Below is the nightmare Victorian Senate ballot paper, in the order determined by random chance. As you can see, progressive candidates did very badly, and the ballot is filled with right-wing cranks and lunatics. The Libs are at the very top. The ALP is way down the bottom - worse, it’s after the far-right “Labour DLP”, which will cause confusion. The ballot highlights how silly it is having a system where people with a few hundred bucks who register a party with a misleading name in April have the same chance of being at the top of the paper as a real party people have heard of.
I’d suggest the solution is that the ballot is in order of who got the most votes last time. No more “Liberal Democrats” getting ahead of the Liberal Party, or the “Labour DLP” being ahead of the ALP. No more trading on confusion.
Anyway, that won’t happen, so here we are. What to do?
And here is a link to a ranking engine used by boardgame geeks to rank their boardgame collections: https://www.pubmeeple.com/board-game-ranking-engine/
It can be used for ranking any list. Like, say, a list of candidates for the Senate in Victoria.
And here is a text list of all the candidates on the Victorian Senate ballot for 2019. If you copy and paste it into the ranking engine, it will pull up two parties at a time and ask you to pick the one you’d prefer if it came down to the two of them at the end. One of them was going to get that last senate seat. It’s down to you. Which is the least bad option? Which would you prefer to see lose? I would suggest ranking candidates and parties that are unclear about what they stand for just above the ones that are outright bad (the LNP) and those ones above the ones that are outright evil (PHON), and the single issue parties where you don’t know how they’d vote on anything other than that issue just above those. Then the ok parties (the ALP) above them and the good parties (the Greens) at the top.
At the end it will generate a list in order of your preferences as you’ve expressed them. Hopefully that’s helpful.
The list:
A LNP
B Republican Party of Australia
C Socialist Equality Party
D The Small Business Party
E Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile Group)
F United Australia Party
G Shooters, Fishers and Farmers
H Climate Action! Immigration Action! Accountable Politicians! (formerly Senator Online)
I Derryn Hinch's Justice Party
J Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) Party
K Citizens Electoral Council
L Australian Democrats
M Independents for Climate Action Now
N Liberal Democrats
O Secular Party of Australia
P Labour DLP
Q Pauline Hanson's One Nation
R Pirate Party
S Voteflux.org Upgrade Democracy
T Australian Workers Party
U Animal Justice Party
V The Greens (VIC)
W Rise Up Australia Party
X Australian Labor Party
Y Sustainable Australia
Z Sunny Chandra & Robert Whitehill
AA Fraser Anning's Conservative National Party
AB Australian Conservatives
AC The Great Australian Party
AD Health Australia Party
AE Yellow Vest Australia
Ungrouped Independents
