In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Tom Rogers, who was the Australian Electoral Commissioner from 2014 to 2024.
They spoke about the structure of Australian elections, how the country counts its ballots, and the importance of democracy sausages.
High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits:
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson
Transcription of the episode is as follows:
Tom Rogers: Elections in Australia have somewhat of a festive atmosphere at the polling place. I'm not sure you know this, Eric or Brianna? There's a big thing about this thing called a sausage sizzle. I'm not sure whether you've ever heard about this. In Australia, it's become this unbelievable thing. There's even an app where you can check the polling place with the best sausages, you know, for you to turn up, and these things are called democracy sausages, and they're pretty much at every polling place.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]
Eric Fey: Welcome to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. This is our first episode from Down Under. I'm Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, with my co-host—
Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon. I'm the County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri.
Eric Fey: And our guest today is — Tom, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Tom Rogers: Hi, everybody. My name is Tom Rogers, and I'm the former Australian Electoral Commissioner.
Eric Fey: So, Tom, before we get into what an Australian Electoral Commissioner is, why don't you tell us about yourself and how you got into elections in the first place?
Tom Rogers: I started life as an army officer in the Australian Army, and I served for 20 years. And from there, I did a range of different things, including working for the Australian Federal Police, running the Police Institute, which is in a spectacular location on a beach in a place called Manly in Sydney. I sometimes wonder why I left that. And from there, I went to the Electoral Commission, and did a range of different roles. I finished doing just over a decade as Australia's Electoral Commissioner. So, it's a really — it was an interesting background to get into elections.
Brianna Lennon: Did you find a lot of similarities in those roles, like, did you bring some of that energy to the Electoral Commission?
Tom Rogers: Absolutely, when I was in the army, I was a logistics officer. And, as we know, for the people on this podcast, elections are all about logistics. I think, you know, federally in Australia, an election is the largest peacetime logistic exercise in the country. So actually, the logistics background that I had in the military was directly relevant to the role I then did as Electoral Commissioner. So, there's a huge degree of commonality.
Brianna Lennon: I think that's interesting because we have quite a few county clerks in Missouri that have military backgrounds, as well. I don't know that I've ever thought about how much they can parallel for a lot of those things.
Tom Rogers: Very, very similar and also, I think the things that we deal with as public servants, you know, right through my career, are the sorts of issues that we deal with at elections — they're working with people and building trust with the community, and these are really critical things that flow right through my service in various entities, and, I think Brianna and Eric, that bind electoral officials globally. These are the same sorts of issues about trust, service, leadership, logistics, that I think they're in our DNA globally.
Eric Fey: I think you're right. We've interviewed a number of election officials from other countries, and maybe the structure is different, some details are different, but there are always kind of through lines of similar challenges that we all face. So, with that in mind, to start with, maybe the differences, because no country has structured their election administration like the United States. Explain, for a mostly American audience, how election administration is structured in Australia.
Tom Rogers: So, election administration is slightly different from where you are. We have a very centralized electoral process in Australia. When I was the commissioner, I was in charge of all aspects of the federal election, from enrollment through to delivery. That meant that the Commission hired about 110,000 people and provided voting services to over 17 million electors, including internationally. You know, we provide voting services to our diaspora, as well, but the Commission also does other things. So, it does all forms of boundary redistribution. I don't think you'd call it that in the US. I think you call it redistricting.
So, there are, for example, there is no political involvement in the redistricting process in Australia, at all. It's totally run by the Commission, and the outcomes are not appealable in any court in Australia either. The Commission also does industrial elections, believe it or not, and every year probably does about 1,000 industrial elections, as well. These are union elections, union official elections, and a very big education reach out. So, the Commission has an Electoral Education Centre in Canberra. About 100,000 school kids a year pump through that, and it does education out in the community, as well.
So, it's a very, very comprehensive, centralized mandate for running the event and managing the entire Australian electoral roll, which is also used by the state electoral commissions who run their state elections. So, I'm not sure if that is enough of a background, but that's kind of our — that's the structural piece, and, of course, we might get into what the differences are in the voting system itself.
Eric Fey: Tom, it sounds like the framework in Australia is meant to be professional and apolitical — at least it sounds that way, and that's certainly not how things have been structured in the United States. Is that the intention, and, if so, how has that structure held up over time?
Tom Rogers: It is absolutely designed to be apolitical. There's no political involvement at all in any part of Australia's electoral process. Designed to be very professional. And now, I'm just, I'm cautious here because one system isn't better than another — I just let me put that on the record. All systems work. So, it's just that we've all got a slightly different design.
