How Preferences Work

Here’s a movie from the AEC explaining how preferences in the lower house work (if you don't have Flash installed this won’t work, sorry). Study this movie if unsure about the process.

The key things to understand for an electorate like Ryan, where only the two major parties stand a chance of having enough primary votes to stand a chance of winning, are:

1. You must number all the candidates; in Ryan there are 5 so you must use all the numbers from 1 to 5, with 1 for your favourite candidate down to 5 for the one you least want to win.
2. If you vote 1 for a major party, no one cares about what else you wrote on your ballot.
3. If you vote 1 for a minor party like the Greens, your vote is counted again when your first choice drops out of the count.
4. The order you number the major party candidates decides who wins, even if you put them last and second-last.
5. How-To-Votes handed out on election day play no role in counting: what’s written on your ballot is all that the people doing the counts will see.

There is a lot of confusion about this; some campaigns prefer to make a big issue about “preference deals” rather than focus on policy. It’s all really simple in fact: decide which candidate you think is best, write down a 1 (we hope next to Sandra’s name), and so on down the list. The counting system will make sure that your vote is not wasted.

It’s unfortunate that there’s a different system for every election, but it’s worth taking the time to understand because it’s your vote and you are entitled to make it count.

We will be handing out “How-To-Vote” information on election day that provides you with a suggestion. But it’s up to you what you write on your ballot. That’s the way it’s always been, and talk of preference deals deciding who wins in the lower house is never correct.

Finally, printing millions of pieces of paper that are only used once is a ridiculous waste, so we print too few and encourage voters to return ours for reuse. We would prefer to change the system to eliminate this waste entirely, but this is the best we can do.