Australia's democratic system is unlike any other on Earth

Australia's democratic system is unlike any other on Earth.

As a nation, we sort of vaguely understand this, and take a generalised pride in the triennial democracy sausage, and the beige, competent omnipresence of the Australian Electoral Commission.

But the itemised list of our peculiarities, and the tales that twine around the getting of them at various points along the life-span of our young Federation — just 125 years old next year! — is worth reviewing, if you have a moment.

Because while we tend to think of our federal system — the vast bureaucracy that radiates across the continent from Canberra (a city built because we couldn't agree whether Sydney or Melbourne should be the capital, and opted instead to build a new home for it that would be inconvenient for everyone) as static and rules-based, the truth is that it changes all the time. 

We didn't always have compulsory voting, for example. Or our unique system of full preferential voting. And for half of our nation's life-span — HALF — we excluded the enrolment of Australia's first people.

Each of these bumps and crenellations has a complex human backstory. So let's dive in.

Enter preferential voting

When voting to elect a government in the House of Representatives, voters in single-member electorates rank every candidate in order of preference, numbering every box. Australia is the only nation to use this system coast-to-coast, though various US states are now experimenting with it and Electoral Commissioner Jeff Pope points out that Tokelau, a South Pacific cluster of coral atolls with a population of 1,500 and a tiny measure of fame for its reef-swimming pigs, has adopted full preferential voting and is using it quite happily for its own triennial elections.

Preferential voting engenders a complex count process, unlike the first-past-the-post system favoured by most democracies worldwide, in which voters select just one candidate and whoever gets the most votes is declared elected. Under preferential voting, it's possible for one candidate to get the largest number of first-preference votes, but be overtaken by another when full preferences are distributed.

Mathematicians have long championed preferential voting as the fairest way of gathering the nuanced views of an electorate. Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematics professor better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was so enthused about preferential voting that in 1876 he published a pamphlet recommending it (his complex model joined other Dodgson inventions, including a fairer model of play for the Wimbledon tennis tournament, a device for making notes in the dark, and an early form of Scrabble).

Ranking the schmucks

Britain scorned his design. And did so again in 2011, when the UK had a national referendum on whether to adopt preferential voting and it sank like a stone. Possibly owing to then-prime minister David Cameron's zero-star review; he described Australia's system, variously, as "unfair … obscure … undemocratic" and "crazy". 

And yet, we persist! Compulsory preferential voting is why our polling stations are surrounded by snowdrifts of how-to-vote cards come election day. Nobody else does that, and from Cameron's horrified account one infers just how unusual the practice appears to foreign eyes:

"In Australia, voters are lectured at polling stations by party apparatchiks with 'how to vote' cards," Cameron said during the 2011 referendum campaign.

"These cards are the product of number-crunching by party pollsters, telling people the exact order in which to rank each candidate. That's what politics becomes: people not voting so much in droves, but as drones."

The defence of preferential voting, of course, is that it allows voters to speak to their politicians in more than one tone of voice.

"There is something about being able to register not just your assent but your dissent in the same process that is, I think, ingenious," says Monash University politics lecturer Waleed Aly.

Adds former prime minister Kevin Rudd: "It forces you to think, and then commit to: 'Which of these schmucks do I really hate the most? Which of these schmucks do I hate second most?' Through to: 'Here is the person that I could perhaps put up with, if my preferred candidate number one can't get elected'."

"Preferential voting, I think, has served us pretty well," says another former prime minister, Tony Abbott.

"First past the post gives us, if you like, the most liked candidate; preferential voting gives us the least disliked candidate and given that Australian democracy has been a substantial success under preferential voting, I don't see any powerful reason to change it."

Why do we have it?

Why do we have preferential voting when the rest of the world doesn't? It's not because of Lewis Carroll's advocacy, as appealing as that explanation sounds. (How fun would it have been, for Australia's electoral system to be designed by a man whose most famous character, Alice, feared ending up in Australia if she ventured too far down the rabbit hole?)

Australia's specific model for preferential voting owes more to Murray Nansen, a Melbourne mathematician.

But the reasons for its introduction in 1918 were less about fairness and tone and schmuck-ranking; alas, than they were about venal political self-interest. Like many of our electoral twiddles over the years, preferential voting was pioneered by a man desperate to save his own personal bacon.

Billy Hughes was our seventh prime minister. Historians, shuttling between adjectives for a man who as prime minister defected from the Labor Party he led and then reinvented himself in office as leader of the conservative Nationalists, often settle on "mercurial". "Brilliant", "impulsive" and "irascible" also are applicable to the man who invented the forerunner of the Australian Federal Police in a fit of rage when a rabble-rouser threw an egg at him in Queensland.

Hughes's government rammed a bill enacting preferential voting through the parliament just weeks before a by-election it looked very much like losing.

