Series
The Elections Series
The machinery around a vote: how a preferential and Senate count actually works, how an electoral roll is maintained and why enrolment is the hardest data problem in the exercise, how a boundary redistribution is run, and how pre-poll, postal and declaration votes are reconciled without anybody voting twice. Part of Under the Hood.
How Does a Vote Get Counted?
Australian counting is an algorithm, and most voters have never seen a transfer worked through. We run a preferential count on a small ballot so every elimination is visible, then do a Senate quota with the fractional transfer value that keeps the arithmetic exact, explain what the two-candidate-preferred number is for, and establish why the count takes weeks and why custody of ballots was always the trust problem rather than the arithmetic.
Coming soon