When Victoria went to the polls last November, Michelle Young stayed at home. She was part of making it our lowest turnout rate since 1943.
When Victoria went to the polls last November, Michelle Young stayed at home. She didn’t forget to vote and she wasn’t too busy doing something else, she just couldn’t see a reason to fill out a ballot. She has always voted at past elections and had always voted Labor, but not this time. “What’s the point of voting if they’re not going to be helping people like me?” she says from her Braybrook home. “I’m just waiting for that fine in the mail.
“We are a very strong democracy but we are starting to feel the bite. It is actually frightening and scary.”Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images Young is now enrolled to vote in the newly created electorate of Laverton, which was comfortably won by Labor. At the last state election, 11,408 enrolled voters there didn’t cast a formal ballot.
“A lot of people come to vote to tick names off, so we don’t get the fine,” he says. “I used to vote Labor, now nobody likes Labor anymore, maybe half-half. We have changed.” ABC psephologist Antony Green believes the falling turnout in Victoria has less to do with the mood of voters than the mechanics of the electoral roll. Since 2010, the Victorian Electoral Commission has used direct enrolment to add voters to the roll. Under this top-down recruitment drive, total enrolment has jumped from 90.95 per cent of eligible voters in 2010 to 97.1 per cent in 2022.
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