Hughes's Nationalist Party was under threat from the emerging farmers' movement, traditional conservative voters who were not entirely convinced by Hughes's phonebox quick-change from socialist Labor guy to conservative scion.

And the farmers were starting to run candidates against him which, under first-past-the-post voting, presented an existential threat. If the conservative vote was split between Nationalists and farmers, Labor could skate through the middle and win.

The legislation passed, Labor was foiled at the by-election, and Hughes went on to win the following year's election. Preferential voting proved a saviour for the anti-Labor forces. A century later, however, it worked the other way around for another conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison. In 2022, he lost government thanks to a swathe of previously safe Liberal seats in which Liberal MPs received the highest number of first-preference votes but were overwhelmed by independent candidates after full distribution of preferences.

Making voting compulsory 

Around the world, only a handful of democracies enforce compulsory voting. Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador — they're not among the usual cohort with which Australia identifies. North Korea also enforces compulsory voting, with turnout near 100 per cent. But in North Korea there's only one name on the ballot, which kind of ruins the point.

Australia staged the first compulsory voting election in the English-speaking world in 1915, in Queensland. Again, the main motivation was self-preservation. Conservative Queensland premier and butter magnate Digby Denham — under siege from the union movement — introduced compulsory voting in the hope it would save him.

If moderate business folk and citizens were compelled to vote, he reasoned, he might be able to defray the militant ranks of the industrially organised. The good news? Turnout was close to 90 per cent. The bad news? Denham was smashed. His party was gutted and he lost his own seat. 

The system was adopted nationally in 1924, and Australians have had turnout rates around 90 per cent ever since. By comparison, the UK and the US — the voluntary-voting democracies from which we borrowed most heavily for the design of our own parliament — recorded voter turnouts of 60 per cent and 65.3 per cent respectively at their elections last year.

Former electoral commissioner Tom Rogers says that compulsory voting serves to keep Australian politics from lurching to extremes, and is supported by around 70 per cent of Australians.

"If you have compulsory voting, and it's broadly supported, you'd never get rid of it. If you don't have compulsory voting in the modern era, there's no way that you'd be able to introduce it. So I think we're very fortunate as a society to have had it for so long."

Ensures the most marginalized vote

Judith Brett, historian and author of From Secret Ballot To Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting, says that a big advantage of compulsory voting is that it confers legitimacy to election results.

"But it also ensures that the most marginalised and the poorer people vote. I mean, what we know from studies of voluntary voting, is that the people who don't vote [are] less well-educated, perhaps new ethnic communities, more marginal people, whereas they're more likely to vote with compulsory voting," Brett says.

This, she explains, in turn obliges politicians to include marginalised groups in policy formulation, rather than ignoring them.

"You don't know what the people think if they are not all voting," says Megan Davis, currently at Harvard Law School as a visiting professor and Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair in Australia Studies. "So I've always been proud of it."

But there are downsides, Davis says.

"A lot of political theorists and social scientists say one of the problems with Australia and the kind of lack of civics knowledge and civics education and civics engagement is compulsory voting," she says

"That it's this kind of huge effort people make every three years … they have to vote and that's their energy expended on civics.

"I'm not going to question whether they are right or wrong but it does also make sense, because if you look at some of the OECD testing of Australian students, they are kind of at the lowest of the OECD countries in terms of understanding how to change things in your world, how do you change things in politics and the Americans and the Canadians are all at the top. They understand you have to protest, you have to organise, you have to do this and that."

Our independent electoral authority

It's a strange and nerdy "first". But the creation of an independent, permanent electoral commission in South Australia in 1856 — a body of public servants who ran elections rather than leaving it to partisan forces — was truly groundbreaking.

And it might not have happened, had cantankerous, gout-plagued London barrister Benjamin Boothby not been appointed to the South Australian Supreme Court in 1853. Boothby brought his wife and 12 surviving children with him (the joke was that he brought his own jury). Justice Boothby was an utter debacle as a judge. But his eldest boy William just happened to have a flair for electoral design.

"South Australia had to run its first elections, and he got the job of running [them]," says Judith Brett. "And he has to do it by scratch. They have to get an electoral roll. They then had to run them. And so who's going to actually set up the electoral roll? Local government is very underdeveloped. There's not much of a police force. Many of the able bodied men are over in Victoria hoping to find gold. And so [Boothby] decides that the only solution is to have paid public servants … building the electoral roll and running the elections."

William ran elections in South Australia for 50 years. He reasoned that elections would be fairer if neutral public servants ran them, not politicians. And that electoral rolls needed to be assembled proactively by recruiting voters rather than waiting for them to present themselves. 

His work shaped the electoral system formed at Federation, leading to the forerunner of our present-day Australian Electoral Commission. His father, Benjamin, ended up being sacked by the British parliament and was the last judge sent Down Under by the Colonial Office.

