She is impetuous & said she certainly will not wait that long. Decisions. Decisions, always bloody decisions these days.
I never really thought about this before, until I was watching a doco on Russia the other night, and they found the pens used at polling booths were filled with erasable ink, whereas the place I voted in for the Fed election had pencils!
That's an interesting thought. I always take a pen. Not because of any conspiracy theory, just because I always carry a pen. If the paper is the right type, almost all ink is erasable.
When I did the TEE we had to use a pencil on the multi-choice papers because they were read by computer and it needed the conductivity of the graphite. Of course that's not applicable with a ballot paper. I suspect it's just that pencils are much cheaper and they know being an ex-penal colony a crapload of them will be knocked off.
I'm currently in Sydney and therefore did a postal vote. Mine was done in ink.
Pen or pencil, if voting truly counted to be of any benefit for the population,............ politicians wouldn't let us do it. [bigwhistle][bighmmm]
Given that a parcel from Pakenham to Moe (about 80km) takes about a week going via a mail centre in Perth WA and a parcel from Dandenong to Moe (about 100km) takes about 8 days going via Hobart I reckon that postal votes will still be arriving at their destination for months to come.....
Postal votes and Declaration votes are counted at central locations, but again, with the entire process observed by scrutineers. The AEC takes care to make all their processes as secure and open to scrutiny as possible.
As far as I am aware there have been no credible evidence of any vote manipulation in Australia in the last century at least, although there have been examples of multiple voting and graveyard voting, especially in local government elections, and for some reason especially in Richmond in Melbourne, although I'm pretty certain these have been very rare post war.