Slashdot Mirror
A How-To Website For Australian Voters
Twisted64 writes "If you're interested in voting below the line in the upcoming federal election in Australia, but don't want to waste time in the booth individually ranking up to 76 candidates (for the unfortunates in New South Wales), then Cameron McCormack's website may have what you need. The website allows voters to set their preferences beforehand, dragging and dropping Stephen Conroy at the bottom of the barrel and thrusting the Sex Party into pole position (as an utterly random example). Once preferences are set, the site can generate a PDF to be printed and taken to the booth." (More, below.)
"There's also something to educate the above-the-line voters — if you check the box for your single party of choice, the site will fill out the effective party preferences below the line. This shows that a vote for The Climate Sceptics hands first preferences to Family First, and so on.
The website claims not to harvest voting information, but for the paranoid it recommends printing out a blank ballot sheet and copying your preferences from the screen. There is also a button to set up a donkey vote when in the ballot view, in case you have trouble counting from 1 to 100."
The website claims not to harvest voting information, but for the paranoid it recommends printing out a blank ballot sheet and copying your preferences from the screen. There is also a button to set up a donkey vote when in the ballot view, in case you have trouble counting from 1 to 100."
There are actually 84 Senate candidates in NSW.
I think the system is obviously pretty broken if the only choices are to number each of 84 boxes, go with a pre-decided list that the main parties have reached through secret preference deals, or have your vote rejected. At the moment you have to choose between two evils, and it has been made as inconvenient as possible for you to even make that choice rather than the party powerbrokers.
Group voting tickets are just undemocratic. Preferential voting should only go as far as the voter wants - if your vote doesn't get distributed to any of your preferences, it should be discarded.
OK that didn't take long. The site seems to be slashdotted already. Perhaps it wasn't a good idea for it to be serving 500KB @font-face referenced fonts from my little VPS. :)
Once everybody's stopped clicking the link, I'll try moving the static data over to something that can handle it, like an Amazon S3 bucket.
"The website allows voters to set their preferences beforehand, dragging and dropping Stephen Conroy at the bottom of the barrel and thrusting the Sex Party into pole position (as an utterly random example)."
Hah. Random. Right. Anyway, I LOLed. Thanks again, Australia!
Non Australian voters might be confused by this article because it gives the impression that you need a HOWTO to be able to vote. But thats not true. Just give people you don't like high numbers, and people you do like low numbers. Its still pretty simple.
You can tell from my sig. Labour candidates are getting high numbers from me in the senate this year.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Actually here's one that actually scales:
https://www.belowtheline.org.au/
The link to the belowtheline website appears to be borked in the article.
A quick Google, finds https://www.belowtheline.org.au/ however.
Does the site have the ballot for silent electors?
Just waiting for the voting guides.
http://www.filter-conroy.org/
The following document is a summary of the parties and their positions on various subjects. Publically modifiable, so if you can contribute, please do.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgwGFHFd0TUIdExCbkNZWllUaVRsRG9yZXVVTXhUN0E&hl=en&authkey=CJu2lp8P#gid=0
Anything to do with www.belowtheline.org.au?
what happened to the coral network, it used to save so many sites from being slashdotted.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
BTW, you know how the pollies really only campaign the marginal electorates and forget about the rest? I've had this idea (never got around to implementing it though), of providing a web app that works out (maybe using the white pages) a voting scheme which would make every electorate marginal. E.g. if everyone with a surname before say 'Peabody' in the white pages voted labor and the rest voted liberal, in suburb X, it work make X a marginal suburb. Extend that to all the suburbs and the whole country becomes a marginal electorate.
Not sure what the deal is with belowtheline.cc (has it been /.ed already?)
But belowtheline.org.au is very telling.
It is telling me that a vote for democrats above the line will likely be a vote for liberal due to them being preferenced second place...
I think I'll do my own preferencing
Why doesn't the AU government provide the service? Why is it left to some random website to provide a means to vote more easily?
Below The Line - How To Vote In South Australia
If Internet Censorship is your main concern this coming election, the following guide has been created online via BelowTheLine.org.au and using the different parties websites and statements on policies to order them.
