Ahead of this year's federal election, we asked the Australian Electoral Commission how preferential voting works and why we use it.
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00:00We're about to be absolutely bombarded by information about the election in Australia.
00:05So how are we going to make our vote count?
00:07We spoke to the Australian Electoral Commission to answer just that.
00:11So when you go to vote at a federal election, you'll be given two pieces of paper.
00:15So you'll be given a smaller green one, which is for the House of Representatives in Parliament,
00:20and a much larger, sometimes white one, which is for the Senate with a lot more candidates
00:23on it.
00:24And the basic premise is that your vote will always end up where you want it to be.
00:28And that's because we have something called preferential voting.
00:30So you have to mark on the House of Representatives green ballot paper, mark all the boxes in
00:35the order of your preference.
00:37And basically what happens is that if your most preferred candidate gets knocked out,
00:41we keep moving down your preferences until it finally ends up with one of the final two
00:46candidates in the count.
00:47So effectively, your vote is always contributing to that final vote tally in those last two
00:52candidates.
00:53We see it in a few other countries, but a lot of times people can get confused between
00:56preferential voting and what's called first-past-the-post.
00:59So that's what they have in places like the UK or the US.
01:04And some of the differences there is that your preferences don't flow down the ballot
01:07paper.
01:08They'll be assigned to where you vote them in the first place.
01:10So part of our work here at the AEC is making sure that people understand how that preferential
01:15voting system works.
01:16And you'll see across different states and territories that they've got preferential
01:20voting, but sometimes there can be little small differences here or there between those
01:24different elections, such as whether you need to mark every box is a really big one.
01:29So that's why it's always best to double-check what the ballot paper is telling you to say.
01:35When you look at how preferential voting actually works, if you ever go on the AEC tally room,
01:40which is our online counting center, you can look at previous results and you can actually
01:43see where the preferences flow.
01:45It's quite interesting.
01:47And you can see when candidates are knocked out, where all the different votes have gone
01:51from there.
01:52And it sort of goes, might go from eight candidates to seven, six, so on, until it's with those
01:56final two.
01:57So that can also help gain an understanding of how that preferential voting system works.