A caveat: the data here is slightly sullied by the fact that my data-scraping computer failed to do so for about an hour from 6PM yesterday. This means that most votes between 6PM and 7PM on Thursday night were logged, in my data, at around 7PM. Nonetheless, I am very happy with my little machine that could — it has performed excellently over this past week.
Voting closed for the 2020 ANUSA elections at 12PM on Friday. Of 18268 eligible voters, 2203 voted this year, bringing the voter turnout to 12.06%. This puts this year’s election firmly ahead of 2018’s turnout at 9.38% and just past 2019’s turnout at 11.86%.
After lacklustre voter turnout rates on Wednesday (309 between 12AM and 11:59PM) and Thursday (265 between 12AM and 11:59PM), Friday morning saw an extraordinary eleventh-hour rally with 171 students placing their votes in the last twelve hours before the gates shut. 35 new voters cast their ballots in the last thirty minutes of voting: in comparison, the greatest voting rate on either Wednesday or Thursday was 17 every thirty minutes.
The strong performance on the first day of voting meant that 50% of all votes were cast by 3:05PM that day.
Overall daily voting trends over the course of the past week were very predictable. Other than on the first day, the voting rate tended to pick up gradually from around 7AM, peak around 10AM, and peter out as night-time drew near. Of note, however, is the second peak that happened around 6PM on most days. Ignoring the inaccurate data on Thursday that exaggerates that peak, both Tuesday and Wednesday saw a renewal in voter turnout at that time.
ANUSA says that vote counting will start at 4PM today.
Thank you for reading my ANUSA election data coverage. The data I collected can be found here (please send me an email at noah.yim@gmail.com if you intend to use the data for publication).
