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As the second most populous state in Australia, Victoria will hold the state election on November 26 this year.
To make the election process more accessible, the Victorian Electoral Commission will introduce low sensory voting this year.
This means there will be a dedicated site separate from public voting centres and early voting centres during the state election in November.
Compared to public voting centres, these low sensory voting sites will have reduced sound, subdued visuals and regulated crowd levels.
The VEC's Acting Electoral Commissioner Dana Fleming says the measure is to make voting more accessible to neurodivergent voters.
"It was an initiative that we started in response to community feedback that we received through our advisory groups that there was a demand for this experience and to make voting more accessible, accessible for low sensory voters, or particularly neuro diverse voters. So we responded to that and ran trials. We ran a trial in the Warrandyte by election, and also again in the Parana Werribee recent by elections."
All 88 lower house districts across Victoria will have the dedicated low-sensory voting centre, and these will be available from November 17.
Families and support persons for the neurodiverse voters can also vote at these low-sensory voting centres.
For neurodiverse voters with multicultural backgrounds, Ms Fleming says in-language services and support will be available at these low sensory sites.
"We encourage our multicultural communities who are neurodiverse, and we'll be reaching out to those communities to make them aware of this service through our multicultural channels, because we certainly will be providing the telephone interpreter service at these sites, and also we will have available the multi language voting instructions that we have at our usual voting sites."
The VEC has also expanded eligibility for voters who can access telephone voting for the upcoming state election.
The new measure has been welcomed by advocates and support groups for people with neurodiversity.
Tom Liollios from Neurodiversity Victoria works with many young people with neurodiversity who could be first-time voters in the coming state election.
"I think it's very positive, and certainly any accessibility improvements that are made for young people to access services and, of course, exercise their rights as citizens to vote and access information, I think is a wonderful thing."
While making the voting process accessible is indeed helpful, Mr Liollios says more needs to be done to get young people with neurodiversity to proactively engage in elections
"I think they face the same challenges that any young person faces, regardless of their cognitive capacity, and that is that news and information is not delivered in a substantial way and in a non biased way through social media. News is very much filtered and categorized and manipulated via, obviously, the the algorithms that are that drive the feeds for social media."
Education could be helpful, but according to Mr Liollios, the content needs to be targeted and engaging for the communities.
"Trying to understand policy in a way that is accessible and understandable by young people, because they use different terminology, different language, they process information in different ways. So what might speak, what might reach us intellectually at our age, and you know, sort of 40, the 40 plus generations. Would would be quite different, I think, to how it should be communicated to younger people."
Ms Fleming says the VEC has activated the Democracy Ambassador Program, which runs education sessions available for communities across diverse backgrounds.
"We run extensive outreach programs for all of our community groups, whether it's multicultural or disability or neurodiverse in this case, through our democracy ambassador program. And if anyone wants to have an education session, we have trained multilingual democracy ambassadors who can come out and run those sessions at sites where the voter is comfortable and they can learn about how to vote in those sessions."