In colonial times the first Australian elections were conducted as per British rules. Only men of property voted, and they did so in public by verbal declaration, as candidates looked on, or bought beers as electoral bribes.

Australia pioneered the more subversive, private method of the secret ballot, which William Boothby perfected with the design idea of boxes next to candidate names, a method that shot round the world. Grover Cleveland in 1888 became the first US president to be elected using the "Australian ballot".

Broad franchise

Australia was the first place in the world where women could both vote and run for parliament. Voting rights for women came about in South Australia thanks to the consistent campaigning of Australian suffragists Catherine Helen Spence and Mary Lee. The part about running for office, though, was accidental. 

A staunch opponent of "Votes for Women", the upper house MP Ebenezer Ward, amended the legislation to add the right to run for parliament, thinking the idea so extreme that it would kill the bill. It didn't — the bill passed, and South Australian women at that moment became the most enfranchised in the world.

When the Federation was formed in 1901, the brand-new Barton government resolved that all adult, non-incarcerated Australians would get the vote. Men, women, property owners or not. This was an extremely progressive stance and would have made the new nation the most fully-enfranchised in the world.

But a last-minute bout of Senate tampering, led by a trenchant WA senator, would change the course of history.

Alexander Matheson, who was outraged at the idea of white women sharing the vote with Aboriginal women, moved an amendment prohibiting, among others, "Aboriginal natives of Australia" and "those of the half-blood" from enrolling to vote.

The amendment was strongly resisted by the government, but support began to spread across the parliament as Matheson claimed that large communities of Aboriginal people in WA would be co-opted by wealthy graziers and "we will be swamped by Aboriginal votes". In the end, fearing the entire bill would be lost, the government surrendered to Matheson and the amendment passed.

'Not an insignificant thing'

While Aboriginal people already on state rolls were permitted to vote, the Franchise Act continued to exclude First Nations people until 1962.

"For the lifetime of our democracy, for almost half of that period, we've excluded Aboriginal people. I mean, that's not an insignificant thing," says Megan Davis.

"We were unable to contribute to debates about laws and policies that absolutely subjugated our people, whether they were land laws, whether they were child removal laws, whether they were stolen wages. It's certainly not something that we talk about a lot, but it's a fact. And that has had the most profound impact upon our people."

The difference between a permanent proud record and a flawed one? A handful of determined individuals whose acts we look back upon now with regret.

The above-listed elements are major parts of our electoral design and history, but there are myriad smaller quirks and oddities that make a closer look at the Australian electoral system a rewarding experience. For instance…

The only bingo-rolling democracy in the world?

The Australian Electoral Commission — the independent authority that administers elections and supervises the neutral drawing of electoral boundaries — is guided by a specific act of parliament. And the Electoral Act goes into extraordinary levels of detail about every step in the process of running an election. It would be rash to claim that we are the only nation in the world that specifically includes bingo rollers in our electoral process, but a casual search doesn't turn up any others.

Once nominations have closed, the AEC conducts a Declaration of Nominations in each of Australia's 150 electorates. According to section 213 of the Act, these must be conducted on the same day, at high noon. A bingo roller and numbered balls are used to determine the order of candidates' names on the ballot. The legislation specifically provides that the person drawing out the balls be blindfolded for the entire process and that members of the public be permitted to have a go at turning the roller. It's extremely precise.

"I think there's something like two-and-a-half pages in the Electoral Act devoted to that act of rolling the cage," says Tom Rogers, former Australian electoral commissioner.

So why not just randomise the draw digitally?

"Where would the fun be in that?" he laughs. "When you've got this fantastic artefact that is so transparent? People are invited to come up and rotate the ballot and they do and they love doing it."

Current Electoral Commissioner Jeff Pope says the AEC retains many analogue procedures because they inspire trust in the system. The AEC is the most trusted public institution in Australia, and retaining that trust is a high organisational priority.

"If we had a randomised computer process, I can guarantee you there would be conspiracy theories and complaints about the code and about the assurance of the system and the bias that sits in the code; that sits behind that, as to how a particular candidate came out on top of a particular ballot paper. Or how they might have come out on top twice in successive elections. It's about avoiding those traps and pitfalls."

From crayons to pencils

The Electoral Act has always mandated that the electoral authority provide writing implements to voters on polling day, as well as a private place to complete the ballot. Hence the foldable cardboard booths that Australians find wherever they vote. For the first 20 years of the federation, Australians were provided with blue crayons and blue pencils. Electoral authorities in each seat were provided with a brown paper package, copiously sealed with wax, containing voting papers and slightly more crayons than one would ordinarily think necessary.

"These crayons are tied up to the bench on which the voting is done," reported Adelaide's Daily Herald in April 1910.

