Learn about Australian elections
Australian elections are complicated! These projects help you learn how they work. Try them out, then use the feedback button to let us know what you thought was good/bad/confusing.
Preferential Voting: A Bird’s Guide
Do you want to better understand how preferential voting works? Maybe you want to help someone else understand it. Maybe you want to do it while pretending to be a bird and voting for who should represent you as “Top Bird”.
Then our preferential voting site is for you!
Try out Preferential Voting: A Bird’s Guide.
Australian Senate counting: A Bird’s Guide
Australian Senate votes are counted with a combination of preferential and proportional voting. Preferences can flow either when a losing candidate is removed, or when a winning candidate has excess votes.
Learn how it works at Australian Senate Counting: A Bird’s Guide
Explain Australian Elections
Understanding Australian vote-counting can be a challenge. Explain that election lets you choose a particular outcome from a recent House of Representatives election, and shows you exactly how the count unfolded. This helps Australians understand what happens to the votes and why the person who has the highest first preferences is not always the final winner.
My Ballot Journey (prototype)
Make up a Senate vote and see how it would have travelled through the counting algorithm. You can see which elected Senators would have benefited from your vote, and by how much. My Ballot Journey.
Democracy is best served by transparent processes. Building something useful and meaningful can take a lot of time and effort. Importantly, it is also iterative. We build and update versions continually while considering all the different kinds of feedback we can collect.
This is still a prototype. Sharing it now serves a couple of purposes:
- We want you to check it out. Play with it. Interact with it. Go through it to see if it makes sense to you or you find it useful. Then, if you want, you can use the feedback button to let us know what you thought was good/bad/confusing.
- It helps dispel the myth that perfect products just appear, fully formed and true to the original idea. This is important to remember when working with democracy: it’s all a continuum, changing and rebuilding as new information makes its way to those responsible.