Australia has one of the most complex political systems in the world. First, like the US, Australia has a so-called bicameral legislature or two houses of parliament, namely the lower house House of Representatives, or "the House", and the upper house Senate (the same terms the US uses). Many countries have 2 houses, but in some countries only the members of the lower house are directly elected and the members of the upper house are appointed. Australia and the US are in the former camp while Britain's House of Lords and Canada's Senate are in the latter camp. The Australian political system mimics the US, both in it's bicameral nature and also in its federal nature, i.e., state and Commonwealth governments. In fact, when Australians federated to form a country in 1901, we turned to the US for inspiration. Australia's political system is a hybrid of the Westminster system and the US system of government, and has been nicknamed the "the Washminster mutation". The Australian Senate, like the US Senate, is a directly-elected upper house with the power to “block supply”, i.e., block the passage of legislation coming up from the lower house. All Australian states and territories, except Queensland, have a bicameral parliament, with the upper house known as the Legislative Council (in NSW, Victoria, WA, SA and Tasmania) or Legislative Assembly (in the ACT and NT). Like the Senate at the federal level, upper houses at the state level are powerful with the ability to block supply.
So far, so good. The thing that really makes Australia's system complicated however is that candidates for the upper house (senators at the federal level or legislative councilors at the state level) are elected by a form of voting based on preferential voting and proportional representation known as single transferable vote (STV), invented by Thomas Wright Hill and first used in Adelaide in 1840. In STV, each voter ranks the list of candidates in order of preference, i.e., by placing a '1' beside their most preferred candidate, a '2' beside their second most preferred, and so on. Votes are first allocated to a voter's first choice and then, after candidates have been either elected or eliminated, any surplus votes are transferred according to the voter's next choice, etc., etc.
In Australia, because of the way upper house ballot sheets are printed, numbering each candidate from 1 to N is called “voting below the line” (see the sample ballot sheet below). Because it's time consuming to vote below the line, many voters choose to vote "above the line", by just voting '1' for a party and relying on the so-called "Group Voting Ticket" by which that party allocates its preferences. That's a shame because voters are giving up some of their democratic choice whenever they let a party allocate their preferences rather than doing it themselves.
Voting below the line gives voters complete flexibility to reflect personal preferences. Given the importance of the upper house to maintaining checks and balances in Australia's system of government, I think that's pretty important.
That's why I developed Cluey Voter, to make it easy to vote below the line.
So if you're going to the Victorian polls on 27 November 2010, try it out, and be a cluey voter!