Phillip Hudson: Systemic Problems in Federal Elections are Being Ignored

The Canberra Times | July 16, 2025

After every election, Parliament’s powerful electoral matters committee reviews that election. This time, it must be a top priority to deal with the rising number of votes that are struck out as informal.

People absolutely have the right to choose “none of the above” when they step into the polling booth, but there are just as many, if not more, who are attempting – and failing – to exercise their precious democratic right. We need to do far more to make sure the rules are simple, consistent and clear.

That responsibility rests with everyone from schools, to the media, citizenship preparation courses, the political parties and the Australian Electoral Commission.

Why is nobody upset that an extraordinary 18,274 voters had their ballots excluded from the May election count in just one electorate – the south-western Sydney seat of Werriwa? It was the highest number and greatest percentage of informal votes in any of the 150 electorates contested at the federal election.

Yet there is no outrage that 17.26 per cent of the voters in a marginal seat were not heard.

It was double the rate from the previous election and the number of ballot papers rejected was far greater than the eventual winning margin of 11,870 for Labor’s Anne Stanley.

In some individual polling places in Werriwa more than one-in-four votes were struck out. In Ashcroft it was 28 per cent.

Werriwa was the worst, but it was by no means the exception. In a staggering 20 seats, the informal vote was larger than the winning margin.

Nationwide, almost 920,000 votes were excluded from the count.

In the nail-bitingly tight seat of Bradfield in Sydney’s north, won by Nicolette Boele by 26 votes, there were 6656 informal votes.

In the Victorian seat of Goldstein, where Liberal Tim Wilson wrestled the seat from teal independent Zoe Daniel, the informal vote was 18 times higher than the winning margin of 175 votes.

Even in the ACT seat of Bean, where Labor’s David Smith got a massive scare from independent candidate Jessie Price and prevailed by only 700 votes, more than three times as many votes, 2670, were ruled informal.

And in the south-western Sydney seat of Fowler, which was hotly contested between Independent Dai Le and Labor’s Tu Le, the informal vote rose by 3.4 per cent with 15,079 ballots struck out in a seat where the margin was 4974 votes. More people voted informally than for the Liberal candidate.

In 11 seats, more than one-in-10 votes were ruled informal, and across the nation, it was 5.6 per cent of all votes cast, which is the highest since 2013.

And that doesn’t include the 1.7 million people who were enrolled and didn’t turn up to vote on the day, early or at all.

Based on past trends, and it will vary for every electorate, about 40 per cent of people choose “none of the above”.

About half of this cohort deliberately left their ballot paper blank.

Read Phil’s full op-ed in The Canberra Times here.