Steep rise in postal votes could delay results in closely fought seats in 2022 election, AEC says

The Australian Election Commission is recording a steep rise in postal vote applications so far during the campaign, a trend which could delay results in closely fought seats.

Real-time data shows the AEC has received 1.54m postal vote applications already in the election campaign. It received about 1.5m in the entire 2019 election campaign.

Analysis by Damon Muller, an elections expert with the parliamentary library, suggests the trend cannot entirely be explained by increases to the population since 2019.

The number of postal vote applications as a proportion of enrolled voters is also higher than past elections, though not as significantly.

The AEC media director, Evan Ekin-Smyth, said comparisons between different elections had been complicated by the way the major parties were collecting and submitting data about postal votes sent in through their various platforms, which was making the analysis of data in real-time difficult.

Ekin-Smyth said the AEC was initially surprised at the scale of the increase.

Postal votes have remained relatively static in recent elections, hovering at about 8% of total votes, the AEC said.

Ekin-Smyth said Covid and the way political parties are distributing postal voting forms to Australians this campaign could explain the change.

Labor have set up howtovote.org.au and the Liberals have established postal.vote to target voters. Neither site has significant party branding. Political parties are also exempt from privacy law, meaning there is no visibility or certainty on how they are using the data collected from postal votes submitted through their platforms.

Any additional postal voting puts more pressure on the count and has the potential to delay results in close seats.