There has been a clear trend in all Australian elections over the last twenty years of voters moving away from voting on election day, with an increasing number of voters choosing pre-poll voting as an alternative.
Tasmania has lagged behind the rest of the country in moving away from ordinary election-day voting, both at state elections and federal elections, but there was a big drop between last year’s election and this year’s election.
Now that we have the booth data, we can sum up the totals by vote type. This chart shows how the vote has split between each vote category from 2006 to 2025 (seven elections).
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“Ordinary” votes refers to votes cast within the voter’s home electorate on election day. The biggest drop in ordinary votes was in 2021, when there was a drop of 8.1%, but this election was the second-biggest drop, with the ordinary voting rate dropping by 6.3%.
It’s worth noting that the 2025 results includes a category for “Postal (Telephone Votes)”, and a separate category for the other postal votes. I have treated these as telephone votes, not postal votes, because they are not the same thing, but it’s not clear to me whether the postal votes category in the past included telephone votes without differentiation.
The postal vote has dropped from 8.3% to 7.3%, but if the 2024 results included telephone votes, then it’s actually an increase for the combined category from 8.3% to 9.3%.
Still the main story, which we’ve seen a lot, is that postal voting is roughly steady while pre-poll voting takes up most of the growth.
This is also an opportunity to take the Tasmanian, Western Australian and federal elections and try to compare trends across Australia’s elections.
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It’s hard to make a fair comparison because each state treats votes differently. South Australia, for example, lumps all non-ordinary votes into one big pile. The easiest way to make a like-with-like comparison is just to compare the numbers of ordinary in-electorate votes as a share of total turnout.
Even this isn’t perfect, though, because the Western Australian Electoral Commission in all their wisdom made the baffling decision to not separately report election day votes and pre-poll votes. For votes cast within the electorate, there is one pre-poll booth for each electorate (excluding a handful of seats with no local pre-poll booth), but that booth was also used on election day. Absent pre-poll votes have also been lumped in with absent election day votes. For this purpose, I have excluded all votes cast at those pre-poll centres (including whatever votes were cast on the day) from my ‘ordinary’ category as my best way to make a fair comparison, but it’s not great. Hopefully the WAEC will not repeat this in 2029.
The other problem with making comparisons is that elections don’t happen on the same schedule. Federal elections happen on a three-year cycle, and Tasmanian elections have been happening much more regularly since 2018.
Tasmania has continuously had the highest rate of ordinary voting, but the 2025 election had a lower rate than the 2022 South Australian election. It seems likely that SA will be lower in 2026, but it hasn’t yet.
Western Australia actually saw more ordinary voting in 2025, and it was probably a bit higher once you factor in election day votes cast at pre-poll booths. But in the federal election, as well as last year’s Queensland and Tasmanian elections, we saw the second post-COVID elections produce a slowing down of the trend away from election day but no reversal.
Perhaps Tasmania is simply catching up with the rest of the country, but apart from the exception of Western Australia we are yet to see any state turn around these trends.
Finally, I thought I would extend some charts that show the vote for the main party groups by the main vote types.
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Probably the most interesting development is how the postal vote has shifted. This is now Labor’s strongest vote type, while it no longer has a pro-Liberal lean. Labor has also done relatively better on the pre-poll vote than they used to do.
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The Greens have always done best on the absent vote, but that gap has widened over the last two elections.