I voted today, as usual choosing a suitably loopy candidate. This time it was the Animal Justice Party, who say “Processed meat should not be sold to people under 18 years of age”. Which literally got my vote.
Did you at least vote for someone further down your preferences who is capable of forming a non-insane* government so your vote was not entirely pissed away? And so you don’t think I’m harsh, I used to be in Grayndler [Albo’s seat] and would always gift my first preference to a worthy cause and then go ALP next.
*Trying to remember the full list of parties that can be considered as insane: Does it have someone’s name in the party title? Adjective Australia? Religious name? Single Issue Noun Party / Alliance?
Preferences suitably considered. And add Orwellian to the list as the “Informed Medical” party were anti-vaxxers, just one tree in a forest of ratbaggery.
Interesting platform.
All the u18yo of my close acquaintance never came close to purchasing Calabrese, Soppressata, Pancetta or Coppa from Mr Rizzos deli in Five Dock. But they ate every slice their parents bought. Greedy sods.
The Animal Justice Party got anything meaningful to say about animal welfare before they are killed?
@banksiaman’s point is well made. The buzz of cocking a snoot at the LIBs and LABs by lodging a minor party protest vote is tempered by the prospect that through the byzantine preference swaps you could find your vote ends up with Clive Palmer’s yellow horde.
Have to hand it to the AEC, they’re on the ball this year!!
Yesterday morning around 8am, I tested positive for Covid, then suddenly realised I wouldn’t be able to get to a booth on Saturday to get my Democracy Sausages RULE.
So I jumped online to try to organise a postal vote, even though I got a banner on the page telling me it was unlikely I’d get my ballot papers before the polls closed on Saturday. Dammit.
But lunchtime today, barely 28 hours since I filled out the request for a postal vote, and VOILA, in my letterbox was all the stuff I need to vote. I am SERIOUSLY impressed.
As in “equally hopeless over a wide array of subjects“?
You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Lastest polls, for what little they are worth, are still saying too close to call.
Which to my mind is not a particularly positive assessment of Albo, cause surely ScoMo’s poor shower deserve a vigorous wire brush to the nether regions.
About 30% of the electorate has apparently already used the pre poll option. At this rate we’ll get something like a US mid-term turnout before the polls open.
As it happens Reid is a critical marginal seat. 2019 margin 0f 1.5% tpp. 40 polling booths, 20 won by LIB last time, 20 by LAB.
Have decided my 1st preference will go to an independent, might even help as a scrutineer for her. The crucial 2nd preference, will undecided, probably blue.
Am spoiled for choice on my last preference. There’s One Nation, Liberal Democrats, Palmer’s United Australia and a Green,
That will take some serious contemplation.
That was my problem. My natural instinct was to number them 1,2,7,7,7,7,7.
Do you have to express a preference on all candidates, or can you just leave off the ones you really don’t want to see elected?
In the House of Representatives [our lower house] for the one representative from
your electorate you have to number all the candidates from 1 → X, which is where many of us like @don_t_ask struggle at the bottom of the ballot list.
In the Senate ballot for your state there is usually a tablecloth sized ballot paper. Your choices are to vote ‘Above the line’, where you vote for a party and the preferences get distributed according to their ticket. You need to number at least 6 boxes.
Alternately you vote below the line, and you can vote for people in any order you like, with at least 12 votes. In my state there are 77 candidates this time. This means you can pick out your cousin’s friend who is running for the Animal Justice Party for special treatment.
Things may change with the increasing number of pre-poll ballots cast, but with polls closing at 6 PM, most seats usually have enough counted by midnight to call a result unless they are close. It takes a week? before they close off the final count for postal votes to all come in and officially declare. The Senate vote in each state [usually for 6 candidates] will usually have a clear sense of the first four spots by midnight, but the final two can take several weeks to sort out the flow of preferences and declare a result.
Because it is hard to predict which micro party will fail first and see its preferences dispersed the final spot can go to an obscure party. Famously Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts party got 0.5% of the primary vote but came through the rabble to win a seat some elections back. i think he put his name forward to help out and had zero expectation of winning.
Challenges are rare, but I think they do an automatic recount if the margin is tight.
If you have say six candidates on your HoR ballot, then picking who gets #4 or #5 in a practical sense can be a bit of a meaningless wash. But not #6. The guy you put last is the one guy has absolutely no chance of getting your vote. Psephological schadenfreude.
Which is why I like full preferences rather than exhausting preferences, that’s just expediency over pleasure.
Here is a link to show you exactly how tricky it can get with preference distributions. Watch how, through 38 counts, the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party candidate Ricky Muir’s 17,122 votes become 504,581… and a senate seat. How close he came to missing out.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/results/senate/vic/?nw=0
Last local council elections there were no how to vote cards handed out due to covid and this really nullified some of the smaller parties preference, with no how to vote cards provided with pre polling I have a feeling anything could happen this election.
I took my mother to vote last week. She’s mobility impaired and since they stopped using the local community centre next door as a polling place and make us all go to a primary school, pissfarting around getting her to the school and queuing up just isn’t worth it.
So many people don’t like either major party, this is likely to be a mess down to preferences.
Federal elections have mandatory preferencing. Some of the State elections eg NSW allow your preferences to exhaust.
So on Sat, if there are a dozen candidates you need to number them 1-12.
Miss one or give two #10s and you risk your vote being declared informal.
In the by-election for Bradfield in 2009 there were 22 candidates. Nine were candidates from the same party (the Christian Democrats). Bradfield is blue ribbon and the LIBs won easily with 56% of the primary vote. LAB didn’t even stand a candidate. 77k votes were cast. Every ballot had to be checked to ensure all 22 boxes were numbered. There was a very high (9%) informal vote, most due to incomplete preferences and none were needed.
I don’t understand the reasoning behind that. Or to put it another way, it seems daft to me: voters should have the option to signal “over my dead body”. In first-past-the-post, the only option is to guess who is best placed to keep X out; in a preferential system, surely it ought to be the option to give no preference to X and only rank the more or less acceptable?
It’s an extension of the concept of mandatory voting. Our Founding Fathers wanted elections to be inclusive. They wanted the electorate to be engaged. For the 30 seconds it takes to cast a vote they wanted every eligible voter to think about the other candidates. And elect the person most thought they would find the least objectionable. That it’s daft to you, Que sera, sera. For over a century Australians have revelled in it.
The Tweedledee Tweedledum nature of the magor parties has give encouragement to the rise of third parties, minor and single issue parties. Which means longer ballot papers. So now maybe takes 45 seconds. And know how to count. And it means to get elected you need to consider how to get the majority of people to like you enough to give you a vote, not just your base and win with the endorsement of 25% of eligible voters. And the majority of the electorate can’t hide behind the “I didn’t vote for them so you can’t blame me” meme.
But scratch those who want to dismantle preference voting and you typically find somebody who reckons the GOP disenfranchisement strategy is the right path and marking just one box is FPTP which is inane.
YMMV.
Just voted. Left the house at about 2.17pm, finished voting by 2.30pm, and that includes the seven or eight minute walk to the nearby voting place (one of three in walking distance).
Is it really true that the USA put a man on the moon 50 years ago? 
As @penultima_thule has explained that isn’t the culture here. Besides which I don’t think your reasoning is a solid as you think - if your preferred candidate isn’t going to be elected, then someone is going to be elected, whether your dead body is involved or not. Our system requires participation, including participation in the decision about which non-preferred candidate is going to have to step over your body to get elected.