I love voting, I really do. I love, despite my misanthropic nature, seeing humans of all shapes and sizes, from all walks of life, trooping together to the polling station, ready to line up and take part in the one thing that we can actively, easily do to make a mark. I love that most of the local schools run sausage sizzles and markets, to give you something to do and something to eat while you wait to vote.

(A quick aside: the local primary school had their rock band playing while I lined up waiting to vote in 2007. Nine year old kids playing Ramones and AC/DC covers decided which school my little girl was going to.)

The trouble with politics in this, and most other democratic countries, is that our electoral system is complicated and not everyone understands how those complexities affect the way their vote is counted. And it matters, a LOT, becuase this is how we end up with statistical blips like Steve Fielding.

What follows is an attempt to explain how voting works in the Upper and Lower Houses, and what you can do to make sure your vote actually goes where you want it to.

The two houses’ voting systems are quite different, which is what I’m going to try to explain below.

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now. All the talk of “preference deals”, and “a vote for Green is just a vote for Labor” tends to make people think that they might as well just vote for one of the majors and be done with it, because they don’t have any control over their preferences. WRONG. Preference “deals” decree only what each party will put on the How To Vote cards that they hand you as you walk in to the polling place. It’s still entirely up to you how to preference.

Australia is the only country to have full preferential voting, where every vote really does count – in most other countries they have variations of “first past the post”, where you only vote for one candidate, and the one with the most votes wins. Some go to a “run off” secondary election, where the top two candidates then face an either/or election later on. Our system is complicated, but it ensures that your local member is the most preferred, or at least the least disliked, of all those on offer.

Let’s imagine there are five candidates in your electorate. All the votes are gathered up and put into piles, according to who’s been numbered “1” on each (these are called “primary votes”). After this is done, they count them all up, and if no one has more than 50% of the votes, they “go to preferences”.

The counters pick up the smallest pile of votes, and put them on the remaining four piles, according to who was marked as “2” on each one. Then they count the four piles, and discover that there still isn’t a pile with more than half the votes.

So they pick up the smallest pile of the four, and this is where it gets a little bit confusing. Each ballot paper is examined, and the candidate of the three remaining who is numbered highest on that paper gets that vote (they obviously can’t give the vote to one of the already eliminated candidates, so have to go down the numbers).

There are now three piles, and lo and behold there still isn’t one with more than half the votes. Now it gets really interesting, because when it gets this close, your fourth and fifth preferences mean a lot – the last to be eliminated could have as much as thirty percent of the pot, and their preferences will decide who wins the seat.

The seat of Richmond, on the North coast of NSW in 1990, was a classic example of this. There were eight candidates, and it came down to three: the sitting Country member, Charles Blunt, the ALP’s Neville Newell, and Dr Helen Caldicott, an independent. After preferences their tallies were, respectively, 29000, 20000, and 19000. Newell, 9000 votes behind, picked up most of Caldicott’s preferences and took the seat. Interestingly, Caldicott could have won the seat if preferences from the Democrat had all gone her way as expected.

Preferences count, down to your last and second-last pick. Unless you’re in a safe seat, in which case enjoy the sausages.

THE SENATE

The Senate works very differently, and I’ll try hard not to freak us all out with the maths, but I must warn you, there are big numbers and kooky formulae to follow.

(author’s note: I have been bashing my head against the wall for two hours now trying to come up with a way to make this make sense – apologies if it doesn’t come close enough, but the last bit is the most important)

Rather than dividing each state into electorates where candidates would need 50% of the vote, the Senate runs on a quota system. As with the Lower House, the best way for me to explain it is through a dramatically over-simplified example.

There are nine Senate seats up for election this time round in Victoria, and let’s say that exactly five million people have cast correct ballots. The quota that a candidate needs to obtain is calculated like this: total number of votes, divided by the number of seats plus one, plus one. Or, if numbers are your bag, baby:

So, 5 million divided by ten, plus one – five hundred thousand and one.

[5,000,000 / (9 + 1)] + 1 = 500,001

I’ll just look at one party’s votes, to keep the mind-bending to a minimum: say Senator Bloggs of the ALP is listed as number one on the ALP section of the ballot paper. Most people vote Above The Line (more on that later), so lets assume he gets two million and one votes, which is more than the quota. His “extra” million and a half votes are then allocated to those candidates who have been numbered Two on his ballot papers, but not at Face Value! Rather than have to decide which of his votes are “extra” they calculate, to eight decimal places, what the value of his “extra” votes will be like this: the number of his extra votes is divided by his total votes, that is

1,500,000 / 2,000,001 = 0.74999963

Each Bloggs vote is then allocated as to the second preferences at that value.

So, let say a million of Bogg’s extra votes had Senator Kafoops ALP as Number Two, so Senator Kafoops gets near enough that it doesn’t matter to seven hundred and fifty thousand votes added to her total. We’ll assume she got one million No 1 votes of her own. Now she has all her votes, plus Blogg’s second preference votes:

1,000,000 + (1,000,000 *.74999963)

= 1,749,999

She’s got her seat and a pile of extra votes, and again, we take her total number of votes, subtract her quota and weight the rest before distributing them to the next preference down .

1,749,999 - 500,001 = 1,249,998

To weight those 1,249,998 votes we apply the same formula as the first round, the “extra” votes is divided by the total votes:

1,249,998 / 1,749,999 = 0.71428498

So all her 1,249,998 “extra” votes are distributed to the next preference down as 0.71428498 of a vote and so on and so on, until nine candidates have attained the quota of 500,001 votes. Which leaves the guy who came tenth, with 499,991 votes, regretting sneezing on a baby on polling day.

When you are given your Senate ballot paper on polling day, you’ll see that you’re given the option of voting “Above The Line”, which means that, instead of having to count all the way up to sixty by numbering every box, you can just put a One in the box of your chosen party and they’ll allocate the preferences for you.

DO NOT DO THIS.

“Why should I not do this”, you ask? Because that’s how we got Steve Fielding in 2004. “I wouldn’t vote for that little dickweed if he gave me a handjob how the fuck did he get in, didn’t only about two thousand nutbags vote for him”, you say? And yes, you would be right. 2513 nutbags to be precise. But 98% of people voted above the line, so their preferences were allocated by party deals, which included a nasty and stupid little effort to backdoor the Greens by the Victorian ALP, which backfired on them (and us) rather spectacularly.

Voting below the line is complicated, and time-consuming, but it’s worth it. It’s the only way you can put the two worst Steves in Australia, Fielding and Conroy, last and second-last, and ensure that they’re both out of a job.

To make it easier, a couple of websites have popped up that allow you to sort through all the candidates and then print out your own How To Vote Below The Line card. The best one is www.belowtheline.org.au, it’s very well laid out and easy to navigate. .

If all of this has been too confusing, or not confusing enough, head to the AEC Website, or trawl through Antony Green (the wonk’s wonk)’s pages on the ABC for more detail and wonk-ness.

If you take anything out of this, please let it be this: think about your vote, get it right, vote Below The Line.

And enjoy the sausages.

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