Informal votes affect election outcome

Updated February 08, 2013 19:12:49

25-year-old Akram Azimi fled Afghanistan with his family in 1999 at the height of a bloody civil war, destined for a better life in Australia.

Having experienced first-hand the conflict and political instability of his homeland, he's grateful to have found refuge in a nation where citizens are entitled to choose who runs their country.

"I grew up in a country where democracy was a foreign concept, where a vote was a thing almost mythologised because it was so far removed from our immediate reality," he said.

"When I came to Australia, I realized every person has a vote, every person has a voice.

"When I found out that some young people had actually been shirking that responsibility, that made me really sad."

Last month, Mr Azimi was awarded the Young Australian of the Year for his philanthropic work with young Indigenous people and for his efforts to raise public awareness about disability issues. He has also joined the WA Electoral Commission's campaign to reduce informal voting and boost involvement, especially among young people, in the lead up to the March state election.

"I think as young people we have this incredibly unhelpful self-fulfilling prophecy, we somehow have got this notion in our heads that our voice doesn't count, somehow the politicians will not listen to our votes and our opinions. So what do we do? We completely disengage, we don't vote or don't vote properly, and we don't have our voice heard," Mr Azimi said.

The Electoral Commission estimates that there are 225,000 eligible Western Australian who are not enrolled to vote, of those 55,000 are people aged 18 to 25.

Result changing

Encouraging people to enrol and turn up to vote is only half the battle.

At the 2008 state election, more than 61,000 voters did not fill out the ballot paper properly. Their votes were deemed "informal" and not included in the count.

"So, having made the effort to turn out, these electors thereafter had no influence over the election outcome," WA Electoral Commissioner Warwick Gately said.

Mr Gately says the number of informal votes in 2008 could have swung the results of 12 lower house seats, or 20 per cent of the legislative assembly, and changed the outcome of the election.

Effectively, this means that in 12 WA districts, the number of spoilt votes far outweighed the winning margin.

For example, the seat of Riverton was WA's tightest contest in 2008 with a margin of only 64 votes. But 1004 votes were not counted because the ballot papers had not been filled out correctly.

The seats of Albany and Forrestfield also had high numbers of informal votes. In Forrestfield there was a margin of 98 votes, yet 1,394 informal votes were cast.

"With no single party winning enough seats to govern outright, the formation of government after the last election could have been very different had these electors marked their ballot papers correctly," Mr Gately said.

The seats of Girrawheen, Nollamara, Cockburn and Bassendean topped the list of spoilt votes, registering between 1,400 and 1,600 each. Research indicates that districts containing a large number of migrants with poor English proficiency correlates strongly with informal voting rates.

About a third of all informal votes were deliberate but it appears the rest can be attributed to a poor understanding of English, or difficulty interpreting the instructions.

"Language may be a difficulty, understanding the voting process may also be a difficulty, there's also the challenge where you have a lot of candidates and it becomes complex to fill out the form," Mr Gately said.

"Those that deliberately spoil the ballot paper are very difficult to break through to.

"I'm trying to get through to the other group."

No excuse

24-year-old Australian Netball player, Caitlin Bassett, has also joined the campaign to bolster involvement in the election.

"We're really lucky living here in Australia," she said.

"Women in the past have fought really hard to get the vote, and we're lucky to live in a country where we have the right to vote.

"It's really important if we have that right, that we use it properly.

"I want to encourage as many people out there to have their say because we ultimately get to choose who runs our country and makes decisions for our future."

With the convenience of the internet at our fingertips, Caitlin says there is no excuse not to enrol.

"I think there's the perception that it's really hard to vote, but it's not. We've got the internet these days, there's really no excuse for ignorance about voting and politics."

The Electoral Commission will be mailing out 1.4 million letters and personalised "EasyVote" cards this month, with instructions on how to fill out the ballot paper correctly.

The letter will contain information in 10 languages.

The cut-off date for enrolments is February the 14th.

Topics: elections, state-parliament, perth-6000, wa

First posted February 08, 2013 17:19:58