Polling Booth Official - The Inside Word!

The only thing people hate more than their least desired party winning an election, is if no one wins the election. On March 15, I spoke to a Liberal member, handing out how to vote cards in the district of Wait, who said they honestly didn’t care who won, so long as we ended up with a government leading in the majority. Well we were all in for a shock, not only did her party not win, we also have a minority government at the hands of Geoff Brock, the Member for Frome (read Member for Port Pirie and surrounding areas).

To become a polling booth official, you know the people who cross your name off and give you your ballot papers when you come to vote? Yeah well to become one of those people you have to have training, have a passion for reciting the alphabet at warp seeds and want to initial your name over and over…. All day long. There is a lot you have to be responsible for as well, I mean just look at Western Australia; someone, somewhere along the lines stuffed up and lots and lots of ballots were lost, and now the entire state has to go back and vote for the Senate on April 5. I know some people will wonder what the big deal is, but if less than 20 people had voted differently in the Senate, 2 different people would have been elected Senators… 20 people!

The day started at 6.30am arriving at the polling booth to help set up the little booths you actually vote in, as well as to assemble the boxes for the ballots to go into. There was a palpable hub of energy inside the booth as we knew that the day ahead, was going to be long but very exciting. Polling started at 8am, and as we watched the seconds ticking away we could see the queue stretching back almost 300 meters!  When we first opened the doors my job was to sort the people who were from the District and who were voting outside the district, this was important because if you don’t vote in your district you have to do a Declaration vote as opposed to an Ordinary vote.

As the hours wore on, I became friends with the people handing out how to vote cards for all the different political parties. You hear horror stories of people refusing to talk to other people from opposing parties, and even abusing voters for not taking a how to vote card….. That didn’t happen where I was, instead they had a party, the Liberals supplied the TimTams, the ALP supplied lunch, the Xenophon Group looked old and the Greens looked scared of talking to people.

Being in the heartland of Wait (Liberal Member Martin Hamilton-Smiths district) it was almost comical to pick out the non-liberal voter, and as the day wore on, the how to vote card handouters engaged in a game of spot the ALP/Liberal/Green voter with surprising accuracy.

When the doors closed at the end of the day the real fun began. Due to the increasing risks associated with counting votes after a long day of handing out ballots, the counting is done in steps to avoid any mishaps. Starting with the House of Assembly ballots, unfolding and separating the formal from the informal votes. While this is going on, other people are unfolding the huge, ginormous Legislative Council white papers. The House of Assembly ballots are then sorted into piles (the amount of piles depends on how many people are contesting the seat) grouped together by first preference votes, and then are handed over to the Polling Booth Manager to distribute preferences until there are only two parties left (usually Liberal and Labor but not always). Counting then can begin for the Legislative Council separating votes into formal and informal, above and below the line until you get piles from A to X up and down the floor. While the night did not produce a conclusive result, the experiences and lessons learnt from a day on a polling booth will enlighten even the most apathetic voter to the sacredness of voting and elections.