Tracking the Early Vote for the 2022 Victorian Election

Updated for voting on Thursday 24 November.

In this post I will track the rate of pre-poll voting and rate of postal vote application during the Victorian election campaign. The Victorian Electoral Commission is very helpful in publishing detailed daily figures on early voting.

Headline figures to Thursday 24 November are –

• Just over 274k votes taken today. The final total is 1,908,400 votes or 43.4%. This compares to 1,389,980 votes or 33.6% of enrolment in 2018.
• Postal vote applications have now closed. There have been 586,208 postal vote (early by post) applications processed representing 13.3% of enrolment compared to a total of 383,921 or 9.3% of enrolment in 2018. The 2022 postal % above has been re-calculated as I was using an incorrect total votes. The postal applications graph below has corrected percentages.
• So far 272,779 postal votes have been returned representing 6.2% of enrolment or 46.5% of postal votes dispatched. There was no processing of postal envelopes on Friday. Instead all the counting went into verifying the previous day’s envelopes to allow them to be counted on Saturday night.
• Both figures show a huge surge in early voting compared to 2018.

The total figures in 2018 were 1,389,980 pre-poll votes or 33.6% of enrolment, and 383,921 postal vote applications or 9.3% of enrolment. So after one week in 2022 there have already been more postal vote applications than in 2018.

Turnout is usually around 90%, so both these numbers will represent a higher percentage of total votes than is indicated as a percentage of enrolment. Also, not every dispatched postal vote will returned.

Graphs of the daily figures inside the post.

The range chart below shows the pre-poll votes taken by day in 2018 in green and thr equivalent 2022 figure in orange. The first three days have all taken more votes than the same day in 2018.

The next chart plots accumulated pre-poll voting by day as a percentage of total enrolment. Again the 2022 figure is well ahead of 2018.

The final chart shows postal vote applications processed by day as an accumulated percentage at the two elections. Again, postal voting is well up on 2018. There was a huge boost to booth numbers on the weekend after the close of nominations when permanent postal voters were added to the processed numbers. The rate of postal vote applications processed slows through the campiagn where pre-poll voting tends to surge in the final days. The final day for processing postal applications is the Wednesday before polling day.