I worked on a lot of elections over the years, Doing My Bit for Democracy, and some of the observations here surprise me.
The story about the spoiled ballot paper indicates a failure of procedure. If you spoil a ballot paper, you can get another one, but you have to hand the spoiled one back. You don't have to explain anything: the electoral officer cannot query your reasons for requesting a new paper, and has no discretion about replacing it. The spoiled ballot paper is marked "Spoiled" and placed in the spoiled ballots envelope. At the end of the day, every ballot paper, including spoils, must be accounted for. In my experience, there were rare occasions when people would spoil a ballot paper, tear it up and throw it in a bin, and then go to the desk to demand a fresh one. They were always refused, until they brought the spoiled paper back to the desk. If this procedure were not followed, then the tally sheets would not balance, the integrity of the booth results would be compromised, and all the electoral officers would have to ferret through the bins until the missing paper(s) were found - usually very late at night. (Do you know how much paper an election generates? It's amazing...)
If you ever have a problem, don't argue with a desk officer: go straight to the Officer in Charge. The OiCs are much more knowledgeable than the desk officers, who usually have only a few hours' online training and little experience. (And if you turn up at 8AM, you will find that they have no experience!)
A few people number their Senate ballots from 1 to a zillion below the line, but in the booths where I worked (near Monash University, and later in South Brisbane), hardly anybody ever got it right. Duplicates and missing numbers were common.
Preference deals are something for the parties to negotiate and publicise. I recall - vaguely - an Electoral Commission handbook detailing Senate preference schemes, which was issued to polling booths. A few people - about three in twenty-odd years - did want to see it.
JH ========== On 16/8/2012 2:48 PM, Kath Bowman wrote:
At the last election I did my usual thing of voting below the line for the Senate election. I start at both ends, and hope they meet in the middle with no errors. Last time, I somehow mucked it up, so took my ballot slip back to the desk and asked for another one. This is exactly what the adverts leading up to the election told you to do. Well, it was like asking for a bar of gold. I had to stand my ground and insist on a new paper (which I got) but it was hard going.I used to help my mother fill in the forms (she was blind) and she voted below the line too. I seemed to spend ages in the booth filling in ballots, but there is something inherently satisfying about putting some people/parties at the bottom!Cheers Kath*From:*austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Kent, Christine*Sent:* Thursday, 16 August 2012 1:46 PM *To:* austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx*Subject:* atw: Re: OT: WARNING: Recruiter advertisements are ONLY trawling for resumes for tender responses!The amazing thing is that in the senate votes, virtually no-one knows where the preferences go if you put the ‘1’ for the party above the line. At the last two elections I’ve asked the booth staff and all of the folk handing out how-to-votes. Nobody knew and the only people who were able to rummage out the info were the Greens.Get-Up actually did provide information on this an election or two back – they made a big thing of it.Easy answer for both upper and lower house is to number the whole damn lot yourself. I always do that just to make sure the parties cannot do corrupt deals to determine where my vote goes – not that my one vote matters much but one can always hope the idea goes into the group mind.I also understand that preferences only flow down 3 levels, so if you have 5 or 6 on your card, I don’t recall exactly, you can number those you know have no chance whatever of winning as 1, 2 and 3, and after that, your vote is tossed – doesn’t actually make logical sense, but one can live in hope that it works that way. Does anyone know if it still works this way?Williamstown was a great electorate for this. Their right wing candidate was the labor candidate and everyone else – and there were usually lot, were further left than labor (not hard these days). You knew the labor candidate was going to win so you picked any other three as 1, 2, 3 etc – with the labor candidate the last preference.So, it is now unlawful to vote with clear intention, but you can vote the lazy way and not know who’s getting your vote. Great!! (where’s that new sarcastic font?)Cheers, Terry
