The Australian Ballot

I was in Canberra recently and I decided, since I was in our nations capital, that I should do something touristy. So I visited the Museum of Australian Democracy, which is located in Old Parliament House. I initially had a guided tour of Old Parliament House before I went wandering around the place myself. During my wander I found out an interesting fact about the system we use to vote in Australia. Apparently back in the 1800s, there were problems in Australia because voters were being intimidated into voting for a certain candidate. Due to the fact that a vote was public, for example people might stand in a group and show hands if they want to vote for Julia, it was easy for candidates to see who voted for them. So this public vote made it very easy to punish those who didn't vote for you, which made intimidating voters a very easy prospect.

During the 1850s it was proposed that all elections should be put to a secret ballot and a man by the name of Henry Chapman devised this process, which is still in use today. The process later came to be known as 'the Australian Ballot' and was designed with the expectations that the government would issue the voting documents, and that all voters would be registered, given these voting document to make their mark in secret for their preferred candidate, before depositing the voting documents to be counted by officials at a later time. This process removed the ability of candidates to threaten individuals into voting in their favour, because they could no longer see whether the individual voted for the candidate or not, and overall made the voting system in the Australian colonies a much fairer system. This system was then adopted by other nations around the world, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, and is today still known by many as the Australian Ballot.