Some useful links for the Australian Federal Election

[pedanther]

alias_sqbr has posted some links to Info about parties in the upcoming Australian Federal Election, including several I'd been meaning to include in this post if I'd gotten around to it sooner.

Cluey Voter, Donkey Votie, and Build a Ballot all offer tools for rearranging a list of senate candidates to produce a personalised how-to-vote card to help you get the right numbers in the right boxes. Cluey Voter is the only one of the three that offers the full below-the-line service; the other two only cover the above-the-line list for each ballot. Build a Ballot offers a service where you can fill out a questionnaire about your opinions on key issues, and it will attempt to sort the candidates for you into what it thinks might be your preferred order, before presenting the list to you for tweaking. (I found that it predicted me pretty well on the lower house ballot, but my upper house ballot required more tweaking because that involved a bunch of minor parties and independents that it lacked relevant information on.)

Vote Compass has a chart illustrating the political positions of the main parties, on a scatter plot with axes for left-right and progressive-conservative, so you can see which ones are similar to each other, and if you fill in a questionnaire on your opinions about the main issues of the day it will add a dot for you and offer a selection of additional charts showing which parties have expressed opinions most similar to yours. (I always find that my results are about what I expected, but I don't mind having external validation that I've got a good grasp of the situation.)

This page on how to effectively vote for the Senate, including both the basics of how to make a valid vote and the more philosophical areas of which half of the ballot to opt for, seems useful but I admit I've only skimmed it so far.