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<\/a><\/p>\nThere’s a couple of ways to vote on our ‘bedsheet’ ballots. You can vote above the line, for a party. Just a ‘1’ in the box for the party you choose. If that party doesn’t win, they can then allocate your vote according to the party’s preference.<\/p>\n
If you don’t like the way any party has allocated preferences, you can vote below the line, numbering each individual candidate in your order of preference. In a Federal Election, this means sequentially numbering about 80 individual squares. If you make errors in your sequencing, your ballot can be declared ‘informal’ or invalid.<\/p>\n
Few people can memorise everything about every candidate; It’s difficult to make an informed below-the-line vote while standing at the voting booth. Of course, this prompts a lot of voters to use the above-the-line method.<\/p>\n
However, unprincipled preference distributions by parties have had unimaginably bad consequences on occasion, most notably with the election of Family Fist’s (no typo) Steve Fielding<\/a>, who has been an enormous pain in the ass<\/a> for the last three years. At very least, Fielding’s bigotry, buffoonery and gaffery has inspired some stellar parody and wit, notably from Twitter’s @FakeFielding<\/a>.<\/p>\n A new website has been set up to help voters build their below-the-line preferences at home, when they’ve got time and easy access to the internet to research their choices. Naturally, it’s called belowtheline.org.au<\/a>. It allows you to drag-n-drop candidates to tweak your vote and to print a copy of your selections to make voting day quick and easy.<\/p>\n Some good advice for Labor, who are now struggling in the polls<\/a>: Dump the internet filtering policy<\/a>– BEFORE 21 August. I’ll put Labor dead last if you don’t. Please don’t help Tony Abbott drive us to theocracy.<\/p>\n -weez<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the benefit of non-Australian readers, Australia has a preferential voting system, which facilitates participation of small and special interest parties. This arrangement has ups and downs. Read on. There’s a couple of ways to vote on our ‘bedsheet’ ballots. You can vote above the line, for a party. Just a ‘1’ in the box […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}