My Year Without Ricciarelli – Federal Election Polling Assistant

This is a post about my experience as a Polling Assistant at the recent Federal Election. Just another new experience to add to all the others I have enjoyed since hitting the road eight years ago. As I had spare time on my hands and I’m always wanting to learn something new, I decided to “volunteer” to help at the Federal election. “Volunteer” is not strictly correct, as these are paid jobs, employed by the Australian Electoral Commission. However, it is only a casual job for the duration of the election. I responded to advertisements I saw that stated the AEC needed 100,000 people to help run the Federal Election. The application process was very simple, all online, and asked quite a few questions about my skills and qualifications. I nominated the Geradlton town area as the area I was willing to work in and indicated my willingness to work in pre-poll voting centres or election day polling places. After a couple of weeks I recieved my job offer, Polling Assistant at the Mt Tarcoola polling place on election day. After accepting the position, I was sent links to training modules I needed to complete on-line before the polling day. These only took a couple of hours to complete and were quite well done, explaining the various roles and what was required to complete them. The four main roles of a Polling Assistant were:

1. Ordinary vote issuing officer – checking voters off the electoral roll and issuing ballot papers
2. Ballot box guard – Standing by the ballot boxes ensuring votes are placed in the correct box and the locked box is supervised at all times
3. Queue controller – Managing the flow of voters into the polling station and into the voting cubicles
4. Hygiene officer – Covid management, cleaning pencils and voting cubicles regularly

Each Polling station also has an Officer in Charge and a 2IC , as well as a dedicated person for managing absentee voters, interstate voters and others who can’t be located on the roll.

Our work started on the Friday night when we had to set up the Polling Station in the Gym of the local Primary School. There were five of us in attendance and it took a couple of hours to get all the table set up, as well as the voting cubicles, pedestrian barriers etc assembled. Apart from the tables, everything else is delivered as cardboard flat packs and has to be folded together and set out. There were three pallets of flat packs for our small polling station, even the ballot boxes and pencil boxes were constructed from folded cartons. At the end of the election all this cardboard was unfolded and returned to the AEC for recycling, which was quite impressive. We left with the room on Friday night fully set up and ready to go on Saturday morning.

On election day we had to arrive an hour before the polls opened to complete the final set up. This included erecting signage on the school fences and controlling the party spruikers handing out election How To Vote leaflets. There are strict rules for these party spruikers regarding how close they can stand to the entrance of the polling booth and not being allowed to enter the polling booth under any circumstances. Some spruikers were already set up when we arrived, vying for the best spot to hand out their leaflets. Luckily we had a group of quite happy party spruikers who all seemed to get on and respected each others right to provide information to voters. Apparently this is not always the case at some city booths where it can get quite heated at times.

Before the polling booth opened we had to open the ballot paper boxes, kept locked up until the morning of the election and only opened with a witness who had to co-sign off that the ballot paper security protocols were all followed. Likewise the ballot boxes were formally locked with zip ties, after first confirming that the box was empty and locked as per the written procedures. At 8:00am, the polling booth formally opens and the small queue of voters waiting were let in to vote.

The vote issuing officer probably has the most intense job as they have to locate the voters on the roll book and formally cross them off the list. This is done in a very specific way so that the roll books can be computer scanned post election to identify any non voters and voters who may have tried to vote more than once. The issuing officer also has to direct any voters who are from interstate or from other electorates to the absentee voting officer. I was surprised also at how many voters were not on the roll, despite them being confident there were actually enrolled in this electorate. These voters were also sent to the absentee officer and usually allowed to vote, but their vote was kept separate in a special envelope for further investigation. Likewise absentee votes were placed in special envelopes to be sent on to the main electoral office in Perth.

I spent most of my time as a Queue Controller and Ballot Box Guard. I prefered this role as I could enjoy some interaction with voters as they waited their turn to vote. The polling place we were in was a typical suburban area in a regional town, with a broad cross section of the local community. The vast majority of people were happy and seemed pleased to be able to take part in the democratic process. There were a very small number of people who seemed agitated about the whole process, but overall it was a happy experience. I was asked by a few people how they should vote, but we were not allowed to give any advice apart from explaining the voting process. We only had one security incident with a voter who wanted the party spruiker to come inside and help him vote. He took a bit of persuasion to calm him down, but ended well. It was a very long day, and I was on my feet virtually the entire time. Polls were open for 10 hours and the polling place had to be fully functional the entire time. Luckily we had one extra person in our polling place so we could get a short break every now and again. The busiest time was the morning, followed by “shift change” time for local mine/port workers at around 3pm. The last couple of hours dragged by slowly as voters dribbled through the polling place, but we did get a head start with the process of disassembling the equipment in advance of the booth closing.

Not our polling station, but a typical set up

Once the poll closed, we had to then close up the room and prepare it for vote counting. This required us to lay out tables for unwrapping and sorting ballot papers, particulaly the senate paper which was huge and difficult to handle. The only people allowed in the room for the vote count were AEC employees and AEC authorised scrutineeers. The scrutineers are people from political parties who are authorised to observe the counting process. They cannot touch the ballot papers and can only question the validity or otherwise of individual ballots. We only had one scrutineer observing our count, probably beacuse our polling place was one where the sitting member was not under any threat of being voted out. The counting process started with the House of Reps ballots first, and we were under pressure to get the votes sorted and counted quickly so we could ring our results through to the local AEC centre. After first removing the ballot papers from the box, again with witnessess to verify all was done according to the protocols, the ballots were unfolded and then separated into piles according to first preference and informal. Informal votes were usually assessed by a few of us before agreeing they were informal. The scrutineeer could also nominate votes they considered informal. All ballots are sent off the Perth for recounting and assessment by AEC officials, so if we had made a mistake it would get picked up later. We then counted each pile. The total number of ballots was also reconciled with the total number that were handed out during the day to ensure there were no missing or extra ballots. After recording the number of votes each candidate recieved, we then allocated 2nd preferences to the top two candidates. This whole process took a few hours to complete, even though we only had around 1000 votes to count.

I was surprised at the number of informal votes, around 70 or 7% of the total. Some were just mistakes, only numbering one square or not using sequential numbering, but others were clearly protest votes. Some people wrote funny political statements on their papers, others just scribbled on the ballot. I guess everyone has the right to protest if they wish.

We then sorted the Senate votes. We had to sort them into piles of First Preference votes “above the line”, which was the majority of the ballot papers, and a pile for “below the line”. We didnt have to count the Senate ballots, just sort them and bundle them for transport to Perth for formal counting. It’s a much more complex process and takes a long time to finalise, so I guess they leave it to the professionals!

It was an exhausting day! I was on my feet for around 15 hours, with only short breaks for lunch and dinner. I did enjoy the experience, I met some lovely locals and it was really interesting to see how the election process works. We are so lucky to live in a democracy where every person of voting age has the chance to have their say at an election. And its amazing that it takes so many “volunteers” to make it happen. And despite this, the whole process is actually quite secure. Ballot papers are kept securely and numbers carefully reconciled. It would be extremely difficult to falsify sufficient ballot papers to change the outcome of an election. So many small polling stations and individuals would have to be compromised that it would be impossible to cover up.

The pay rate is typical Award rates for a entry level Public Service role, plus Casual allowance. We were also paid overtime for time worked beyond 8 hours. Its not something I would do for the money as its a very long day for average reward, but it was a great experience and a small payout at the end was a bonus.