‘Car breakdowns, locked gates’: AEC gears up for remote voting in the NT

The date of the referendum for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament is set for Saturday October 14. Between now and then, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has two weeks at most to bump up enrolment across the country, and another four weeks to ensure all systems are in place for a vote.

So far both the national enrolment rate and the national Indigenous enrolment rate are at a historic high — 97.5% and 94.1%, respectively. Indigenous enrolment is up from 84.5% at the end of 2022. The next challenge is to get people to the booths.

In the cities, that means mobilising and staffing tried-and-tested voting centres — schools, libraries and town halls — for a Saturday morning outing. In remote locations, it’s a very different story.

“Most communities say don’t come to us on a weekend and don’t deliver a Saturday service because people go hunting, fishing, visiting relatives, all of those sorts of things,” Northern Territory Australian electoral officer Geoffrey Bloom told Crikey.

“It’s not a popular day for polling amongst communities.”

In the three weeks before the official ballot (normally it’s two weeks but was legislated as three for this referendum), roving AEC teams will be deployed to provide remote voter services to communities across the country. In short, the remote voter service is a mechanism for early voting in hard-to-reach locations.

Compared to the 540 early voting centres scattered across the country (in cities and towns), Bloom said there are a total of 41 AEC teams to service 450 remote locations nationwide. Many of these services are concentrated in Western Australia and Queensland, but the NT is home to the nation’s largest number of remote offerings — 19 teams to tend 200 locations.

Although the AEC’s main NT hub is Darwin, it will also run an operation from Alice Springs with nine remote voter service teams for Central Australia and the Barkly region. A 10th team will dip down from Alice Springs into South Australia to facilitate voting in Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, or APY Lands.

Bloom said not every team will be deployed for the full 21 days, but the extra week (courtesy of updates to the Referendum Machinery Provisions Act) gives them leeway to loop back and attend to any locations they missed — either because the community closed its doors for cultural reasons (e.g Sorry Business) or something happened to the remote team that prevented them from getting there (e.g the roads were impenetrable due to excessive rain).

The whereabouts of these remote voter services in the NT are yet to be announced. Bloom told Crikey the AEC is contending with a change of season that makes it difficult to nominate locations.

“The later it is in the year, the more transient people become as they move to get away from heat and rain,” he said.

“We know people move from small homelands to major communities or from communities into towns, but if we’re going to deliver a remote service, we need to know people are there.”

Bloom explained that a remote Central Australian location home to a high number of people in August might be almost empty come October. For the AEC, that means constant phone consultations with contacts in communities, repeated trips out to remote locations, and tempered expectations that everything will run smoothly on the day.

“When we go out to remote locations, we know there’s going to be challenges. During the federal election, we had many issues. There were weather events, car breakdowns, locked gates where we quite literally couldn’t get in,” Bloom said.

“We expect that will happen again.”

AEC teams deployed to these remote locations in the lead-up to the referendum will go out in teams of two 4WD vehicles, each with a mine spec fit-out — dual battery systems, rollover protection, bull bars, cargo barriers, back-to-base monitoring and a full satellite set-up.

“We always have two vehicles per team in case one stops or breaks down,” Bloom said.

A small selection of remote voter offerings will double as a voting service on the actual day — including at Yulara (right next to Uluru) — but the majority will close up shop the Friday before.

Territory voters will have 46 polling centres to choose from on the day of the referendum and a handful of static polling places (effectively pop-ups). Six of these will come from Alice Springs. Nationally, there are 8000.

In a briefing to NT media, AEC electoral commissioner Tom Rogers told reporters that this year mobile teams will visit 35% more locations across the country and spend 80% more hours in those locations. Although not isolated to remote outposts, he said the time investment in these communities has been — and remains — a big focus.

There’s a maximum of two weeks remaining for voter enrolment. The cut-off is always seven days after the governor-general issues the customary writ (same game as an election) calling on the AEC to host the vote. It’s still waiting for a call to action, but the last possible date for a writ to be issued is Monday 11 September.

In the NT, 92% of eligible Territorians are now enrolled to vote (compared to 89.8% in December last year) and the territory’s Indigenous enrolment rate is 87% (a jump from 76.7% at the end of 2022).

Despite the looming deadline for voter registration, Bloom said that the AEC’s bigger task is to ensure record enrolment numbers are reflected in votes: “The big challenge now is to get turnout to match enrolment.”