But when the Australian Public Service Commission does these surveys every year about trust in the community, and I think at the end of 2022, the Australian Electoral Commission was the most trusted public sector agency in Australia. Also, the agency that registered the highest levels of service satisfaction amongst the community. And given elections are all about trust, I mean, I used to say that, I think that sometimes people forget elections are actually all about the loser, not the winner. You know, in my 11 years as a commissioner, I never had a winner come to me to complain about an electoral outcome. It's the other way around. So, you've got to run the event in a way that people trust that outcome. We're very proud of working on that trust process to get that rating. So, it's held up pretty well and is very well respected in the community. So, that's been a very deliberate process over many years of really working on that.
Brianna Lennon: One of the things I wanted to talk about, and we had emailed about too, was about how Australia has compulsory voting, and I would venture to guess that taking out some of the element of convincing people to vote — because that is primarily what our political parties do, and, you know, we can educate people all that we want, but it's, you know, still somebody has to motivate voters to go actually cast a ballot — if you take out that motivation, do you think that that has had an impact on the ability for elections in Australia or electoral administration to be apolitical?
Tom Rogers: It absolutely has. We've had compulsory enrolment, as well. Compulsory enrolment, compulsory voting for, I think, almost a century in Australia. It's very well accepted. Surveys consistently show that about 70% of Australians support compulsory voting, but it's funny, it's a historical thing. I think compulsory voting is the sort of thing that if you have it, you're never going to get rid of it. If you don't have it, you're never going to be able to put it in. I speak to people around the world — there's not a huge number of countries that have compulsory voting — and people say to me, "That’s outrageous because, you know, what about civil liberties and people get the right to choose."
And all of those arguments, which I absolutely understand — but Australians love their compulsory voting. They see that it's a civic duty for people to turn up and participate. Elections in Australia have somewhat of a festive atmosphere at the polling place. I'm not sure you know this, Eric or Brianna? There's a big thing about this thing called a sausage sizzle. I'm not sure whether you've ever heard about this. In Australia, it's become this unbelievable thing. There's even an app where you can check the polling place with the best sausages, you know, for you to turn up. And these things are called democracy sausages, and they're pretty much at every polling place — I know you have some similar stuff — they're normally run by the local school, the Parents and Citizens Association at the local school, the community group. Money goes to the community group. And there's arguments about whether people should be having their sausages with onions or without or whether the onions should be on the bottom, you know, it's become this big thing, but it speaks to the kind of festival of democracy atmosphere. And because there's not the sort of pressure on the commission to get the vote out, we can focus on other things in informing the electorate. So, it's very well entrenched — the democracy sausage. I urge people to look it up — it's a cultural motif for Australia. It doesn't fly anywhere else, but it just seems to be a thing that we're doing, and compulsory voting is a big part of that.
And there's some other compulsory aspects, as well. We might talk about that later on, about — we do preferential voting, which we might talk about, but the, I think the legislation says — we don't compel you to mark your ballot paper in a particular way, by the way. You turn up, you have to take a ballot paper, get marked off, and then away you go. But we then get, in Australia, because some people, obviously, maybe wouldn't otherwise turn out to vote — we get special messages occasionally written on the ballot papers, and sometimes those messages are for politicians, and sometimes they're for electoral administrators.
Eric Fey: There's this overall theme so far, Tom, and you've been very diplomatic so far, but like a boss once told me when I was young, with all the employees, he said, "All of us here are equal, but some of us are more equal than others,” and that's the way the Australian election system versus everybody else seems to line up.
Laughter
But anyway, I wanted to go back to real quick, the list of electors or the voter registration list, I don't know exactly what you call it there, but you said that component is also compulsory. How do you all build that? Is it an active voter registration, or is it passive with using databases from other governmental agencies, or what?
Tom Rogers: It's a mixture. So, over the last 10 years, we've introduced what we call direct enrollment in Australia, which is the use of a whole range of data sets — trusted data sets, gold standard identity sets — and it used to be, we use that anyway, but we would write to people and say, if there was a flag on one of those data sets, "Oh, we think you've moved. You should fill out this enrollment form," but over the last sort of 40 years, people don't respond to mail anymore. It just doesn't work that way. So, we've moved to direct enrollment. If the Electoral Commission gets a data flag, the Commission will write to an individual and say, "We know you've moved, we've got evidence that you've moved, and therefore we've put you on the roll in that new location already, unless you write back to us with proof that you haven't moved.” And what it's led to is a huge increase in the roll. I think at the moment, it sits at about 98% complete around Australia, and that's really high levels of youth enrollment, which previously was a real problem in Australia, and very high levels of estimated enrollment for our indigenous population in Australia, as well. So, it's been a huge success factor for us, but people can still, and we urge people still, to jump on and do their own enrollment, too. So, there's a mixture of direct, you know, passive, active, and we also remind people to keep their enrollment details up to date, as well.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Midbreak]
Brianna Lennon: Shifting gears a little bit because you did mention preferential voting. We are, I mean, and this is kind of, it's probably several questions I'll roll into one, but the United States, for people that don't know, adopted the Australian secret ballot years and years and years ago. And you mentioned reputation. In the United States, a lot of reputation of voting systems and technology and how people are voting has been at the forefront of things. Can you talk a little bit about the ballot design, preferential voting, and how you count those ballots?
