Presumeably most of the readership will have appreciated the flippancy of the previous post however there is some interesting social trends to be found in the patterns of informal voting in Australia. For those of you who are the poorer for not being Australian, Australia has mandatory voting at state and federal level, that is every Australian citizen of voting age, with some minor exceptions, is required by law to vote at the election. Practically, this means you must show up at the polling point, have your name ticked off, get a piece of paper which you can do a number of things with.

1. Decide who you want to vote for and, hopefully, fill it out correctly.
2. Decide who you want to vote for and stuff up the form
3. Decide not to vote and leave the form blank or fill it out with rubbish.

It is relatively easy to distinguish between the latter two.

Stuff ups are classified as follows

"Number 1 only", "Non-Sequential" - Incorrect numbering on the ballot paper
"Ticks & Crosses" - Incorrect approach to completing the ballot paper
"Voter Identified" - Including identifying material on ballot paper

Protests are as follows
"Blank"
"Marks and scribbles"
"Slogans obsuring numbers"

A comparison between the last election in 2004 and previous elections shows increasing percentage of informal votes. So are we as a population, in fact, getting dumber or, at least, more careless?

The significant shift in informal ballot papers is in the "Marks and Scribbles" category, which could be presumed to be random defacing of the ballot paper which rose nationally from 6.93% of the informal votes to 14.27%. The main contributors to this trend were ACT, Tas and Vic.

Additionally, whilst "Slogans Obscuring The Numbering" represents only a small percentage of the overall informal votes the percentage trebled from 0.26% to 0.83%. Once again the huge movers in this category were ACT and Tas. We could speculate that the Tasmanian phenonemon arose the forest policy curfuffle that resulted from Latham's 11th hour announcement of an $800 million plan to protect 240,000 hectares of old-growth Tasmanian forest, which workers there saw as a jobs sellout. Followed by Howards counter offer of $250 million spent to protect 190,000 hectares of old-growth Tasmanian.

The ACT is more mysterious. I know you lot don't comment on The Green Man much but I would welcome speculation on what had made the people of the ACT so angry that the number of informal ballots arising from slogans on the paper jumped ten fold, from .05% to .58%.

Source