Great Work Australia, Record Numbers Of People Have Enrolled To Vote
It's the biggest electoral roll in history.
Congratulations Australia, you did it!
This afternoon the Australian Electoral Commission confirmed that a record number of Australians had enrolled to vote, just in time to to take part in the postal survey on marriage equality.
Marriage equality advocates have spent the last few weeks encouraging young Australians in particular to get registered and update their address details. Nearly 300,000 Australians aged 18-24 aren’t on the electoral roll and polling suggests they are far more likely to support marriage equality than the rest of the population.
On Wednesday Junkee and a number of other youth publications including Vice, Pedestrian.TV, Broadsheet and FBi Radio, blacked out our websites and encouraged young Australians to enrol to vote.
Today the AEC announced it had processed an “extraordinary” 765,000 enrolment transactions since the postal survey was announced. There are another 165,000 that came through before the deadline of Thursday night that are still waiting to be processed.
While most of those enrolment transactions were address updates, 90,000 new voters were added to the roll. By the time Thursday’s enrolments are processed that number is likely to hit 100,000. The AEC confirmed that the current electoral roll is the biggest in Australian history.
But that was the easy part. Now it’s time to make sure you actually vote. A coalition of pro-marriage equality groups have a launched a new website to co-ordinate the campaign. Check it out and do your bit for marriage equality!