The trend of voters choosing to cast their votes has been progressing for a long time, but there was a major shift in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic moved a lot more voters away from casting their votes on election day.
The 2020 Queensland council elections were the first elections in Australia after the start of the pandemic, and there was a massive change in how people voted.
In this post I’ll run through the change in those trends over two decades, and the latest information about the numbers of people casting an early vote. This early voting data suggests there will be a decline in the numbers of people casting a pre-poll and postal vote this year, but not a particularly dramatic one consisting the big change in 2020.
This first chart shows the share of votes that were cast using each voting method. This is shown as a proportion of enrolment, which allows us to compare it with the data we’re currently receiving for the 2024 election.
Around 70% of enrolment had been cast as ordinary election day votes from 2000 to 2008. It declined gradually in 2012 and 2016, but collapsed in 2020. Barely 20% of voters cast an ordinary election day vote, just slightly more than the number of postal voters, and less than the number of pre-poll voters.
There was also a decline in the overall turnout in 2020 to under 80%.
The trend in turnout has not all been in the same direction, but in the long run it has been downward.
So with this information, what can we learn from the 2024 data?
The ECQ has published daily data on the number of pre-poll votes cast, and the number of postal votes returned. They’ve also published the number of postal vote applications, which is always larger than the number of postal votes recorded, since some voters either do not vote or choose to use a different method. Unfortunately we don’t have the equivalent data from 2020 so it’s hard to make a like-with-like comparison.
155,009 postal vote applications have been requested, which adds up to 18.3% of enrolment. This is lower than the 19.8% who cast a pre-poll vote in 2020, but still much higher than the 10.2% who cast a postal vote in 2016. As of Monday, 7.5% of enrolled voters had returned a postal vote, but this number will continue to grow.
Pre-polling is open for two weeks. As of the end of Monday 11 March, 10.7% of the electorate had cast a pre-poll vote. Usually more pre-poll votes are cast in week two, but the current trend suggests pre-polling will be less than the 22.8% in 2020, but still a lot higher than the 11.1% in 2016.
Both of these trends suggest a small decline in postal and pre-poll voting, but still much closer to 2020 numbers than pre-COVID data.
If you assume a slight increase in turnout and a slight decline in postal and pre-poll votes, the increase in ordinary votes wouldn’t be close to enough to return to 2016 levels.
It seems like voters with a taste of early voting mostly like doing it, and come back to do it again. While the extremes of the early pandemic are unlikely to be repeated again, the shift away from early voting, accelerated by the pandemic, isn’t going away.