"But no matter how closely they are secured, they vanish on polling day. Voters take fancies to them and cut the string, or carry off, string and all. So there has to be a reserve stock of crayons. For Victoria alone the reserve stock consists of 40 gross of crayons. The public appetite for them would seem to be as insatiable as the official appetite for sealing wax."

Crayons were abandoned, however, in December 1917, when a national plebiscite on conscription (Billy Hughes again) coincided with a ferocious national heatwave.

Reported the Richmond Guardian: "Miss Goodwin, of "Yarra," Coppin-street, maintained her record of being the first woman to vote at every poll since Federation was established … When the voter attempted to mark her ballot paper and the blue crayon bent over as if it were putty, she did not know whether to regard it as a good or bad omen."

Similar scenes afflicted voters all over the country. And after 1919, the first federal election at which the preferential voting system obliged voters to number every box on the ballot rather than just scrawling a cross in one of them, even the blue pencil — unmeltable, yes, but also undeniably stubby — was doomed to extinction.

"Electoral officials stick to the old-fashioned blue pencil, tethered by a string to prevent absent-minded beggars walking off with it," complained Sydney's The Truth in 1922.

"A thick blue pencil was just the thing in the old days when the method of voting was to mark crosses against the names of favoured candidates, but in these preferential voting, when a long list of numbers has to be marked on the ballot paper, the blue pencil is quite unsuitable."

And so we landed at the lead pencil, which has served us ever since. In 2025, the AEC provided around a quarter of a million pencils. Still secured to the booth with string.

The rules are the rules

Every single ballot paper — printed in batches with serial numbers — is electronically tracked by the AEC, which sends 55 million of them around Australia and to embassies around the world. Ballot boxes are strictly sealed until election day, even the pre-poll ones which are collecting ballots weeks before polling day. They are not allowed to be opened by ANYONE until the approved moment for the count to begin. Even when — as happens quite often — people accidentally drop stuff in them when poking their ballot papers in.

"So the number-one foreign object that goes into ballot boxes are wedding rings," says Tom Rogers. "I know it's odd, people race in and I don't know why they are putting their fingers so far into the ballot box but anyway the ring pops in. I don't want to make light of this but it's never just the wedding ring, it's always a very sentimental wedding ring, it might have been owned by the grandmother who is no longer with us. all of those issues. People become very, very demonstrative about that and not wanting to leave the polling place without getting their ring back and of course we can't open, but for pre-poll if they voted on day one of pre-poll they are going to be waiting for two weeks to get rings back."

"So what we do is, particularly a wedding ring, we will mark the ballot box saying there is a wedding ring in here so on the night when that is opened everyone is aware that they will take the details of the individual, but occasionally we have to say, 'Step away from the box'.

"The number-two item is car keys … I remember [one where] the guy said, 'I need my car keys'. I said, 'Well, I'm sorry, we can't give it to you'. He said, 'No, no, no my car is outside in a no standing zone with my kids in the car', and again we couldn't get the keys out of the ballot box."

Rules are rules.

Discouraging the sneaky

Australia's Electoral Act has been changed many times over the years, and changes made to our voting processes well beyond the biggest reforms like compulsory voting in 1924 and preferential voting in 1918. Voting rules change regularly to discourage opportunists. Like the Senate voting rule changes in 2016 to stop minor parties harvesting preferences; ever since then, Australians select six candidates above the line rather than just one. There have been many tweaks to Senate voting, the biggest of which was the introduction of proportional representation in 1949.

Or the abolition of alphabetical ordering of Senate party candidates. This happened after the 1938 election, in which the NSW Labor Party swept the field by running four candidates called Ashley, Arthur, Armstrong and Amour.

Going absolutely everywhere

Federal elections now cost half a billion dollars, thanks to the AEC's obligation to enable Australians to vote no matter where they live. Remote teams are sent out by chopper, boat and four-wheel drive, and every Australian embassy abroad receives voting materials for expatriates. Australians expect a high degree of service from our electoral authority — sometimes, unrealistically high.

"There is a limit to what we can do," says Tom Rogers. "There was a famous case where a woman wrote to me and she was living in a remote village in Spain and was very upset that the AEC didn't personally visit to pick up the ballot. This was genuine, she was really upset and I get it because she really loved democracy… she wanted to vote and of course we pointed at the postal vote but she really thought the AEC should visit every Australian citizen globally to pick up that ballot. So, there is a limit, but the AEC would consider itself probably the electoral commission globally that provides most access to its citizens.

"If I go back though before my time there was a period back in the 80s, for a very brief period we sent some polling officials on cruise ships if the cruise ship was going away for a week over polling day. Obviously that was a very popular task if you were given that, and people still talk about that, why did we get rid of the cruise ship voting?"

Stream all episodes of Annabel Crabb's Civic Duty free on ABC iview from Monday 10 November.