Regarding the Guardian cover pic - my sister was swimming at a beach in Sydney one year when she suddenly remembered it was election day. She swam across the bay to the building that was being used as a polling station, hopped out of the water, walked in, gave them her name, and voted. She was most amused. “I just voted in my bikini!”
So yep, it’s a thing.
And we just take our dogs 
I generally do the postal vote so I can google the minor parties for the upper house, and then have a drink every time a party has a name that sounds reasonable, but a platform made up of bile and spite. Democracy drinking games over democracy sausages for me 
We’ll be walking our dog down to the primary school on Saturday.
Did she have her passport and birth certificate with her?
We don’t need them. We have our address on file, and when you turn up to vote, they look up your name in the electorate book, and you confirm your address. That’s all the ID you need. Then they give you two voting sheets and there’s a pencil in the booth.
You see, Australia is still basically a high trust society, where we don’t typically have to go around everywhere at all times assuming that everyone we meet is actively trying to trick or rob us. The US is … not that.
That, plus they do cross your name off the list when you vote. High turnout prevents people trying to use more than one name; voting is compulsory, and turnout is above 95%.
They cross-check for fraud after each election. There is fraud, but not nearly enough to worry about - fractions of a percent. And as has been mentioned elsewhere, the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero, and the grown-ups here know that.
Awesome. My 12-year-old is learning about the world in part from YouTube, and asked about “wasting a vote”, so we had a fun conversation about preferential voting. I’ll show them this too.
Whereas the US is a high colonic society.
Hmmm, two chronic liars telling different stories. What to believe?
I’m going to go with “they’re both arseholes”.
