One Twitterer to-day - Election Day for all Australians - tweeted
"I love the smell of democracy. It smells like sausages." And so it does. Because, you see, no polling booth is complete without at least one or most of the following: a sausage sizzle; a cake stall; a cold drink stall; a jumble or garage sale.
And here is what the 1st Vermont Scout Group did when their building was used as a Polling Booth in the seat of Deakin to-day.
Apart from the sausage sizzle, you must have nice smiling and friendly
booth workers from the various political parties
to hand you a how to vote ticket.
There are various ways of taking a how-to-vote ticket.
Some people come in waving all tickets away.
These people might be very secretive voters who won't tell.
Some might be "I know how I'm voting" type voters
who can't be bothered with any assistance.
Then there are some who will take everyone's how-to-votes.
Some of these are environmentally sound and
return them to the booth workers on exiting the polling place.
Still others, and that tends to be me, just take tickets from
the party/ies they will be voting for.
And here are some of the friendly booth-workers at Vermont.
Then there is the queue. The line-up is rarely long.
And for what are we waiting?
We are waiting to go across the room to the tables
to get our ballot papers from polling workers.
So that this occurs in an orderly fashion,
there is a guide. He is standing behind the "Wait here" sign.
When we get to one of the polling workers,
we are asked:
Name and address
and
Have you voted already to-day?
Voting early and often is not on at all.
We are then crossed off the electoral roll
and given two ballot papers:
a pale green one for the House of Representatives
a very large (lots of candidates) white one for the Senate.
We then go here ......
...... to complete our ballot papers in private and in pencil.
We then cross back and place the ballot papers in their respective boxes.
A simple process taking, I suppose, about ten to fifteen minutes of our time.
At the close of polling,
House of Representative ballot papers are then counted.
Senate votes are forwarded to the electoral office for counting later.
House of Representatives results are unofficially announced and updated during the evening.
This is in spite of fact that all votes won't have been counted -
pre-polling votes (for those who won't be in their electorate);
absentee votes; and postal votes are counted last.
So the nation will know on the night which party will form government -
except in the closest of close races.
The two major parties in Australia are:
the
Liberals (equivalent of America's Republicans) who
with the
National Party (a small agriculturally based party) form 'The Coalition'
and the
Aside from these, the other significant party is the
Greens -
an environmentally based party.
The Greens have never won a seat in the House of Reps at a general election.
They do hold a small number of seats in the Senate because of the voting system.
At this election, the Greens are hoping to gain additional senators
and their first House of Reps seat in the seat of Melbourne.
So as you can see, Networkers from overseas,
voting runs very smoothly in Australia.
Our voting is not computerised -
except for those with a visual disability.
We don't even use ball-point pens.
Just a plain ordinary lead pencil does.
This is the largest polling booth in the whole world - and
my nephew can't speak highly enough of how
proceedings were run there.
And to complete the picture of how things are done in The Land of Oz, I thought I would include the review of a television show published in the A2 section of The Age to-day. The review does not refer to to-day's election but it does make a strong political point. In fact, it could be required reading if Tony Abbott and the Liberals win government to-day.
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From Twitter:
Just voted. There were no militias or suicide bombings. There were sausages and a cake stand. Voting in Australia is awesome.
