Could a rise in ‘anatomical drawings’ seal Peter Dutton’s fate?

This election, the electoral roll is bigger than ever before. As usual, on the way to scoffing a sausage, we will fold up our ballot papers and put them in those big cardboard boxes. But when it comes time for some of those votes to be counted, they will instead be chucked out.

Why? Because we can’t vote. Not properly. As the next chart shows, in the 2025 election we can expect about 5% of votes to be “informal” — they didn’t follow the rules. That equates to about a million votes headed for the bin. A not insignificant number when it comes to the electoral fortunes of very key people, including the member for Dickson.

Stay with me.

The rate of informal voting is highest in NSW and lowest in the ACT. If you take a squiz at the electorates with the highest rates of informal voting, you’ll find yourself looking at a big fat chunk of Western Sydney: Labor heartland.

This next chart is an absolute treasure trove — I could stare at it for hours. You’ve got your safe LNP electorates at the top and safe Labor electorates at the bottom (mixed in with some seats where Labor is leading the 2pp against the Libs but not actually winning the seat, like Melbourne).

On the left, you have seats with low numbers of informal votes, like Canberra. On the right, seats with many informal votes. And in the middle, marked red, the seats where the margin was so tight that the number of informal votes was larger than the margin.

What you might notice is that Labor wins the electorates that know how to vote and those that don’t. LNP wins more of the middle. Which reveals something about the electoral challenge for Labor: winning the woke inner city and the diverse outer suburbs. Blaxland, the seat with one of the highest informal votes in 2022 is held by Labor cabinet stalwart Jason Clare. It’s also the seat that had the highest vote against the marriage equality plebiscite back in 2017, and delivered a strong No on Albo’s voice referendum. 

Blaxland is highly socially conservative. The seat has one of the highest shares of Muslim voters and people who speak Arabic at home. Migration goes some way to explaining the high informal vote share. If your family has been in Australia for many years, you probably know how to vote — like Amelia Hamer, candidate for Kooyong, which is one of the seats with the highest share of formal votes.

Those red dots in the middle of the chart above are fascinating to me. The seats where informal votes could, in theory, have changed the outcome. In the next chart, we zoom in on them.

I wrote donkeys in the title of this chart as a lark, but let’s be clear. The term “donkey vote” commonly refers to numbering the boxes on a ballot paper from top to bottom, which is a legitimate and formal vote.

So what are the main types of informal vote? The Victorian Electoral Commission has the best answer on that: 

• Blank ballot papers (22% of informal votes)
• Just numbering one box (17%)
• Numbering all the boxes but stuffing up the numbers (15%)
• A sequence of numbers, but missing some boxes (13%)
• A single tick or cross  (5%)
• … a range of other things … including “the usual anatomical drawings” (0.7%)

The anatomy pics alone aren’t enough to swing any seats, but some seats are quite close — notably, the seat of Dickson, held by the leader of the Coalition, Peter Dutton. Last election, there were 3,400 votes in it and 4,000 informal votes registered. Will the share of informal votes rise in 2025? Name recognition alone might increase the number of anatomical drawings!

The ALP has been broadcasting the idea that it is close to unseating Peter Dutton. While the seat is doubtless close, and there’s precedent for Liberal Party leaders getting voted out, I suspect that’s more mind games. It’s a clever grenade to lob because it might spread disunity. The more ambitious Liberal MPS might begin to wonder if they’d actually rather be party leader in opposition than a minister in government. 

Ultimately, the overall share of informal votes is a reminder of the levels of literacy and numeracy in Australia.  Around 12% of people are at the lowest levels of literacy and 20% at the lowest levels of numeracy, according to the OECD. 

Anyone reading these pages is, of course, literate; numeracy is highly correlated with literacy. Your family, friends colleagues are probably literate and numerate too, but anyone you know who isn’t is working double time to hide it. We generally have no idea how common illiteracy is: it’s everywhere though, and at election time, it matters a lot to the significant number of people who are disenfranchised by our voting system. 

Whatever the overarching reason, informal votes could matter more than you think this election — particularly for the member for Dickson.

Have you ever cast an informal vote? Was it accidentally or on purpose?

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