Preferencing Process
Pirate Party Australia has completed its preferencing for the 2014 WA Senate election. All group voting tickets (GVT) have been published on the Australian Electoral Commission’s website.
In keeping with the Pirate Party’s commitment to transparency and participatory democracy, last election the Party pioneered a form of preferencing unprecedented in Australian politics. We continued to use that process for this election.
After publishing the statements publicly, the members of Pirate Party Australia ranked all 56 registered parties according to how they should be preferenced.
A rundown of the process is as follows:
- Party members were given a ballot listing the parties to be preferenced in an order predetermined by the Party’s Election Committee to be a good general order of preferences based on the Committee’s research. They were given three days to respond to the ballot.
- The Committee used the preferencing order prior to the closing of the ballot in order to determine how to best go about negotiating preferences with other parties in order to get them to reciprocate the preference order determined by our members.
- As soon as the GVT ballot closed, the deals ballot was put to our members.
- 24 hours later, the deal results were determined and the other parties were informed.
- The Election Committee met as soon as possible after receiving the Group Voting Tickets for each state and democratically determined any changes necessary to the GVT that were not possible to determine in advance.
- The minutes of that meeting can be found here.
- These results are now being published in this statement.
An example of the digital ballot that the members of the Party used to determine their preference order can be found here!