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Australian voter turnout in July election lowest in 90 years

Xinhua, August 9, 2016 Adjust font size:

Australia recorded its lowest voter turnout at last month's Federal Election since compulsory voting was introduced in 1925.

According to a report in Fairfax Media publications on Tuesday, 1.4 million eligible Australians, representing 9 percent of voters, failed to cast a vote on July 2 for the lower house of Australian parliament, the House of Representatives election.

In what became one of the closest elections in Australia's history, the turnout was the worst since only 59 percent of the population voted in the 1922 general election, prompting the introduction of compulsory voting from 1925 onwards.

Voting in the Senate, the upper house of parliament, was slightly better than the House of Representatives with 8.1 percent of people failing to lodge a vote in the July election.

A spokesperson from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) told Fairfax that the election coinciding with school holidays and being in the middle of winter could be responsible for the poor turnout.

The spokesperson also said that voters casting absentee votes (a vote cast by someone who is unable to attend a polling station in the electorate where they live), incorrectly identifying which electorate they were enrolled and thus casting a vote in an electorate in which they are ineligible to do so could account for the turnout.

Those votes cast by absentee voters would not have counted as a formal vote for the lower house but their Senate ballots would have been valid, possibly accounting for the discrepancy.

Pre-eminent election analyst Antony Green said the AEC enrolling people using information from other government agencies without notifying the people could have contributed to the low turnout.

"You end up enrolling people who tried to avoid voting for years," Green told Fairfax.

The incumbent center-right Liberal National Party (LNP) led by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull won the election by a narrow margin, securing the bare minimum 76 lower house seats required to form government.

First time non-voters will be charged a 15 U.S. dollar penalty while repeat offenders have to pay 38 dollars. Endit