While they are ordered in preference of internet censorship, the top 2 are ordered based on their ability to influence. The rest are ordered within their preference (against/unknown/for) relatively randomly, except with the Australian Labour Party being given a dead last position, to reduce their influence.
This ballot will result in your vote being against internet censorship, as much as possible.
If you want to change some of the ordering around a bit, feel free to edit the ticket here...
Edit Below The Line - How To Vote In South Australia
Just make sure you keep them in their general positions.
Some information on what positions each party is taking can be found here, though it's good to go over their websites, news articles, and similar...
Australian Political Parties who oppose and support Internet Censorship
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
in Oz you can just nominate the party of preference at the top of the voteing paper and the numbers are set as that party has published. As for those like me who number each square, that's the price of actually thinking. Why do we need a /. entry for this crap??
You make an interesting point. That article you linked to is Fiona Patten, the leader of the Australian Sex Party and the Eros Association so you have to admit that she’s not purely objective/independent in this situation. Also, I think both censorship and refugees have to do with civil liberties.
For the record, I agree with your position against that censorship, but I don’t see how you can conclude that it is the main issue in this election.
From my understanding, censorship in the context of the filtering Refused Classification (RC) rated internet content is impractical for a variety of reasons, will reduce internet speeds and could be a slippery slope to more draconian censorship. Australian’s treatment of refuges and the demonisation of the boat people already leads to pain, suffering and death of a very vulnerable group of people that Australia has already agreed to protect through international conventions.
When I look at it this way, I don’t see how you could conclude that censorship is a more important issue and voting should be made along censorship.
You break all the laws of physics and you seriously think there wouldn't be a price?
A wise person votes both above and below the line. If you do that and stuff your below the line vote up then your above the line vote gets used instead.
See http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/07/how-to-vote-guide.html, in the last section titled What happens if I vote both above and below the line? .
I tried this, but in fine print at the top of the list was Brain Slugs. Oh well, for some reason I think they're worth voting for, and I think you should vote for them too.
The Chinese people confuse l and r and consequently confuse election and erection. That's why China has the largest population but no democracy.
From the AEC link:
A vote below the line is informal if:
While they've put a lot of words there to try to make a confusing process less confusing, they are doing it wrong.
If, as this page explains, a ballot is rejected when 90% or more of the squares are not numbered, then that means that the ballot would be accepted if 89% or fewer of the squares are left blank.
They mean to say "if fewer than 90% of the squares are numbered," or "if 10% or more of the squares are not numbered"
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Quick question, Cameron: Bob Brown is standing in this election as a senator for Tasmania for the Greens party. Why is he not on your Tas Senate Ballot list?
That's only in the ACT (which is the default option on btl.org.au, so you might not have intended it)
The ACT senate election is a bit peculiar (see http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/07/the-act-senate-contest.html), but I'm still surprised (and disappointed) at the Dem's decision there.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What a wonderful idea, well done. This should be advertised on the radio or something.. see if you can get some attention from the ABC!
I'm sure everyone has suggestions for you. :) Here are mine.. mainly directed at the idea of this becoming a tool for the *average* voter, so they consider voting below the line, not just to make it easier for those who do it anyway. If it catches on, democracy benefits. Either that, or we realise we did need saving from ourselves. :)
1. A link in each party's box to that party's site - anything to get some information about their policies. I have no idea who the Secular Party, Carers Alliance, etc. is.. I think people would benefit from seeing how many choices there are out there and to easily see what they're about.
2. A page to visually represent all the preference deals. It's too hard clicking each party name on the ballot view and trying to work out how the numbers change below the line. Something simple, easy to interpret would be excellent and very helpful for people.
3. A bit more work, but perhaps a list of several major issues which are on the agenda in the election. People tick "like" or "don't like" for each issue, then it shows you which parties you had best vote for to get that result. Examples:
a) Current National Broadband Network (Labor) vs Starting again (Liberal)
b) Internet Filtering - Yes (Lab/Lib) or No (Greens)
c) Carbon Tax yes/no
d) Selling off Medibank Private (Liberal)
etc. etc.
That would also help people realise there's more to the election than the pale agendas set by the two individuals hogging the airwaves and debating crap like who is more "real" and "unleashed". No wonder people draw dicks on their ballots.
Once again, well done, I believe this is the start of a more aware and savvy electorate! The internet rides again.