I AM fairly sure I know who I am voting for in tomorrow’s election, but will my vote really go in the direction I intend it to? A few weeks ago the deadline passed for the preferences tickets for the Senate, and working out where my preferences will go is for me the most confusing part of an election.
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To avoid your preference vote going somewhere you don’t want it to, you must number all the boxes. You will find yourself in a fragile cardboard voting booth, pencil in hand marking every square in a banner sized senate voting sheet.
A sheet that is so long you have it curved up the sides of the booth, sounds like too much work for a Saturday morning, especially being the first weekend of Spring.
Yes, it’s going to be a can’tbe bothered kind of weekend.
This is how we end up with informal voting, not to be confused with Donkey voting which is the practice of voting a straight one to five up and down the ballot.
Which probably happens when we can’t be bothered as well, but they still get counted.
Informal votes are the ones that don’t count, these are the votes that are stuffed up.
Statistics from the Australian electoral commission show that informal voting is on the rise, with around 700,000 votes not being counted in the last election.
Now I’m pretty sure in the past there may have been an occurrence where I unwittingly stuffed up my vote, the likely cause being a small child of mine needed to be wrangled.
This is because the toddler is a beast that on entering the big empty space of a school hall, has an overwhelming desire to run around squealing at the top of their voice.
This display often acts as signal to other toddlers, who then run in even bigger and louder circles, in an attempt to outdo each other’s performance and gain attention.
However, it seems that more Australians are throwing their votes away on purpose, over half of all informal votes received appear to be intentional.
These votes are either blank, or have something else written on them.
Poetry and protest letters are a favourite way to do it in Tasmania, and that accounts for 64 per cent of their intentional informal votes which is the highest in the country.
Back to my point about preferences.
While I realise this is politics and nobody is ever going to be completely transparent about things (no matter how much they tell us they are), I would still like to able to have confidence in what my chosen candidate supports.
Just this morning I read that my candidates preferences will go to a party I do not want to support, so now what do I do? I will laboriously number all the boxes below the line, it seems to be the only way to be sure, but it may be little hard to read as I fill it in while running in circles around a school hall.
