Back in the bad old days of serious machine politics in the various state Labor parties, the numbers men exhorted the faithful to 'vote early and vote often'.
In some wards, the dead rose from their graves to vote repeatedly at different polling booths.
That was then.
We've since got an independent statutory body - the Australian Electoral Commission - which oversees elections at every level.
Our elections - apart from the extremely rare occurrence of missing ballot boxes in some organisational elections - are usually straight.
We have a formal electoral roll and what used to be a pretty straightforward enrolment process with a reasonable period for enrolment after elections are called.
But that's changing as of 16 April this year.
For the rest of this week, you can enrol by giving name, address, citizenship status and birthdate and getting someone who is already on the roll to witness your signature.
Next week, you'll have to provide full ID and choose from a small menu of authorised people to both view your ID and witness your enrolment application.
If you're in prison, you now lose the right to vote.
Forget about internationally-recognised civil and political rights.
Cons will not be able to exercise them
And if they called an election tomorrow, you'd have until 8pm the same day to register if you'd forgotten to do it beforehand.
In a literate society, this should not be a problem.
But what about in remote areas, where many Aboriginal people - particularly the young - are barely literate?
Many simply do not carry their own documentation, leaving banks, stores and health clinics to look after ATM cards, Medicare cards and the like.
In order to enrol, they'd have to round up their ID, then find one of the authorised people and then fill out the form - or get someone to do it for them.
If they live on an outstation, they might not hear about an election being called.
So if they haven't enrolled, the chances of rounding up the ID, getting an authorised person to witness the form and then faxing it off to the Electoral Commission in time are pretty slim.
There's a big enrolment drive on in the territory at the moment, to try and make sure that Aboriginal people aren't disenfranchised by the move.
Funnily enough, not that many of them are likely to vote for the current government, whose Indigenous policies derive their intellectual foundations from the philosophy of assimilation.
They're also pretty good at blaming the victim, too.
The Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Electoral Matters - a member of the governing party - said, without going into specifics, that the changes would stop the 'deluge of last-minute enrolments', which increased the scope for fraud and manipulation of electoral roll.
But as one of the activists who run the GetUp website pointed out, new technology should make voting easier and if the the government wanted the roll to be accurate and up to date, they should be allowing people to enrol.
Not making it harder and harder for them.
But no, they pushed the legislation through Parliament last year and it's sat there waiting for deadline - pretty well unnoticed by all but a few.
I took part in a survey by my union - the Media Alliance - and was asked if I was aware of the coming changes to the Electoral Act.
I think I surprised the interviewer with the extent of my knowledge.
She told me after the interview that only one in 30 members - yes folks, about three per cent - of the membership were aware of what was happening.
So if the media doesn't know, how are the punters going to find out?
Unnoticed changes might make the process neater.
But are they democratic?
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