- "travelling": why didn't you postal vote?

- "medical": we allow pre-voting; was it planned?

Just paying the fine without arguing on time gets you a 50% discount in state voting. And it's a token fine - $20 or so from memory for federal ballots. Besides you don't have to vote. The requirement is you turn up, or give them a piece of paper if you post it. This is deemed so important when we designed our own voting machines (which were never deployed), they had an explicit "I decline to vote" option.

The paper can be blank, but people are often more imaginative. I can't find the reference to it now, but one paper had penises of different lengths drawn beside each option. The Australian Electoral Commission is required by law to "save" votes, which means that even if it wasn't marked strictly according to the rules if a reasonable person could infer the intention, it counted. This particular vote worked its way through the courts, where it was eventually struck down. Reason: it was impossible to know if a longer penis meant it was more or less favourable to the candidate.

About 8% of ballots can't be saved. Of those around about 2% are deliberately spoilt - the rest are mistakes. If Vanessa Teague's voting machines (with the decline button) had been deployed, the remaining 6% would have gone away.