Pre-polling doesn’t prove democracy is in decline

If you were a naysayer, the unprecedented level of pre-poll voting for this year’s federal election, could be yet another entry in the folder marked ‘the failure of democracy’.

Anecdotally, there is a sense of exhaustion with this election campaign. No doubt in part this stems from the feeling of perpetual campaigning and inherent instability of minority government — something Australia has experienced several times in recent years.

Though neither convenience nor frustration are legitimate reasons to pre-poll in Australia, in the current environment it is perhaps easy to understand why increasing numbers of voters choose to effectively opt out of the election early and pre-poll.

AEC data compiled by the parliamentary library shows that, with 12 days to go to the election, pre-polling had almost doubled over 2016. Nor is the historical trend promising in this regard: pre-polling seems to be increasing exponentially, having almost doubled at this same stage in each of the previous three elections.

But an increase in pre-polling is not, by itself, inherently negative.

There is no doubt that nearly two million voters casting their vote prior to the last week of the campaign will have an effect on future campaigns.

Parties will have to lay out more of their election platform earlier in the campaign, which will allow both for greater analysis of the issues in the media, and for the parties to more robustly test each other’s claims and costings.

It will also reduce the effectiveness of baseless scare campaigns launched in the last week of the campaign, where they can be difficult to combat with facts. It is bound to make the leadership debates more interesting as well.

There is merit in everyone voting on the same day, in possession of the same facts, but there is also something to the idea that voters will form a fuller picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the parties’ platform over the course of three years. Not every last minute decision is a sound one.