I was in primary school when I first learned about preferential voting. On a school field trip to Canberra, amidst the chaotic scientific highs of Questacon and the freezing cold air at the top of the Telstra Tower, we visited Australian Parliament House. There, tucked away in one of the small education rooms, a kind woman walked us through how preferential voting worked.
She had these stacks of fake ballots, and she laid out eight baskets in front of us. In small groups, we’d rotate between counting the ballots and being scrutineers. We spread out all of the ballots in their allocated first preferences, counted the preferences, and discovered that no one had passed the 50 per cent minimum for election. We recounted the ballots with the smallest total votes, and eventually, after several rounds of redistribution, we had a winner.
The system sounded so complex, but was incredibly simple in execution.
My mum has been a political staffer for most of her working life, so I’ve witnessed many elections from the sidelines. Days covered in sunscreen, handing out how-to-votes. Hours spent listening to gossip trickle down from her colleagues, as she scrutineered in a secluded room. Minutes cheering alongside her when the elections were hard-earned and won.
I’ve always been surrounded by politics at home. Turning 18 was exhilarating for me, not just because I could drink legally, but because I could become an organ donor and also register to vote.
It has always been drilled into me that voting is not only a right, but a privilege.
So it always comes as a surprise when I hear, from either side of the political aisle, that an individual would willingly choose to donkey or informally vote in an election.
How does one donkey vote? It’s simple. A donkey vote is a vote in which someone just numbers the ballots 1-10 (or however many choices there are) from the top down. Donkey votes were propagated by the era of the preference deal. Before the 2016 Senate voting amendments, individuals would only need to preference a single party, and that party would create internal agreements with other parties as to where that vote would land. By chronologically numbering the ballot, it was believed that this would either be an obviously invalid vote, or at a minimum, mess with these so-called ‘group voting tickets’.
The first sentiment is false: a donkey vote is technically a real vote, which means any donkey votes count towards the final election. Also, as an act of political protest, it doesn’t hold the same power it used to. Currently, above-the-line votes in the Senate require a minimum of six preferences, and preference ‘deals’ don’t affect ballots beyond a party’s ‘How To Vote’ handout. Even if a donkey vote did have substantial political power at that time, it certainly doesn’t hold the same power now. Your vote, as it stands, is the most powerful tool you have to nominate your political preferences.
A purposefully informal vote (any ballot which is intentionally not valid) is not quite a donkey vote. Yet, I leave it in this umbrella. Leaving a form blank, putting indeterminate scribbles on the ballot, drawing a massive penis or vagina over the names of the candidates: all of these are forms of individual ‘resistance’ to the electoral system, one might say.
Perhaps you believe yourself to be a conscientious objector to the federal political machine. Perhaps you feel no one party truly represents you and your values. Perhaps, somewhere deep down, you earnestly believe that the giant phallus you scribble on your vote is going to be seen by some scrutineer in your local primary school’s hall, and that person will pause and think “wow, maybe politics really is just a giant penis”, and suddenly everything will be right with the world.
That’s not how this actually works, though. It is not only a privileged statement to say that not every country in the world gives their people the right to vote, let alone mandates truer democratic representation through compulsory voting, but it is also true statement. It is spitting in the face of decades of suffrage movements to discard your chance to elect the people who will represent your electorate, and your country.
Let’s not call it a donkey vote anymore. Donkeys are fun animals and they don’t deserve the disrespect of the title of donkey vote. I love donkeys. A ‘donkey’ vote is a term that is filled with unearned whimsy. At best, it is a misinformed political action which shits on our freedom of democracy. At worst, it is ignorance.
Let’s call it what it is: a coward’s vote.
Perhaps in a voting system like the United States, where you can only vote for a single candidate for President in a first-past-the-post style, it could be more justifiable to abstain from voting. Any vote for a third party is considered ‘wasted’, and there is an almost fatalistic truth that political control cannot meaningfully be removed from the two major parties.
In our current system, compulsory preferential voting means that you can support smaller parties or independents, you can force us into diverse minority governments, and you can provide essential data to both that party and to the wider community about the kinds of policies and personalities the Australian person desires to vote for. That vote will still be real and valid when it finally trickles down to the person who is elected.
Most egregious of all, beyond the individual who believes that their donkey vote is a march against the ‘facade’ of democracy, is the kind of voter who will wilfully abstain from voting, then believe that they have a say in the actions of our Parliament. Brandishing their Facebook posts and loud opinions like medieval peasants shooing a wild boar, it is the individuals who actively choose to pay a fine over voting that truly engage in political hypocrisy and cowardice.
Let’s move beyond the conversation that everyone should vote because they get a fun democracy sausage. Everyone should vote because it is a civic duty. Everyone should vote because it is our federal politicians and parties who represent us domestically and internationally. Everyone should vote because it is your rights, livelihoods, and family on the line.
There is no way to be truly apolitical or exempt from the political system if you live in so-called Australia. It is imperfect, and it is understandable to believe that this institution of government, which fails to truly recognise something as simple as the sovereignty of its Aboriginal people, cannot be a truly representative institution. However, whilst it is an imperfect system, it is still ours, and ours alone to change.
Here’s a fun fact: you can draw a penis on your ballot, and as long as it’s not in any of the boxes, and the numbers are filled in correctly, that is still a real vote. If you choose not to vote because you’re not politically engaged, you can take a few moments to use the dozens of tools available to you to find a vote that truly represents you, and also still draw that tiny penis which brings you such childhood whimsy.
Enacting and incentivising change outside of the Government system is vital, but once every three or four years, casting a vote within the system is actually quite important. Don’t let the assumption that other people will ‘do the right thing’ while you abstain be the reason you don’t vote. Whether you investigate the potentially hundreds of below-the-line Senate candidates to determine your true order of political preference, or you adhere to the guided numbering for the House of Reps of the single party you believe in, make sure your vote counts when you go to the ballots this election.
If you do choose to vote informally, don’t take the donkey’s reputation down with you. It doesn’t deserve that indignity.
