Preference buddies:
Adversaries:
The circles represent political parties or tickets giving or receiving preferences for the Senate in the 2013 Federal Election. Circles which preference each other more highly are (more or less) closer together.
Click on a circle to see whom that party gives preferences to and receives preferences from.
What does the graph represent?
Each point represents a ticket in the Australian Senate; some of these (like, for example, the ALP and Liberals) are officially designated parties; others are tickets of independents grouped together on their state's ballot paper. The positions of points are determined by their preferences; parties are positioned closer to other parties they've given high preferences to, and further from those they've placed lower on their Senate how-to-vote cards.
What do the colours represent?
Parties are coloured roughly by affinity. The way the points are coloured is that a few parties (such as ALP, Liberals and Greens) start with fixed colours, and other parties are coloured by proximity to already coloured parties. Also, if a party's name contains a keyword such as “socialist” or “Christian”, its hue will be affected.
I see. What's the purpose of this visualisation?
I coded this visualisation to provide a visual representation of the affinities of parties as demonstrated by their official preferences. (The visualisation grew out of a script I wrote to crunch the preferences for a blog post on the same topic.) In the 2013 election, there is a record number of minor parties, and they're not always transparent in whom they preference (the recent Wikileaks Party fiasco is a case in point). Hopefully this will make it easier to see the ideological affinities and/or back-room deals of the various tickets.
So how should I vote?
That, of course, depends on your views; though, in any case, you should vote below the line in the Senate. It takes longer to number all the boxes, but then again your vote isn't given away to whoever the party you ticked did a deal with. Also, you get to tailor your vote to your views, rather than buying into the entire package someone else put together.
Are there any other resources online for helping with casting a Senate vote?
Yes; Cluey Voter is a guide which generates a custom how-to-vote card from your choices.?
Who coded this?
Visualisation coded by acb, using D3 and a bit of Python. Data from ABC Vote Compass. More details on how this was made.
A product of The Null Device.
Average preference given to -: -
Average preference received from -: -
Buddies with: