Australians: Check your Enrolment, And Vote.

[thorfinn]

Yo. Australian Citizens. Apropos of our sudden change of Prime Minister to Julia Gillard, and the fact that we'll have a federal election within the year, go check your electoral enrolment at https://oevf.aec.gov.au/, and please vote.

I feel pretty strongly that it's every Australian's civic responsibility to at least attend a polling booth on election day (or postal/pre vote as appropriate).

Not simply because it's required by law, but because I think it's your one chance to participate directly in the political system of this country. People have protested, fought, and died both historically and to the present day around the world to secure the right to vote. Don't waste yours.

You don't have to do anything other than get your voting paper on election day and then vote nothing at all - if that is a genuine expression of your actual political preferences.

I personally think that you should seek to be more informed about politics and thus have more complicated political preferences than that, but I'm really not going to argue with anyone who believes that that is their actual preference, so long as they still exercise a citizen's right and responsibility to obtain a ballot paper.

Comments

[vivienne-aster.livejournal.com]

As embarrassing as it is to admit this, I'm forced to admit that I'm very glad you put that link there - I thought I'd updated my electoral details and it turns out I've been voting in my previous area for a while... It doesn't make much difference as they are both safe Labor seats, but it's still poor - thank you!

[thorfinn]

Oh good. :-) Happy to help!

[damien_wise]

Very cool write-up, and a well-timed reminder.

ISTR writing something _very_ similar a few years ago...I think it was after the last federal election, and may have been on the LJ Melbourne Maniacs group. I think it was in response to someone whinging about having to vote, and that they / their partner might get fined for choosing not to vote. It's rather spooky to see what you've said, right down to the order of your points. :)

Democracy -- and our flavour of it, with out voting system -- may have its imperfections, but it's about the least bad political system in history, anywhere in the world. Wish I could say the same for some of the candidates. ;)

[thorfinn]

*grin* I think I've posted the same thing before around the time of most elections.

We aren't the only ones to feel this way, I'm sure I've seen the exact same argument from a lot of people over the years.

I totally get that politics freakin' sucks... but when you have an actual chance to participate directly, and it's organised to be as easy as possible? FFS. Take it. With Both Hands.

[pauamma]

I'm definitely in favor of voting, but one thing in your entry caught my attention, and I want to make sure I got it right: "required by law"? As in, "there's a law that says you have to vote, and if you don't (or maybe even can't prove you voted), you can be fined, taken to court, pilloried, or whatever"?

[thorfinn]

Yes, Australia has compulsory voting. You get fined if you don't turn up to elections. Yes, it's much much better than non-compulsory.

We also have proper full preferential voting. Using verifiable and recountable paper tickets, not electronic. Counted and verified by humans. And almost every polling booth is 90%+ counted by at the latest midnight on polling day, which is enough to declare a government, usually.

[thorfinn]

Oh, and elections are always held on the weekend, booths open at 9am and stay open until 6pm (I think, it's something close to that period, anyway).

Proving you voted is trivial (turn up at the booth and get your name ticked off), and you can trivially organise to postal vote or pre-vote if you know you might be unable to make it to a polling booth on the day.

And if you're travelling you can vote for your electorate at any other polling booth in the country (or state if it's a state election).

Polling booths are organised (at least within cities, the rural electorates are a bit more problematic) such that everyone is within a maximum of a few kilometres (2-3 miles max) of a polling booth.

[pauamma]

I agree with all the "this is the better way" statements you made in the 2 comments above, except the first. (And if I interpret your choice of examples correctly: I'm not a US citizen, FWIW.)

Regarding the "compulsory voting enforced with fines is better" statement, can we agree to disagree? (I can see some benefits to that approach, but IMO the costs overwhelmingly outweigh them.)

Oh, and unrelatedly: since you have a paid account, you can edit your comments.

[thorfinn]

Good deduction on the assumption that you were a US citizen. :-) It wasn't conscious, but I was highlighting a number of features of our electoral system that are quite glaringly highlighted as major issues with the US electoral system when we see news coverage of it.

