Who are Australia's undecided voters, and what matters to them?

Updated

Australia's undecided voters are younger, less politically engaged and more likely to be women than those who know how they are going to vote in Saturday's federal election, Vote Compass data reveals.

About one in eight Vote Compass respondents said they remained undecided about who to vote for.

Use our interactive charts to explore who they are, the issues that matter to them, and which parties they are leaning towards.

Portrait of the undecided

Fourteen per cent of Vote Compass users said they did not know who they were going to vote for, a result ABC election analyst Antony Green says tallies with conventional wisdom.

"Most people have an underlying habit of voting one way or the other, they have opinions on policies. It's not often you get people who are completely devoid of opinions," Green said.

"When pushed, most people will be able to tell you who in the end they will probably vote for. Much of modern campaigning is about ensuring that people do vote by their pre-conceived views, that they aren't persuaded to change their vote by the election campaign."

Green says "Vote Compass is showing what you traditionally know about undecided voters - that younger people make up their minds later [and] that women tend to be less sure of their votes".

"Most people who are older in life have got firm views and political habits. Younger people are less wedded to one political party, they've thought less about politics and they're more open for persuasion."

What are the most important issues to undecided voters?

Undecided voters are more likely to rate education and health as the most important issues to them, compared to those who know how they will vote.

The economy remains the most important issue for the undecided, but not by as large a margin.

Who are undecided voters leaning towards supporting?

Among undecided voters, 37 per cent indicated they were leaning towards voting Labor, 27 per cent were leaning towards the Coalition and 17 per cent towards the Greens.

"The data does indicate that Labor is leading among those undecided voters - but those voters may yet change their mind," Green said. "I think the difficulty is that Labor has so many people who would think of voting for it who really still haven't made up their mind."

FAQ

What is this?

When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called the federal election for September 7, the ABC immediately launched Vote Compass.

Since then, we have received more than 1 million responses, as people used the tool to see how their views compare to the parties' policies.

The ABC has revealed weighted data showing what Australians think about various policy issues and the party leaders..

This report examines the demography and views of undecided voters.

The data has been weighted by gender, age, education, enrolment as a student, religion, marital status, industry and state using the latest population estimates to be a true representation of opinion at the time of the field, resulting in an effective sample size of 456,790 respondents.

Vote Compass is not a random sample. Why are the results being represented as though it is a poll?

Vote Compass is not a poll. It is primarily and fundamentally an educational tool intended to promote electoral literacy and stimulate public engagement in the policy aspect of election campaigns.

That said, respondents' views as expressed through Vote Compass can add a meaningful dimension to our understanding of public attitudes and an innovative new medium for self-expression. Ensuring that the public has a decipherable voice in the affairs of government is a critical function of a robust democracy.

Online surveys are inherently prone to selection bias but statisticians have long been able to correct for this (given the availability of certain variables) by drawing on population estimates such as Census micro-data.

We apply sophisticated weighting techniques to the data to control for the selection effects of the sample, thus enabling us to make statistical inferences about the Australian population with a high degree of confidence.

The Vote Compass data sample was weighted on the basis of: gender; age; education; students; religion; marital status.

How can you stop people from trying to game the system?

There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure the authenticity of each record in the dataset.

Vote Compass does not make its protocols in this regard public so as not to aid those that might attempt to exploit the system, but among standard safeguards such as IP address logging and cookie tracking, it also uses time codes and a series of other measures to prevent users from gaming the system.

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Topics: federal-elections, australia

First posted