[goatforce5]

In Australia every polling booth has party volunteers handing out How To Vote flyers showing how they recommend you distribute your preferences. So if you like the Greens but don't really know where those two obscure independents fit in to the picture, you'd just follow their guidance on whether to put them at the top or the bottom of the list.

I suspect most Australians probably just follow their preferred candidates preferences.

http://www.australianpolitics.com/elections/htv/

Allocation of preferences is the mechanism that gives the smaller parties a say in the political process. The Greens (say) might know they have no chance of getting more than a couple of percent of the votes in a giving electorate, but they can do deals with the major parties based on that. e.g. "If renewable energy becomes a campaign promise, we'll direct our supporters to put you as their second preference."

[hugh3]

I suspect most Australians probably just follow their preferred candidates preferences

Do they really? I never have, and I've never understood the mindset that would. Maybe I will vote for you, Mr Candidate, but I'm not gonna take your advice on the numbers I stick in everybody else's boxes... especially since those numbers probably indicate whatever deals you've made rather than some actual order of preferability based on competence or ideology. For this reason I've always thought that the whole preference-deal thing was a complete waste of time, but hey, maybe there's a lot of people out there genuinely following the how-to-vote card.

It hardly matters anyway. There's very few electorates with more than two viable candidates, so all that really matters is whether you put "Liberal" before "Labor" or vice versa.

[goatforce5]

The link says most people just go along party lines.

Even though in many electorates your vote will end up going to Liberal or Labor, the path it takes to get there is super important. That's kinda the point. If you think the environment is a really important issue, go vote Green because typically they'll have worked out a deal with one of majors to get some of their issues addressed.

You like smoking pot and there's a nutty local candidate who'll never be voted in in a million years and who none of the major parties will have bothered to do deals with? He's still worth a vote so that once the election is over the other candidates can see there's some people who consider it an important issue.

The entire beauty of preferential voting is it gives some voice to the other candidates in shaping policies, regardless of who gets in.

[hugh3]

Fair enough. The other advantage is that it really does let us know when fringe candidates are fringe. If the nutty independent gets 3% of the vote then he can't say "I woulda got elected if it weren't for this damn two-party system"... we just look at him and say that, yep, he really is on the fringe.

Personally my strategy is to always vote number 1 for someone I'm pretty sure is going to get less than 4% of the vote. Why? Electoral funding rules. The government gives the parties money for their election campaigns based on how many votes they get. Except for folks who get less than 4% of the vote -- they get nothing. So if you vote 1 for a major party you're voting for taxpayer money to be given to political parties (yeech) but if you vote for some minor <4% nutjob then no money gets given on your behalf (hooray!)

Or so I've heard. I've never actually verified that this is true.

I'm also one of the few people who actually fills out every box below the line on the upper-house ballot sheets. A few years ago I think there were two hundred and something candidates, so I just wound up numbering consecutively in pretty spirals and so forth. Then I folded my ballot paper into a hat and wore it across the room to the box. They glared at me.