We can agree to disagree, certainly. :-)

That said, I think the compulsory voting benefits do outweigh the costs in the context where you have preferential voting and very effective and accurate electoral system.

I'm not entirely sure what you see as the cost of compulsory voting... "loss of freedom"? There's no compulsion to send your vote any particular direction, or even necessarily put anything on the ballot at all.

Loss of freedom as a general principle? Nobody is free to do just anything they want in any state you care to mention. The state can and should legislate in a direction that is beneficial to all citizens, if it's clear that citizens are unlikely to act for the general benefit in a space without such legislation.

The very significant benefit of compulsory preferential voting is that you get a lot less vote power granted to "special interests" - who will always have an easier time getting out a vote.

Much as I personally would probably benefit from not having compulsory voting (being relatively wealthy), I think it's much better for the country that I don't. :-)

By having compulsory preferential voting, we get the "least hated" groups in power, not the "most liked". Generally that's a lot more moderate and a lot less unstable a situation. A "least hated" group in power is more likely to be able to conduct good negotiations with as wide a group as possible, where that is often untrue of a "most liked" group, because the latter will often have significant groups of "haters".

(And ta, I keep forgetting about the edit comments thing - used to other fora being a bit unhelpful with notifications and such.)

[pauamma]

OK, the argument below is based on my interpretation of how you describe in-person voting: namely, Peggy shows up at a certain place on a certain day, shows credentials to Victor, and perform at her option one of the following: mark choices on a form, leave it blank, draw something obscene on it, smear it with bodily fluids, or pocket it and substitute a Jack Chick tract instead. Then, slip that sheet of paper in an envelope, and drop the envelope in a box, where it and the sheet inside can no longer be traced to her. If the process is substantially different, the specific argument below may not be applicable, or only with changes.

That process doesn't actually compel Peggy to vote. If Peggy drops an envelope containing a penis drawn in blood and bile, she doesn't contribute any more to the process of selecting the "least hated" group than she would have by staying home. All it does is compel her to be present in a certain place at a certain time, unless she took steps in advance to opt out of that obligation. (Related question: is Peggy free to choose whether to vote by mail at her option, or is she required to demonstrate that she is/may be unable to vote in person, or even make an unsupported claim to that effect?)

I contend that the government has no more business telling Peggy "You must be seen to visit a polling place on $date" then it would have telling her to attend the place of worship of her choice on the same date and under the same penalties.

Also, on a personal note, I would be more likely, under that system, to scrawl "voting under duress" across the form and leave it otherwise unfilled than I would be under a system where I'm truly free to vote, to make a pretense of voting, or to say "Fuck you! I'm going fishing."

Also also, would you mind if I linked to this thread from the_2nd or reposted it there? "The pros and cons of compulsory voting" is a good topic for that comm.

[thorfinn]

Feel free to link and/or repost with link. :-)

Yes, the process does not compel Peggy to vote - but it does actually, in practice, right here in Australia where we are using that exact process, result in a very very high percentage of voter turnout and a very low percentage of informal (invalid) voting.

Our last federal election in 2007 had somewhere between 4-5% informal vote, and a turnout of about 94-95%.

US turnout seems to be 50-60% in presidential election years and 30-40% in non-presidential election years.
UK turnout is apparently 60% - 70% or so.

It seems entirely likely that we would have similar turnout in Australia if we went non-compulsory, whereas we instead have 90% plus for our entire history of compulsory voting.

That difference is well worth the requirement to get your name ticked off the roll at an election. And, as I answer below, it's really really easy to not have to be there on the day by postal or pre-voting.

On your question: Peggy is free to choose whether to vote by mail (or pre-vote at an electoral office) at her option. No evidence is required of any reason why you are choosing to pre-vote or postal vote.

Postal and pre-votes are in two envelopes, one with the vote which is anonymous, and the external envelope with voter details to be ticked off. The registration is ticked off, the external envelope thrown away, and the inside envelope is added to the ballot boxes for that electorate to be counted later.

There is no duress in the process - you aren't being required to turn up at a booth on the day, because you can postal and pre-vote at your discretion.

http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/ has a whole heap of publications. In particular:

http://www.aec.gov.au/pdf/voting/compulsory_voting.pdf

has a pretty good list of the pros and cons and statistics.

