A most peculiar thing is happening in the Festival State.

After two months of non-stop partying, traversing the full spectrum from highbrow to high octane, it would seem that South Australian voters are doing whatever it takes to avoid the corflute solitude of the polling booth this coming Saturday, March 20.

Since just before Christmas, Adelaide has been on the entertainment equivalent of an eating binge, starting with Lance Armstrong riding in the Tour Down Under, moving on to the Fringe with its centrepiece, the Garden of Unearthly Delights, a Bedouin style collection of performers and tents that completely occupies one of the CBD’s parks, the dope-infused WOMADelaide world music festival, Writers Week and, of course, the Adelaide Festival itself, almost forgotten in the hoopla.

Sandwiched in between this was a maxed out, ear-splitting AC/DC concert at Adelaide Oval, with the city council lifting decibel restrictions for the night.

The party officially ended last weekend with the four-day Clipsal 500 V8 Supercar event, a 250-kilometre race on a course snaking through the city’s streets and the defunct Victoria Park Racecourse, on once-sacrosanct parklands.

More than 89,000 fans attended Sunday’s race. Nearly 280,000 attended the four-day event.

Holden’s Garth Tander managed a clean sweep of both races at the Clipsal 500, a result that goes down well in the town that makes the Holden Commodore.

So, everyone should be in a good mood rolling to the polls, right? Err, not quite.

Now the party is all over. It is time to knuckle down to the job of electing a government. Oh the horror, the horror.

If figures released this week by the state electoral commission are any guide, the state’s voters are doing whatever it takes to avoid the polling booth.

The electoral commission has been caught by surprise by a remarkable demand for postal votes. By last weekend, the commission had received more than 80,000 postal vote applications. That is about 8 per cent of the just over 1 million enrolled voters, or about the same number of people that attended last Sunday’s V8 race.

The high number of postal vote applications is in no small part to a big postal vote mail-out by both the Labor and Liberal Parties, gazumping the traditional role of the electoral commission.

Postal votes are seen as captive votes by political parties, with the added bonus of beefing up the direct mail data bases run by party HQs.

But why would so many voters take up the option?

It is unlikely that 8 per cent of the voting population will be out of town on March 20, especially after three months of partying. Is something else going on?

Is it possible that by opting for a postal vote, a large number of South Australians are somehow trying to depersonalise the nasty business of electing a government? Or throwing one out? Is it somehow nicer to make these decisions from the comfort of your family room, rather than the polling booth?

Given that probably half of the postal votes have been netted by the ALP’s mass-mail-out, maybe, maybe not.

But a slew of recent newspaper opinion polls over the past two months have shown South Australians are in an ugly mood for change. This is a state with a track record of turning on surprising, sometimes brutal election outcomes.

The latest poll, the state-wide Galaxy poll of 800 voters run for The Sunday Mail and published last weekend, confirmed that the ALP’s primary vote has buckled. It is stuck on 36 per cent, a figure confirmed by published statewide polls by The Advertiser and The Australian’s Newspoll. The Galaxy poll puts the Liberal primary vote at 42 per cent. Conventional political wisdom in Australia dictates that to win an election, you need a four in front of your primary vote.

After preferences, Galaxy has the Liberals leading Labor 51 per cent to 49 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, a swing of 7.8 per cent since the 2006 election which, if uniform, would deliver government to the Liberals.

But swings in South Australian elections are rarely uniform, a statewide poll takes in rural seats where the Liberal vote is higher than in metropolitan areas and the polls have shown a slightly happier picture for the ALP in its marginal seats of Newland, in Adelaide’s north-eastern suburbs, and Bright, in the southern suburbs.

Taking an average of the polls and the best stab at preference distribution, most commentators put Mike Rann’s Labor Government and Isobel Redmond’s Liberal Opposition at dead even on 50 per cent each of the two-party preferred vote. If this holds to election day, it points to a hung parliament, with both sides having to cut a deal with independents to form a government.

But even so, this is a stunning reversal of form for a government that, this time last year, was strolling toward a comfortable election victory.

Mike Rann, once the party’s great asset with an approval rating of 80 per cent, has been shown to have political feet of clay. It has been a rude awakening for the ALP, accustomed to riding on its popular premier’s coat tails.

Despite Premier Rann’s clear denial that he had a sexual relationship with parliament house waitress Michelle Chantelois – she says they had sex – the allegations have taken a toll on the Premier’s standing.

The Chantelois issue has developed into a rolling media sideshow that has refused to go away during this campaign. On March 4, Rick Phillips, the estranged husband of Ms Chantelois, pleaded guilty in court to assaulting the Premier with a rolled up Winestate magazine at a Labor fundraiser at Adelaide’s National Wine Centre on October 1 last year.

No conviction was recorded against him, and is he is on a two year good behaviour bond.

This did not stop his, or her, commentary on Mr Rann’s merits as they viewed them. Mr Phillips was seen signing autographs for racegoers at last weekend’s V8 carnival race, where his son was competing in one of the lead-up events.

Despite overseeing a healthy economy, retaining the state’s AAA credit rating through the Global Financial Crisis and recording the nation’s lowest unemployment rate last month, the Government has struggled for oxygen.

Liberal leader Isobel Redmond, just eight months into the job, is campaigning on a Redmond is Ready platform. She has now overtaken Premier Rann on the key question of preferred premier.

And on the major policy difference between the two major parties, Galaxy shows that more than 60 per cent of voters prefer the Liberal plan to redevelop the existing inner-city Royal Adelaide Hospital over Labor’s plan to build a new hospital on a railyards site further along North Terrace.

In the last election in 2006, Mike Rann’s ALP brand strolled home against a Liberal campaign that was literally flat broke. The Liberals could not afford any TV advertisements until the last week of the campaign.

This time around, the Liberal campaign is cashed up, is roughly matching Labor on positive and negative TV ads and its campaign has a more professional edge about it.

Labor has 28 seats in the 47 seat parliament. The Liberals hold 14, Independents four and the Nationals one, although that MP, Karlene Maywald, accepted a position in the Rann Cabinet.

The ABC’s election analyst Antony Green says the Liberals need a uniform swing of 10.2 per cent to govern in their own right. A uniform swing of 6.2 per cent would reduce Labor to bartering its way back into a minority government. The opinion polls are pointing to this size swing.

But swinging voters in this state often engage with the political process late in the piece, often in the last week of a campaign.

The ALP in South Australia has a track record of running smart marginal seat campaigns that operate below the opinion poll radar. It will need every ounce of its marginal smarts, and some luck, to hold office.

The Right’s Michael Atkinson, the state’s colourful Attorney General, late last week launched what he calls The Spruce Goose, direct mail letters in 48 languages, including Urdu, to ethnic voters in key marginals. He, and Labor, are hoping The Spruce Goose flies.

One senior Labor strategist, deep in the party’s bunker, told me this afternoon “this is going to be a week you will remember for a long time”. He said that by Saturday the ALP would either have scraped its way back into office, or it would be in Opposition.

It is game on in South Australia. The election will be decided this week.

Matthew Abraham and David Bevan present the morning program on 891 ABC Adelaide.

Matthew has covered state politics for The Advertiser and covered the Hawke-Keating Government as the paper’s federal Press gallery journalist and on ABC local radio in Canberra. He is a former state political reporter for The Australian.