Tom Rogers: So, I just might break those into two things because the House is very different from the Senate. So, the House is by far the most simple we use. It's compulsory preferential voting, so you have to number every box on the ballot paper in the order of your choice. And I know sometimes that people think, again, that this is somehow almost anti democratic. But it's as simple as this, you number every person in the order of your choice, and the candidate who wins 50% plus one vote is the person that wins that count. So, effectively, you know, you start the count and you start excluding on each count the lowest ranked candidate, and you distribute preferences to the next ranked candidate on each ballot paper. Eventually you come up with a winner.
What it means, though, is that it's slightly complex, so that you can have some fairly tight contests and the count on the night of the election. And, by the way, our election is always on a Saturday. It's designed to maximize participation, so that, you know it's on a weekend, so that people are out of work. Sometimes it means on that Saturday night, despite huge pressure from the community to determine who won, you may not know that because the count on the Saturday is an indicative count, and then you've got to do some other stuff. So, that count is all of those — the voting process is entirely manual. There are no voting machines in Australia. It's all pencil. I think, I forget the number, but it's something like about 300,000 pencils around Australia. Paper and pencil only and manually done. And we also, because we do postal voting, as well, the Commission has to wait, by law, for 13 days after the election for all postal votes to return. And so, if it's a close election in a particular seat, you can't declare that seat, potentially, until all the postal votes are back. That's the House. We think that's relatively simple. A lot of people I know — American friends I've spoken to, I think you mostly use first past the post voting — think that the preferential voting is incredibly complex. I'm not sure the House voting is complex, but the Senate voting is complex, and it is a quota system.
So, it's called proportional representation with a single transferable vote, and you have to establish a quota. That's a complex mathematical process that you do, and then the vacancies are filled as people reach the quota. The way you're transferring surplus votes at a reduced rate, It's called the transfer rate — so, it's a highly complex process that takes some weeks after the event. It's hugely logistically expensive. All ballots are taken back to one central Senate Scrutiny Center in each state. There's a mixture of manual and electronic counting, and it's a nerve wracking process and big, expensive. And the ballot papers for the Senate — I've got one on the wall behind me, amongst all the other stuff — is normally a meter long. So you've got, you know, big choices, and it's complex.
Eric Fey: For the House of Representatives, are those folks elected from a specific riding or district, or, I don't know what you call —
Tom Rogers: Yes.
Eric Fey: Okay, so. Oh, go ahead.
Tom Rogers: No, no. I was just gonna say every — there's 150 divisions at the moment in Australia. They translate into 150 seats in the House of Reps, and each one of those is separate, has its own ballot paper. So, just — not sure about your system – you don't actually vote, for example, for the Prime Minister. You're just voting for him or her in their seat as the Member of Parliament, and then whether they become prime minister is a matter for the party and Parliament.
Eric Fey: And all of the ballots in that electoral district for that, are they like — for the, well, you said for the Senate, that's like a nationwide counting problem — or no, not nationwide, but in the Senate —
Tom Rogers: Yep.
Eric Fey: By state. So, is it similar for the House, where they all have to be compiled into one location so they can all be counted to go through those rounds, you know?
Tom Rogers: Eric, that's exactly right.
Eric Fey: Okay.
Tom Rogers: So, even though we'll do an initial count in the polling place at night, all of those votes then have to go back to one place for that division where they're then counted. And that means, including the votes — the manual votes taken overseas have to come back to Australia and go back to that division, as well. So, at the last election, I think the Commission offered voting in over 100 of our overseas missions, but that's also manual, and then they've got to be packaged up and sent back to Australia and then sent back to that seat, as well, for the count. I think we did a track at a point in the 2019 election I ran — ballot papers arrived back to their seats by 40,000 different transport routes, and just like in the US, you've got to track this stuff. It's got to be safe. And so, it's a hugely complex thing. The Australian electoral system is not for the faint hearted. Logistically, it is slightly complex, but it works.
Eric Fey: And last question on this topic, at least for me. So, for a division in the House of Representatives, when there are multiple rounds of, kind of, recalculations, yeah, how long does that typically take?
