Biden’s numbers among young voters have slid during his presidency from the high margins that helped him beat Trump. Several former supporters explain why.
the gist is that if you want to just vote for a party, you can: if you simply put a 1 in a box, that party will assign your preferences (when you vote “below the line” - numbering every box in the order that you’d like - you have to fill out 150 numbers, making sure you don’t make a mistake)
so your ballot paper has about 20 different parties[1] on it, ranging from the major parties (coalition/liberal/national and labour) to a few others (greens are becoming big, socialist alliance, etc), and then single issue parties (legalise cannabis australia, there was a high speed rail party at 1 point)… and it has a bunch of individual politicians below each party with their own boxes
if you decide that legalising cannabis is the issue you care about, you can just number their box and they’ll allocate your preferences - hopefully based on how likely they think a particular politician is to support legalising cannabis. you can also put multiple numbers above the line and a range of other things, but at its simplest it’s putting a 1 in a box and going home
some of this might be slightly incorrect because it can get very complex and i don’t really delve too deep into how the ballot actually works at its most complex level… but i think the great thing is that you can vote according to whatever complexity or detail you like and the system ensures your vote is allocated to who you’d most likely want
the gist is that if you want to just vote for a party, you can: if you simply put a 1 in a box, that party will assign your preferences (when you vote “below the line” - numbering every box in the order that you’d like - you have to fill out 150 numbers, making sure you don’t make a mistake)
interesting. I… wonder how the system would resolve putting a ‘2’ in the box and then voting for somebody else as a 1, but otherwise party line. like the party-line vote is the failsafe, but I put my preferred 2 or 3 candidates in first.
you can only vote above (party preference) or below (all preferences) the line on our ballots, so that’s not a situation that can occur, however i imagine it’d be something the actual counting system could tolerate - heck you could probably even assign someone an arbitrary 51 and imo the system could just grab that person out of the party preferences, sequence the list, and then put them in at number 51 and that’s your preference list
otherwise, the party preferences are published in advance, so you can always print them off and tweak them, then vote below the line
yeah we have RCV for everything… everyone knows how to vote; it’s really not hard
https://www.aec.gov.au/media/2022/05-11.htm
this articles a little old and it’s changed a bit since then, but on a basic level it the same:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/how-does-australia-s-voting-system-work
the gist is that if you want to just vote for a party, you can: if you simply put a 1 in a box, that party will assign your preferences (when you vote “below the line” - numbering every box in the order that you’d like - you have to fill out 150 numbers, making sure you don’t make a mistake)
so your ballot paper has about 20 different parties[1] on it, ranging from the major parties (coalition/liberal/national and labour) to a few others (greens are becoming big, socialist alliance, etc), and then single issue parties (legalise cannabis australia, there was a high speed rail party at 1 point)… and it has a bunch of individual politicians below each party with their own boxes
if you decide that legalising cannabis is the issue you care about, you can just number their box and they’ll allocate your preferences - hopefully based on how likely they think a particular politician is to support legalising cannabis. you can also put multiple numbers above the line and a range of other things, but at its simplest it’s putting a 1 in a box and going home
some of this might be slightly incorrect because it can get very complex and i don’t really delve too deep into how the ballot actually works at its most complex level… but i think the great thing is that you can vote according to whatever complexity or detail you like and the system ensures your vote is allocated to who you’d most likely want
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Australia
interesting. I… wonder how the system would resolve putting a ‘2’ in the box and then voting for somebody else as a 1, but otherwise party line. like the party-line vote is the failsafe, but I put my preferred 2 or 3 candidates in first.
thank you for your input!
you can only vote above (party preference) or below (all preferences) the line on our ballots, so that’s not a situation that can occur, however i imagine it’d be something the actual counting system could tolerate - heck you could probably even assign someone an arbitrary 51 and imo the system could just grab that person out of the party preferences, sequence the list, and then put them in at number 51 and that’s your preference list
otherwise, the party preferences are published in advance, so you can always print them off and tweak them, then vote below the line