From today's crikey - final election figures

Voters going postal – or a benefit of incumbency?

Christian Kerr writes:

The full results from the November 24 federal election are in -- and they show something interesting.

The Coalition ended up with 47.44% of the two party preferred voted. Despite the impression on the night of a strong Labor win, Kevin Rudd was only elected with a margin just over 1.5%.

That’s the smallest swing for a change of government since World War II, going by Mr Mumble’s table.

The Coalition clawed its position back “after strongly outpolling Labor in the record 2.5 million postal, pre-poll and absentee votes counted after election night”, according to Tim Colebatch’s analysis in The Age.

The conventional wisdom has said that the Coalition does better from these vote as they come from older, more conservative electors stuck at home or the more affluent.

That, however, is challenged. It’s a little out of date to assume that only Liberal voters can afford to take interstate holidays that require them to cast postal votes.

So how do we explain the high Coalition postal, pre-poll and absentee vote?

The influence of elderly voters was certainly felt there. It’s easier for many oldsters – and their carers – if they cast a postal or pre-poll vote. This demographic favours the conservative parties.

But all the major parties chase postal, pre-polls and absentee voters. Virtually every household would have received postal vote applications from both the Liberals and the ALP in the first few days of the campaign.

There’s usually strong competition between the majors to see who can get theirs in the mail first. They hope the applicant will follow their how to vote.

The Coalition had the advantage of incumbency at the November 24 poll – more MPs with more electorate databases and more postal allowance to spend.

Did this help them win more postal, pre-poll and absentee votes, or does the conventional wisdom still apply?

From yesterday's Crikey

When is a vote not a vote? When it's provisional

Peter Brent from Mumble Politics writes:

A funny thing happened to provisional votes at the November 24 election. It probably cost the ALP several seats. Or it prevented them from taking several seats they shouldn’t have. Or perhaps 70,000 – 100,000 people who couldn’t be bothered keeping their enrolment details up to date simply got what they deserved.

It’s in the eye of the beholder.

What is a provisional vote? Broadly speaking, this is when an elector rocks up to a polling station on election-day, gives their name to the official but finds they aren’t on the roll.

So they get a ballot paper, fill it in, and also write their name and address and electorate on an envelope, into which the ballot paper goes. In the next week or so the AEC checks the voter’s bona fides and if the AEC agrees they should indeed have been on the roll, their ballot paper is counted.

At the 2004 election, about twelve and a half million people voted across the country. Some 180,878 people went through the provisional vote process described above, and of those, 90,366 were rejected, and 90,512 accepted.

So almost exactly 50% made it into the count in 2004.

At last month's election, nearly 13 million people voted in total, and there were (none of the 2007 figures is final) 168,767 provisional votes received by the AEC.

But only 24,212 were counted; the rest were rejected. That is, the acceptance rate of provisional votes fell from 50 percent in 2004 to 14 percent in 2007. Why?

The Howard government made several changes to the electoral law in the last few years, but one of them largely accounts for this huge drop.

Under the old rules, if a person moved from one house to another in the same electorate, and the AEC found out they had left Dwelling A, and so took them off the roll there, but didn’t put them on at Dwelling B because the voter hadn’t filled out a change of address form, they were still entitled to have their vote counted. (If they had moved to another electorate and had dropped off the roll they couldn’t vote.)

But that rule is no more, and such people were discarded in the preliminary scrutiny after last month’s election.

The remaining 14 percent – those who were accepted – were accidentally taken off by the AEC, could show they hadn’t moved address, or were mistakenly thought to have died, perhaps.

Does all of this matter? From the point of view of the disenfranchised elector it does, although some argue that if you can’t be bothered keeping your AEC details up to date you have no-one to blame but yourself.

There is also the fact that provisional voters are disproportionately left of centre. For example, the total national vote at the 2004 election split, after preferences, about 53 to 47 in the Coalition’s favour. But provisional votes split about 53 to 47 to the ALP.

Last month, the nation voted about 53 to 47 in Labor’s favour. Can we assume the “missing” provisional votes would have swung by the same amount, and so gone 59 to 41 in Labor’s favour? If we do assume that, then they would have added about .1 percent to Labor’s national vote, and given them a few more seats.

Or maybe they wouldn’t have swung by that much, and probably at least some of the “missing” provisionals should not have been counted anyway. But even a conservative treatment of them delivers Labor the ultra-marginal McEwen and Bowman.

Electoral law is not black and white. The tension is between integrity of the roll and people’s right to vote. Throw in partisan considerations - from both sides – and it’s a heady mix.

The Coalition government has rammed through some long-held hobby horses since taking control of the Senate in 2005. The new Labor government will have its own, although passage through the Senate may be tricky.

Any electoral system must guard against fraud. But the fact is – and all political parties know it – that the legitimate electors who are likely to lose their vote under tighter restrictions – renters, young folks, people who move around a lot, those without a drivers license – tend to vote left of centre in greater numbers than the rest of us.

This informs the parties’ approach to electoral law.

The Australian Electoral Commission runs a first class operation on election-day. Beneath the calm, efficient exterior at the polling booth is a massive logistical exercise that remains the envy of much of the planet.

But on enrolment we have fallen behind world’s best practice. In many countries address changes are automatic – you don’t have to tell the officials, they change your details for you – and in others enrolment and detail changes are possible up until polling day.

