Early voting opens in Australia’s general election

Canberra, April 22 (IANS) Early voting began in Australia’s general election on Tuesday, with about half of the country’s 18 million registered voters expected to cast their ballots before election day on May 3.

Hundreds of early voting centres across Australia opened their doors from 8:30 a.m. local time as the election campaign entered its final stretch.

The proportion of Australians choosing to vote early, either in person or by post, has steadily increased at recent federal elections from under 20 per cent in 2004 to almost 50 per cent in 2022.

Voting in elections is mandatory for over 18 million citizens aged 18 and over who are enrolled to do so with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). According to the AEC, eligible voter enrollment for the May 3 election is a record-high 98.2 per cent, Xinhua news agency reported.

Although millions of votes will be cast early, AEC staff cannot start counting any ballots until polls close at 6 p.m. local time on May 3.

Jill Sheppard, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the Australian National University, said that the rise in early voting could be attributed to the convenience of pre-polling as well as growing disengagement among voters with political parties and campaigns.

Earlier on April 21, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that the country’s upcoming general election was still “up for grabs” despite polls showing his Labour Party was on track to win a second term in government.

The campaign restart came one day before early voting opened across the country on Tuesday — offering millions of Australians the opportunity to avoid long queues to cast their mandatory votes — and after several new opinion polls showed that Labour had increased its lead over the Coalition among voters.

The latest edition of Newspoll, published by News Corp Australia on Sunday, reported a 52–48 lead for Labour over the Coalition on a two-party preferred basis.

A separate poll published by the Australian branch of UK firm YouGov on Friday put Labour ahead 53–47, marking the government’s strongest two-party result in the firm’s poll in 18 months, Xinhua news agency reported.

Labour had won the 2022 general election 52.13–47.87 over the Coalition on a two-party basis.

When asked on Monday if Labour was in pole position to win the election, Albanese pointed to lessons the party had learned from 2019, when polls had widely forecast a Labour victory only for the Coalition to win a third term in power in a result hailed by then-PM Scott Morrison on election night as a “miracle.”

“There’s no complacency from my camp,” Albanese told reporters in the state of New South Wales. “This election is certainly up for grabs.”

Dutton, who on Monday announced that a Coalition government would spend 750 million Australian dollars ($482 million) on a crime crackdown, including a national register of sex offenders, also pointed to the 2019 election when asked about the polls.

“Not too many people were predicting a Coalition victory in 2019. A lot of people were busy with work, busy in their lives. Many Australians didn’t know there was an election coming up,” he said in Melbourne.

“We can well and truly win the election from here.”

When Australians visited polling places across the country to vote, they did so on a preferential basis — assigning their first preference to the candidate in their local electorate whom they most wanted to represent them in the lower house of the federal parliament.

If no candidate in an electorate received a majority of first preference votes, candidates with the fewest votes were eliminated and their votes distributed based on the preferences marked by individual voters.

Australia was divided geographically into 150 electorates, each with approximately the same number of voters. Labour entered the election holding 77 seats in the lower house compared to 53 for the Coalition. Some electorates had as many as 13 candidates running in the election.

The Newspoll published on Sunday found that 34 per cent of respondents intended to vote for their Labour candidate as their first preference — the highest since January 2024 — and 35 per cent for the Coalition, while the YouGov poll had both major parties tied at 33 per cent.

Labour traditionally received fewer first preference votes than the Coalition but performed better on preferences. Labour received 32.5 per cent of first preference votes in 2022, compared to 35.7 per cent for the Coalition, but benefited from over 85 per cent of votes for the Greens, Australia’s third-largest party, flowing its way.

–IANS

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