Tom Rogers: It just depends. There'll be a number of seats that will be declared on the night because they’re just over, you know, straight up. There's no way the number of outstanding votes can swamp the margin on the night, and so, that can be, you know, declared. But for some of the seats, they wait for the full 13 days until the very last postal vote is back, when you do the final throw, and then that determines the seat. So, it can lead to huge pressure if things are, it's a really close election, and, of course, I'm sure it's the same in the US, those seats that look like they're coming down to the wire, you get lots of party scrutineers. A lot of focus. You know, people there watching every vote, every vote's challenged, and because it's a manual vote, people argue about what's on the ballot paper —whether it's at number one or a European four, or, you know, there's a whole range of things, or whether the diagram that someone has drawn on the ballot paper, that may be may be obscuring or the numbers renders the ballot informal. I'm trying to use a euphemism there.
Brianna Lennon: How often do you have elections in Australia?
Tom Rogers: So, it's a — elections are a three-year cycle at the federal level. The states are slightly different. Each of the Australian states do something slightly different, but it's a three-year, non-fixed term election. And so, the result of that for the Commission is they need to be ready to deliver at fairly short notice. The Prime Minister is the one that calls the election within legislative, you know, guidelines, but it makes it slightly interesting.
Eric Fey: Tom, I'm wondering to what extent some of the foreign interference issues that some countries in Europe have experienced, of course, the United States — we've had issues, or at least allegations, of that. Has that been an issue in Australia?
Tom Rogers: I think it's an issue everywhere. I think democracies globally are under threat. So, during my time as Commissioner, we worked with government to set up a thing called the Electoral Integrity Assurance Task Force, and that's a collection of security agencies and intelligence agencies who support the Electoral Commission in delivering the election.
I just need to be really careful here so that people don't get the idea that security and intelligence agencies are involved in the conduct of the election because that's a very bad thing.
There's an air gap between the activities of that group who support the Commission and the Commission, but part of their job is to monitor the environment for messaging, to see what's going on and to see whether or not there has been foreign interference. And at the end of every event, they issue a statement for the Commission saying they either have or have not seen foreign interference or interference in the election that might be worrying. And of course, what we're seeing globally is the issue of dis- and misinformation.
I know that can be a toxic term in some jurisdictions because there's this strong belief that people have the right to believe whatever they want to believe, and I'm on board with that, but it can skew what people think about the electoral process. So, the AEC [Australian Election Commission] still has a hugely focused effort on dealing with that. Internally within the Electoral Commission, they have a thing called the Defending Democracy unit. I have to think that running is the best job title in the public sector, you know, in Australia, if you're the Director of the Defending Democracy unit.
The Electoral Commission does a whole range of things to protect the integrity of the process — not what politicians say about their own platforms, but if someone says something like, "The election's been canceled,” or “you don't have to turn up tomorrow,” or, you know, “the way to cast a formal vote is just to put a number one on the paper and don't worry about the rest of it." The Electoral Commission takes direct action. It runs a disinformation register online. It calls out specific bits of disinformation. It's got a hugely active and aggressive social media presence, a very active education presence and that's about dealing with that issue, Eric and Brianna, that I know you deal with in the US because all democracies deal with it. I think, unless I'm wrong, it might be all. I'm not sure roses and puppies and oxygen in the US about that, but I think this is a global issue.
Eric Fey: So, now that you are no longer the Electoral Commissioner, do you have a favorite democracy sausage spot that you like to visit on election days now?
Tom Rogers: Look, I'm not sure how it works in America. I think you have precinct voting where you have to go to one polling place. It's not like that in Australia, you've got a wide choice of where you can go to vote, and in the pre-poll period — because we have a heavy pre-poll period — any Australian can go into any polling place in Australia during pre-poll. So, on the day, I go to my local school, a place called Yarralumla Primary School, and they have a pretty good sausage sizzle there. And, of course, vegetarians get annoyed with Electoral Commission officials when they just talk about that, so, you know, you might have a ballot falafel, or a, I'm not sure, a democracy cake or something, but the democracy sausage is the number one thing. It's big.
Eric Fey: All right. So, if an American ever found themselves in Australia on an election day and stumbled into one of these sizzles to not look like a total foreigner —
Tom Rogers: Yeah.
Eric Fey: — you know, what is the appropriate topping or accompaniment to a democracy sausage?
Tom Rogers: Democracy sausage all looks – they all look the same. They have one thing, it's not like a hot dog with a bun. It has to be a piece of plain white bread. The sausage is put diagonally across it. Just wrap the bread around it. Tomato sauce, onions and a little bit of mustard —not everyone has the mustard — and that's it. Eat from one end. You'll get a little serviette, napkin, and that's what people have. It's a big thing. Don't put the onions under the sausage. Onions on top. Very important. There's a big argument about that.
Brianna Lennon: You've been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I'm your host, Brianna Lennon, alongside Eric Fey. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.
