Election Day

Today was federal election day here in Australia. By my calculations I think this was the tenth federal election I’ve voted in. The results aren’t in yet – polling places in my home state, Western Australia close in about 15 minutes as I write this. In any case, I don’t want to blog about who I voted for, or about politics generally. Rather, I want to blog about the process, for me.

I think I’ve been going to the same polling place for the last four or five elections – the local primary school. This morning while waiting for M to vote – I voted first and then waited for M with the dogs – I sat in the school courtyard and observed the place and all the people who turned up to vote.

We got there at around 9:30am and there was a long queue of people waiting to vote. I got in line and M stayed with the dogs (dogs aren’t allowed into the school building where we vote). It was a beautiful sunny Perth winter’s morning. The school had very entrepreneurially set up a sausage sizzle – hurray for democracy sausages! – a book stall, a used clothes stall, and a cake stall. The stalls were doing good business, especially the sausage sizzle – you could get a sausage in a wholemeal hotdog bun with cooked onions for $3; $2 extra if you wanted a drink. They were also selling “brekky wraps” – bacon and scrambled eggs with spinach leaves wrapped in pita break.

Of course we had to have a sausage – and my tweet of my sausage even got featured in an article about democracy sausages around the country:

#democracysausage #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/EY6p9pMDUg

— Constance Wiebrands (@flexnib) July 2, 2016

For those of my readers who have never voted in an Australian election before, here in Australia we seem to have evolved a particularly Australian institution at polling places – stalls (“sausage sizzles”) selling sausages in buns or bread. People have been tweeting about the #democracysausage all day today because a mark of a good polling place is apparently whether or not it has a sausage sizzle. If there’s a cake stall there too, even better!

My polling place won on both counts, with its sausage sizzle AND cake stall, but I think what made it even better was the sense of community and almost neighbourly feel I had while sitting in the courtyard. People stood and waited quietly. Some brought their children, or their dogs. They chatted with each other. They ate sausages. I felt very privileged to be living in a country where voting is so safe – and where we have a food tradition associated with elections!