Democracy sausages hit an early-voting snag: Traditions

On election day, P&C president Katie Gray will have been up since the crack of dawn preparing for Lewisham Public School's polling day extravaganza. It's a small community school in Sydney's inner west, and basically every family has turned out over the past few weeks to help get things in order.

"We've got about 70 parents, and for a school of only 200 kids I'd say that's probably almost every family contributing in some way," Gray told AFR Weekend in between deliveries of cupcakes, gas bottles and plants for the floristry stall.

"It's been a huge commitment from everybody - it's a community rite of passage; I think it really brings everybody together."

Gray is one of thousands of volunteers who will be out in force around the nation on Saturday, staffing cake stalls, barbecues and coffee carts as we participate in the great Aussie tradition of serving a snag on a slice of white bread in honour of the vote.

Australians have been using election day to raise money for charity for at least 100 years; Anne-Marie Conde, curator at the Museum of Australian Democracy, says the earliest photograph of a polling booth cake stall dates back to 1924.

But some fear the slow demise of the democracy sausage. As of Friday, the Australian Electoral Commission confirmed more than six million eligible voters had cast a vote by pre-poll, and a further 1.5 million by postal vote.

"It's about 45 per cent of the electoral role," said the AEC's Evan Ekin-Smyth, and not all eligible electors show up.

"You can say with absolute supreme confidence that more people will have voted before the day than on the day."

Data from democracysausage.org shows a dip in the number of sangas on offer between the 2019 and 2022 elections, from 8735 locations registered in 2019 to 8717 in 2022. On Thursday - two days out from the big day - 8655 stalls were registered this year.

While that number could portend another fall, the site's Alex Dawson says the speed of submissions for this year's locations is outpacing 2022. He's optimistic sausage sizzle availability is on track for a resurgence in 2025.

That is, unless you live in one of the country's apparent sausage deserts.

If you're from Sydney you may be familiar with the so-called Red Rooster line. It's an imaginary diagonal drawn from west to east along the northernmost Red Rooster restaurants and is used as shorthand to describe the socioeconomic divide between the wealthy north and eastern suburbs and the less advantaged south-west.

In Sydney, the sausage desert starts at that line, with fewer sausages west of the line.

And if you overlay a map of Melbourne's wealth with sausage distribution, you will see a dearth of locations also lines up with socioeconomic indicators.

It seems likely that families with fewer resources can less afford to volunteer to run a stall.

Even where a stall is available, whether the punters will show up to buy is another question.

Controversially, the original Aussie celebrity chef, Iain "Huey" Hewitson, was spotted on social media this week suggesting if you can't find a sizzle in your local area, you might want to order one on UberEats.

Regardless, the folks who run DemocracySausage.org are unconcerned. "What I do know is that there are still 18 million electors in Australia," says Dawson, so even if 45 per cent are avoiding the booths, that's nearly 10 million Australians still out and about and primed for a cupcake and a snag.

At Lewisham Public, Gray is certainly hoping so.

Asked if election days are the school's biggest fundraising event, her response is definitive: "Absolutely."

Conde says: "For a lot of small children, it might be your first experience of democracy.

"For very small children, that's often how they learn how voting works. And I think that's really nice."

CREDIT: Rachael Bolton and Joshua Peach