As has become a regular story, there was an uptick in voters choosing to vote using other methods than turning up at a regular polling place to vote at the last Tasmanian state election.
Tasmania’s voters have been less likely to switch away from election day voting than in most other jurisdictions, but the direction of travel is the same.
Just under two thirds of voters in 2021 cast their votes at a polling place in their electorate. There was a slight uptick in postal voting, but pre-poll voting almost doubled.
It’s also worth looking at the relative strengths of the parties in each vote type.
This chart shows the Liberal and Labor votes for the four main vote types.
The Labor primary vote has tended to converge to the same point over the last three elections. The Labor primary vote in the ordinary vote was 7.4% than the pre-poll vote in 2006, but it had narrowed to just 3% in 2014, and 1.1% in 2021.
The Liberal vote has widened, but this is primarily due to the poor Liberal performance with the absent or Out of Division category. The Liberal pre-poll vote was 3.8% higher than the Liberal ordinary vote in 2006, but it had narrowed to a 3.4% gap in 2021.
Generally the Labor vote is higher in the ordinary and absent votes, and Liberal vote is higher on pre-poll and postal votes.
The Greens vote used to do better on the pre-poll vote, but as the pre-poll vote has grown it has become less positive for the Greens. Postal voting has consistently been the worst vote type for the Greens.
So what do we know about the voting trends in 2024? We don’t have daily figures, but Kevin Bonham tweeted the figures as of Tuesday night.
37,000 prepolls and 13,000 postals received as of yesterday. (45K prepolls one day later in 2021 so similar) #politas
— Kevin Bonham (@kevinbonham) March 20, 2024
That would translate to 9.1% of enrolment in pre-poll votes, and 3.2% of enrolment in postal votes. In comparison, 17.7% of enrolment voted at pre-poll in 2021 along with 6.8% voting via postal votes. Based on those numbers, I suspect we’re on track for similar numbers of pre-poll and postal votes to 2021.
This looks like more evidence that the changes in voting trends at the first post-COVID elections in each jurisdiction aren’t reversing. Like in Brisbane, the big increases in early voting seem to largely be holding steady.
Finally, this chart shows the proportion of voters who cast their vote via the ordiinary method of voting for the six states and federal elections since 2005. In the 2005-2007 period, they were all very closely clustered together, between 77.8% and 83.9% using the ordinary method.
The states gradually diverged from each other, but all in a downward trend, right up to the 2017-2019 period.
In the 2020-23 period, every state had its first post-COVID election, and every state saw an accelerated decline. Victoria had consistently had the worst rates of ordinary voting, but Queensland (the first state to hold a COVID election) passed Victoria.
Through it all, Tasmania has been the state that has seen the least change in voting trends.