I'm going to preface by saying that I don't want my votes to go to the Dark Lord or the Liberal Party or the liars in the Labour Party. They are both completely corrupt and I'm adamant that they need to feel some pain.

So then I want to look at the independents and consider what they do and what they don't do, and will they be truly representative, or are they just there scrambling for votes to get some money and power? Who can say?

So what I'd like to do to make sure the Liberals and Labour don't get my vote, is find some kind of flowchart, that shows if I vote for an independent or a smaller party, where does that preference go to, so that I don't feed the party that I don't want to get my vote in the end.

Is there any resource out there that can show me where the preferences get fed to, so I can make an informed choice.

I feel like this should be a legal obligation, that we are all given this kind of information in a flowchart. But I can't find it. Can anybody help?

Thank you so much.

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[–] eureka@aussie.zone 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

(only addressing this part, as the other comments have the important part covered)

I feel like this should be a legal obligation, that we are all given this kind of information in a flowchart. But I can’t find it. Can anybody help?

I'd say the Australian Electoral Commission is the most authentic resource for getting facts about our election (seeing as they run it). I wish some of this information was shoved in our faces more.

The information sheets PDFs linked on this page summarise how the vote count works: https://www.aec.gov.au/learn/preferential-voting.htm

Further reading: The preferential voting system we use in Australia is Single Transferable Vote (with the House of Reps using Instant-Runoff Voting ~~with optional preferences~~. IRV is just a single-winner version of STV), but you'll often hear it just called 'preferential voting' here (other preferential voting systems exist, e.g. Borda count).

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

with the House of Reps using Instant-Runoff Voting with optional preferences

Not optional preferences.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Whoops, I was going from memory based on last election. You're right.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 3 weeks ago

Federally, the Reps has always had compulsory preferential. Things are different at some state and council elections though. For example, in Queensland state elections it's compulsory, but Council elections have optional preferential. It was an election promise by the LNP to change it to optional preferential in both state and council elections. Because optional preferential helps the LNP a huge amount, by causing some Greens and Labor voters to have their votes exhausted rather than going to the other.