Voice to Parliament referendum sees highest voter enrolment since Federation

With less than a month until referendum day on October 14, the AEC revealed in a briefing on Thursday that 17,676,347 Australians are enrolled to vote.

By comparison, there were 16 million enrolled voters at the (non-compulsory) 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey, while 12.3 million Australians were enrolled to vote in the 1999 republic referendum.

NSW recorded the highest enrolment rate of more than 99 per cent, with Victoria and the ACT following with 98.3 per cent and 98 per cent, respectively.

The Northern Territory recorded the lowest rate, with only 91.7 per cent of estimated eligible voters on the roll.

The commission said that it has also recorded historically high youth and Indigenous enrolment rates - two groups that are typically under-represented on the electoral roll.

The estimated level of Indigenous enrolment is sitting at 94.1 per cent, a 20 percentage point increase since 2017.

Meanwhile, 91.4 per cent of people aged 18-24 years have enrolled to vote - the first time this number has sat above 90 per cent for any electoral event since calculations began.

AEC Commissioner Tom Rogers said the commission has been deliberately working to lift enrolment - especially around young voters and Indigenous voters - but said the high figures may also be due to the level of interest and media coverage surrounding this referendum.

"It's one of the reasons why ... byelections traditionally have a lower level of participation, and particularly if the media thinks there's not a contest in a byelection and there's very little coverage, then turnout and enrolment tends to be lower," he said.

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Mr Rogers shut down claims from some "conspiracy theorists online" who allege the commission is trying to stack the Voice referendum by working to increase Indigenous voter enrolment.

"We're simply trying to provide the option for all eligible Australians to have their say," he said.

"And the issue of the Indigenous enrolment focus has actually been a bipartisan approach from Parliament to urge the AEC to focus on that issue to try and lift levels of Indigenous enrolment."

The commissioner couldn't speculate as to why roughly 2 per cent of the eligible Australians hadn't registered to vote, but joked that "we're coming for them".

The deadline for enrolling to vote or update your electoral roll details ahead of the referendum closed on September 18.

The AEC also noted that postal vote requests are already sitting close at 1.2 million applications, raising questions around whether we will be able to call a result on referendum night.

Commissioner Rogers noted this was 200,000 more applications than the AEC saw at this point leading up to the 2022 federal election, which already had increased postal vote requests due to the pandemic.