ETA: And the whole point of the system is to avoid any kind of verification of how Peggy votes, to avoid any compulsion in how she might choose to cast that vote. If her vote is genuinely, "I don't care, they all suck", then that is a valid contribution to "least hated". The statement is "I hate them all equally." That's a perfectly valid statement of political preference.

ETAA: And that statement would not be known and countable if Peggy simply stays at home. We know in Australia that around 4-5% of voters make that statement, and that the rest actually do have some kind of preference.

[pauamma]

Thanks for the links. I'll read them later this week. On a quick note: one statement that Peggy cannot make lawfully in the current AU syxtem is "Fuck the AEC, I'm not voting or even going through the motions." It sounds to me like your argument boils to: the ability to count accurately the "I don't care, all candidates suck equally" votes is worth forbidding the "fuck the AEC" statement as a separate statement.(*) But forbidding it also means the "all candidates suck" votes aren't counted accurately, because you're counting the "fuck the AEC" votes as "all candidates suck" votes.

(*): after reading it quickly, so I may well have missed something, and I'll revisit this after reading it more thoroughly and reading the links, but that won't happen until the end of the week.

[thorfinn]

Actually I think there's a small but significant number of adult Australian Citizens not on the electoral roll, which probably counts as a "fuck the AEC" statement. :-) ETA: In theory, those people can be prosecuted and fined for not being on the roll, but the act also says that if they do enrol, the prosecution and fine goes away. And in practice... I've never heard of anyone ever being fined for not being on the roll.

My argument boils to: increasing voter participation to 90+% instead of 60-ish% is well worth the small percentage (a maximum error of 5%, and actually likely much much less than that) of whatever "inaccuracy" is introduced by compulsory.

[(Anonymous)]

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm one of the people who will be counting votes on election day. I'm also likely to be greeting Australian electors, marking their names off the roll, making sure that scrutineers don't interfere and so on.

It is your right to vote informal if you so choose. But please, for the love of all that is either holy or profane (whichever you prefer), please do NOT pocket your ballot and walk out with it, and especially don't replace it with a Chick tract.

At the end of the night, we have to account for every ballot paper that we can. In many countries, missing ballot papers may constitute evidence of election fraud. We get paid the same amount whether we leave at 10pm or 3am, and if there are too many ballot papers that we can't account for (say, 5 or more), then have to do a full recount then and there.

Deface it, write a slogan on it, just leave it blank... if that's what you really want to do with your vote, on your head be it. But please, just put it in the damn box.

Besides, the Chick tract won't be read.

[(Anonymous)]

Nice post.

May I request posts expressing your views on the following issues:

1) Compulsory National Service
2) Separation of Church and State (preferably including a comparison or correlation regarding moral responsibility and civic duty)
3) The role of satire, free speech and personal voice in state matters with regard to individual identity

Cheers,

Thag (Ivan)

[thorfinn]

Interesting request. I didn't know I was standing for a political office... :-)

All three of those topics are huge essays on their own, deep and complicated. If I were to come up with a TL;DR version:

1) Good in theory, practical considerations (what constitutes useful National Service?) make it very problematic.

2) A lot of churches don't like the idea that the state should have nothing to do with them. I think the State's role is to look after the best interests of its Citizens - and that has nothing to do with any Church. A Citizen's civic role is to participate and cooperate with the laws of the State, and advocate for changes where appropriate.

3) Ah, the vexing issues of satire, racism, hatespeech, etc? Very very thorny problem. I don't think a free-for-all is appropriate, but I also think there's big issues with the slippery slope. I think actually .au laws in this space are pretty good overall - they're complicated and messy, but it's a complicated and messy issue.

Close of rolls

[(Anonymous)]

One additional thing that someone reminded me of - John Howard's "lets have fun disenfranchising the youth" laws still apply, so once the election is called you have at *most* 3 business days to update your enrolment.

Do It Now.

http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/Fact_Sheets/Close_of_Rolls.htm

-Damien (aeduna)