have to stand in queues on a Saturday.

• Voters generally make a quick decision after receiving how-to-vote cards from candidates.

• Bad weather.

References

Greater Dandenong attendance vote to cost more than $200,000

Election information