From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage by Judith Brett

Author:Judith Brett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

10

VOTING ON SATURDAY

AUSTRALIA IS ONE of only a handful of countries to hold elections on Saturdays. Cyprus, Malta, Iceland, Latvia, Slovakia, Taiwan and New Zealand are the others. Except for New Zealand, these are not countries we often compare Australia with, and New Zealand has only been holding elections exclusively on Saturdays since 1951.1 We’ve been voting on Saturdays federally since 1913, and since the end of the nineteenth century in Queensland and South Australia. Labor’s federal caucus committed to Saturday voting in 1901, and made it law in its 1911 revision of the Electoral Act.2

Most countries go to the polls on Sundays, except in the Protestant-dominated Anglosphere, where public activities on the Sabbath other than attending church have historically been severely restricted. Continental Sundays, when people drank, shopped and made merry, were regarded by Protestants as papish defilements of the Lord’s Day. In Australia, until restrictions started to be lifted in the 1980s, shops, pubs and picture theatres were all closed on Sundays, there were no sporting events, and the streets were deserted.

Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland all vote on weekdays: Canada, Monday; the United States, Tuesday, though some states declare a public holiday; the United Kingdom, Thursday; Ireland, generally Friday. Weekday voting, without the easy absentee and postal voting Australians enjoy, makes casting a vote much more difficult for many people, particularly when they are required to vote in their electorates. New Zealand shows the benefits of voting on Saturday: even without compulsory voting, its turnouts are generally well above 75 per cent, though it does have the booster of compulsory registration.3

During the week most people are at work or studying or both. An American study of reasons for not voting found that the most common was the inability to get away from work or study commitments.4 Thirty American states do guarantee people time off work to vote, in some cases even paid leave, but only if the voter doesn’t have two, three or sufficient hours of their own time available, generally before or after work. This being the United States, the allotment of time varies from state to state. The other twenty states make no provision at all.5 Even when leave is available, employees still have to request it, so exercising this right assumes they feel able to ask their employers for the time off without fear of adverse consequences, and that employers won’t obstruct them for partisan reasons. And it is no help at all to the casually employed, who lack the fixed hours the legislation assumes.

Canada also allows one to ask for time off to vote, if three consecutive hours are not available at either end of the working day. The situation there and in the United States is better than in the United Kingdom, where there is no legislation at all to allow voters to take time off to vote. People do have the right to request it, but their employer is not obliged to grant it. For the 2017

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