The Australian Electoral Commission estimates 1.4 million Australians are not enrolled to vote. To put that in perspective, imagine having all those people around for Christmas. That’s roughly 700,000 bonbons, not to mention the added pressure on your recycle bin. Doing Kris Kringle would also be a nightmare.

1.4 million Australians is enough to change the result of an election. The 7PM Project asked viewers ‘what would encourage you to enrol?’ The correct answer is, ‘I don’t need encouragement; enrolling is a civic duty, privilege and my simple contribution to a functioning democracy of which I am very proud.’ However, most of you said you wanted a free iPad.

Election Day will be special, and not just because it’s the first time Bill Henson is allowed back in a school. August 21 will be a day that most adult Australians will be doing the exact same thing at once. When else can you share a national communal experience, apart from every night during Masterchef?

Encouraging new voters to enrol is tough because young’uns are cynical. And why wouldn’t they be, when they get referred to as young’uns? 7PM viewer Ardeet said that ‘if voting actually made a difference they wouldn't let us do it.’  Ardeet sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, or he might be from Iran. Either way, I bet he’s interesting and I’d like to buy him a drink (though he’d probably swap it with mine while I wasn’t looking).

Vicki said she would enrol for ‘six hundred thousand dollars a year tax free’. Not just $600,000, but tax free and every year. If this initiative were implemented, the priorities of the federal budget would read something like Health, Education, Defence and Vicki. Sorry Vicki, the government doesn’t give away free money like that. Who do you think you are, a mining executive?

Tania says she will not enrol because voting can ‘ruin your weekend’. She’s right – an election can ruin your weekend – especially if you’re the losing candidate or have a fear of pencils and sausages. Breina has a suggestion to get people like Tania interested: make polling venues exciting. Breina wants the AEC to stop putting polling booths at primary schools, and start setting them up at ice rinks, pools, laser tag venues and shopping centres. The election would be a family day out! What a great way to teach kids about democracy, and allow absent fathers to see their children at least once every three years.

This approach would not work for James, who claims that for him to enrol, it would take ‘Julia Gillard coming to my house in Tony Abbott’s budgie smugglers and hand delivering me the enrolment forms’. James is a lazy arrogant pervert, but then so are most backbenchers.

Nicole says young people don’t want to vote because they are ignorant of politics. But, she says, it’s not their fault; ‘Australian curriculum has a hole where this information should be’. Nicole wants our political system compulsorily taught in high school. For some reason, this idea has never caught on. Ardeet would probably say it’s because the ruling class has a vested interest in maintaining an ignorant populace. Ardeet, you’re so crazy!

The overall feeling from 7PM viewers is that it should be possible to enrol online. In fact, pretty much everyone thinks this should happen. But there are no guarantees. After all, the Australian Electoral Commission don’t deal with the people’s will, they deal with democracy.