election day
Well it is state election day in sunny Victoria and I have just come back from exercising my citizenly duty. In my latte-sipping eleftorate (see what I did there?) there were plenty of people clutching Greens how to vote cards in line for voting and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a sizeable swing towards the greens from the ALP. As one who takes my duties seriously and always elects to number the boxes below the line, I LOVE the new optional preferential voting. It meant that I didn’t have to direct any of my preferences at all to the looney people. If you number above the line, just think that part of your vote will go to the Citizens Electoral Council, whereas none of mine will.
There is something about election day which reminds you that you are part of a community. I walked to my polling booth and had a conversations with a number of people on the way chatting about where the nearest booth was, whether there was likely to be lines and so on. It is a nice feeling to know that everyone has this task on their agenda today. And there was almost a sense of cameraderie in the line waiting for 40mins or so to get to the booth. Everyone was patient, kids were running around and playing on play equipment. It was nice.
Of course, I got lumped with the only electoral official in the world who can’t follow the alphabet and insisted repeatedly that my name wasn’t shown on the roll after hunting through all the “mck”s and the “mac”s. I don’t think you are supposed to take the roll from the electoral official and look it up yourself, but she wasn’t even taking my helpful hints “It’s on the previous page” “You are looking in the wrong part of the alphabet” and so on.
November 25th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
I know where I’ll be at 3 o’clock this afternoon (6 o’clock eastern summer time)…
Clicking on the internet radio stream from Victoria of the state election coverage.
There’s nothing better than the thrilled commentators…45 minutes into the count…getting their first figures from a booth in Orbost…..’with 0.02 percent of the vote counted there…I think we can see a trend against the Government..Kerry.’
And then 75 minutes into the count…..the party official on the panel says…’well, the night’s not going as well as we’d hoped….but you’ve got to remember… there were some boundary changes and the sitting member has run a very good campaign…Kerry’.
For an election tragic..it doesn’t get any better than this.
November 25th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Oh, and it’s the one night of the election cycle where politicians are honest before things get back to normal tomorrow.
November 26th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Am quite confused at the moment;it didnt rain so assume the message from the bishops didnt persuade God to move around the low pressure systems at least to melbourne,however on the other hand the Christians did Ok;Family First scored 4.5%) the last time I saw figures.Still no one should give up on the low pressure systems,according to Fred Nile the day of praying for the shifting of the hydrologic cycle doesnt end until 9 on the 27th when the 700 christians and politicians sit down for the annual parliamentary prayer breakfast.
November 27th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Rant
As a fellow election process junky, I duly asked to see the ‘direction of preferences’ for the other parties. You may not have noticed that they are no longer stuck to the wall as they used to be, but for the past two ellections are only available by request from an ellection official.
Anyway the first THREE electoral officials knew nothing of what I was talking about. I was twice told to go back outside to collect the ‘how to vote’ cards from the candidates. Baah!
When I finally got passed up the chain to the boss, she did at least know that I was entitled to see where each party had registered to allocate their upper house preferences, and handed my a book of them - only, she had the wrong book ‘Northern Victoria’ instead of ‘Northern Metropolitan’.
/ Rant
Anyway in our province we didn’t have any Shooters Party, Citizens Electoral Council, or One Nation so I missed out that particular joy of numbering them last
November 27th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Highlight of the night by far…on Jon Faine’s ABC radio coveage…was some glitch in the tally room computer, which briefly had Family First with a 34% primary vote in Caulfield…which was more than enough to oust the sitting member.
The ABC panel started off on some of the most ridiculous speculation to explain the result…including that the high Jewish population in the area may have supported Family First en masse(!)
They rang the sitting member for her reaction.. She was puzzled why she was receiving the call…and during the interview, fresh figures came in…..which more accurately had the Family First vote at about 1.7%, not 34%.
Oops.
November 27th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
I thought the highlight of the ABC television coverage was how unbelievably grumpy Robert Doyle was, unceasingly criticising anyone who tried to put a positive spin on the result or Ted’s performance.
Bitter much?
November 27th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
I’m also an “election process junkie”, and I followed it even though I’m in SA (we had our turn in March) and for a while it looked like the Country Alliance were going to get a seat!
The distributions for no.1 above-the-line are always available on the ABC & electoral commision websites, and the commentators thus have a go at guessing who’ll get in.