This was published 13 years ago
'Latham effect' has thousands blanking out
By Michael Bachelard
ALONG with the pictures of penises, the votes for Albus Dumbledore and Adolf Hitler, and various misguided attempts to spell the word ''Donkey'', ballot papers for last week's federal election were, in their thousands, blank.
Scrutineers at booths in New South Wales have told The Sunday Age that the federal election was blighted by the Mark Latham effect.
The former Labor leader and sometime Channel Nine reporter used his time on the 60 Minutes program the Sunday before the election to suggest voters who were sick of both parties should turn in a blank ballot paper.
And in western and southern Sydney, at least, they apparently listened to the local boy. The 14 most informal electorates in the country were all in that area.
The same 14 NSW electorates were the worst performers at the 2007 election, but this time, they were even worse, swinging decisively towards informal.
Blaxland, held by Labor's Jason Clare, topped the national league table with 10,317 informal votes, or 14.25 per cent of all votes cast there, up 5.3 percentage points from its previous level. It was followed by Watson, Fowler, Chifley, McMahon and Mark Latham's (and Gough Whitlam's) old seat, Werriwa.
The average swing for the informal vote in these NSW seats was 10.34 per cent - a landslide.
The worst performing Victorian seat, Gorton, had less than half the proportion of informal votes as Blaxland. That said, in Corangamite, where the two parties are separated by just 912 legitimate votes, 2802 people managed to vote informal.
Scrutineers said the result in Sydney was ''definitely'', in part, a protest vote against politicians.
''I've scrutineered federal and state elections for 13 years and I've never seen so many blank ballot papers in my life,'' said one Labor-aligned scrutineer in the Sydney seat of Throsby.
That electorate recorded 5648 informal votes, or 2 percentage points higher than the informal vote of 5.24 per cent in 2007.
''In the past there would certainly be your pile of informals - squiggles, drawings, penises, pictures of people in fishing boats saying 'I'd rather be fishin',' but this time there was blank after blank after blank.''
Patrick Kelso, who scrutineered for the Greens in nearby Grayndler, said it was ''30 to 32 per cent blank, completely''.
In Victoria, the Latham effect was more muted. A scrutineer in Corangamite said the number of blank ballot papers was relatively small. One voter, however, had written on his or her paper: ''Mark Latham is a tool but he has a point''.
Electorates in Queensland and NSW are more prone to informal votes because of confusion. In state elections, putting a ''1'' in a single box and not following with more preferences is a formal vote, which is not the case in federal elections. Mr Kelso said most of the informal papers he saw were these ''honest'' mistakes.
Apart from these and the blanks, he said, ''the remainder were ones that had lovely messages, as if Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard were reading the ballot papers''.