It’s time for Australian enrolment procedures to move into the 21st century. Then issues such as provisional voting would hardly arise.

Interest rates and lessons not yet learnt

From today's Crikey email:


Kilgour: Dumb, dumber, downright stupid and Downer
Adam Kilgour writes:

John Howard suggested last night on The 7.30 Report that Australian interest rates are rising in Australia because of the US subprime mortgage markets. So why are interest rates falling at a rate of knots in the US?

He also points to other events out of his control that impact the economy. Yet he still maintains on the eve of the 6th interest rate rise this term that he will keep interest rates down better than a Labor Government. Dumb.

At least Wayne Swan was honest about the situation in the last 24 hours saying that you couldn't make promises on interest rates. I'm tipping voters will believe Swannie over Howard on this one.

So how would Peter Costello, the economic wonder boy, keep rates low if re-elected? By making billions of dollars of spending promises? Dumber. If a financial tsunami is rolling in like Peter warns, why is he blowing the surplus like a 1999 dot.com burning cash? And if all that cash is really going to flow in all its abundance, why are we waiting until 2013 for the $34 billion tax cuts?

One thing's for sure. The winner of this election will spend the first year junking a big bunch of spending promises if they are responsible. Howard figures he's not going out with one penny in the kitty. Labor feels they have to follow. The Pork Barrel meters the daily press love so much are blown out already, less than halfway through the campaign.

Mark Vaile is still not convinced Climate Change is being impacted by human activity. That's downright stupid. Visit any farmer or regional centre and ask them what they think about that absurd statement.

Drought and water shortages. Bushfires and twisters. Mark must have seen some of these on the famed Wombat Trail. I thought the Nats' campaign was about being young, funky and relevant.

And where is Alexander Downer in the campaign? Back in Adelaide making sure the jailer doesn't fall asleep and let David Hicks escape from his cell until after polling day?

If he succeeds, he's a sure bet for South Australian state Liberal leader, his new dream job.

Younger people still under represented on electoral roll

From today's Crikey email:

Rolls close, young voters still under represented

Simon Jackman and Peter Brent writes:

Late on Friday afternoon, the Australian Electoral Commission published the total numbers on the electoral roll for the upcoming election.

The rolls had closed, for new enrolments and re-enrolments, on the evening of Wednesday 17 October - nine days previous – and for address changes on Tuesday 23 October.

Three Saturday papers looked at the data, all concentrating on the youth component. George Megalogenis in the Weekend Australian was upbeat, noting that “the number of 18-year-olds eligible to vote jumped by 10.3 per cent when compared with the previous election” Sarah Smiles in The Age was also positive, describing the “nearly 100,000 more Australians in the 18-29 age bracket on the electoral roll than at the last election.”

But Paul Bibby at the Sydney Morning Herald was less happy, claiming that “the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who are eligible to vote has not increased since 2004, remaining at 80 per cent, compared to 95 per cent for the rest of the adult population.”

So who was right? This is a tricky area, requiring assumptions and estimates, and we don’t have all the data available.

For a start, we ignore the million or so Australians living overseas. This is a huge number, but a story within itself.

The good news is that the national electoral roll, as a proportion of the number of Australians eligible to vote, is about the same as it was as of the close-of-rolls in 2004. In fact, our best estimate has it .1 percent higher.

That number is around 93 percent of the age-eligible citizenry. This is “good” because earlier in the year this looked to be a heroic task. But not going backwards is qualified praise, and that still leaves 7 percent of people off the roll.

Megalogenis’s numbers on 18-year-olds are correct, but in proportional terms the increase is less stark. In 2004, 18-year-olds comprised 1.43 percent of the electoral roll, now they account for 1.51 percent.

But the 18-24 subset has marginally shrunk: in 2004 it accounted for 11.27 percent of the roll, and this year 11.26 percent. At the same time, it appears that the size of this age cohort has actually slightly increased in the population (see the March 2007 release of Australian Demographic Statistics from the ABS), and so rates of enrolment of this group may actually be going backwards.

Smiles’ number is also only part of the story. The proportion the roll accounted for by 18-29-year-olds is actually a little smaller in 2007 than in 2004: 19.13 compared to 19.28 percent.

Bibby’s 80% should read “in the low 80s” but his 95% is about right, as is his general thrust: young people are significantly under-represented on the electoral roll.

And one final point. Last year’s changes to the electoral law, to close the rolls when the writs are issued, instead of seven days later, were justified by the government on the grounds that the last minute flurry of enrolments placed an intolerable burden on the AEC. This flurry – numbering 156,000 in 2004 – has traditionally come about because the AEC finally had a cut-off they could advertise: “if you don’t enrol by such and such a date, you miss out”.

In ending this practice, the government claimed the AEC could get the roll up to date in advance. And the evidence suggests that the AEC did, through “RockEnrol” and general advertising, gather significant numbers before the election was called.

But in the end what happened in 2007? By postponing the issue of the writs, the government left the rolls open after all – for three working days, rather than the old five - after calling the election.

During this time 77,000 new enrolments were processed. Why the government did this we don’t know, and we don’t know how much the AEC suffered under the burden, but we do know that without those 77,000, total roll numbers this year would look very unimpressive