A ballot paper that doesn't clearly indicate preference order or identifies the voter is counted as "informal" and removed from the pool [0].
I don't believe it is an offence to vote informally but even if it was the anonyminity of the ballot woult make it impossible to enforce.
In the last Federal Election the overall informal vote share was about 5.92%. In some electorates it was above 10% [1].
The AEC doesn't distinguish between votes that were intentionally invalid and votes that were unintentionally invalid. I used to work as an electoral officer and in my experience the latter usually far outweighed the former. I saw very few if any ballots that were totally blank, about 10-15 where the person tried to make a statement of some sort and the rest were people who did not understand the instructions and number every box.
As far as I can tell, elections in Australia are seen as something you don't really ignore despite your individual disdain for politics.
I don't believe it is an offence to vote informally but even if it was the anonyminity of the ballot woult make it impossible to enforce.
In the last Federal Election the overall informal vote share was about 5.92%. In some electorates it was above 10% [1].
The AEC doesn't distinguish between votes that were intentionally invalid and votes that were unintentionally invalid. I used to work as an electoral officer and in my experience the latter usually far outweighed the former. I saw very few if any ballots that were totally blank, about 10-15 where the person tried to make a statement of some sort and the rest were people who did not understand the instructions and number every box.
As far as I can tell, elections in Australia are seen as something you don't really ignore despite your individual disdain for politics.
[0] http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/informal_voting/
[1] http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/informal_voting/division.htm