What a cold business is voting by post.

It felt desolate last month, sorting disembodied local council candidates from a soulless written list, filling in a ballot paper on the kitchen table and dropping it without ceremony at the post office.

Remote. Just as it felt in 2020, when, fearful of a virus, we were locked down and the only way to vote for local councillors across Victoria was by mail.

“Democracy sausages” (and fundraising food stalls) are part of Australia’s election days.Credit: Darrian Traynor

No cheery gathering at a local school or town hall. No lining up and chatting merrily to neighbours and strangers. No eyeballing of anxious candidates, nor the secret satisfaction of knowing you wouldn’t vote for some of them no matter how fawningly they grovelled.

More to the point, no sausage.

No sizzle, as my colleague Cara Waters so rightly observed in the lead-up to last week’s dreary local government elections-by-post.

I’ve enjoyed voting days ever since my first, in the federal election of 1972, when I took satisfaction in placing Malcolm Fraser last on the ballot paper for the south-west Victorian electorate of Wannon.

It wasn’t that I disliked Fraser personally, nor that I had any affinity with the other candidates, whose names I have forgotten if I ever knew them.

Why, just a few months before the election Fraser sent me a card to mark my 21st........

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