Suspect,

It is not a hard thing to do if you are a serious candidate and especially if you have the backing of a minor party to leaflet drop, say 5000 houses in the electorate you intend to be the representative for. Explain who you are and why you are running and ask people that if they think you are worthy for running as a candidate to sign a form and send it back to you, regardless of whether they would vote for you or not. But I do agree with Antony that 500 is much too onerous, so lets make it 200-300, which would mean leafleting 2000 houses maximum.

So minor parties are good, provided that they aren't wasting people's time and provided that they seriously want to win, regardless of how much chance they have. I emailed many candidates of the Werriwa by-election and asked them for a how to vote, well none of them had thought through their politics enough to come out with a proper how to vote card. It was all along the lines of 'vote 1 Joe idiot who has never lived in the electorate and after that donkey vote your way to candidate number 16'. So I hope I have cleared things up there. We can have a democratic system, without the opportunists.

I think a person needs to write an article about Centrelink, will you be that person usual suspect? If Centrelink is what you say it is, and I agree, then the AEC is the opposite, allowing for the fact that it is still a bureaucracy.

I have passed out How-To-Vote cards on election days and the majority of people who refused to take one, looked like it was the first time they were voting ( ie: 18) - 'I'm too cool for that' says their sneer. But what happens in the booth? Do they complete the ballot correctly for their intention. I fear not.
Re Centrelink where I have worked: an enormous amount of money is wasted there. When you read, that the cost to that hallowed 'taxpayer' of a particular benefit is X$billion, please understand that 50% of that amount is admin wastage. Managers from every region being flown to Canberra on a monthly basis, colour TV in lunch rooms, tropical-level heating of offices through winter. I would go on and on except this forum is about electoral process.

I think the issues of tax, welfare and civic duty in mass public involvement in democracy are pretty interconected. And I was also too cool for a HTV, being 18. I did my own research and made my own HTV, but I was too stupid to vote 1 for the senate ballot paper so I asked for a HTV for that. Ironic isn't it.

Brownie, I regard this massive welfare state, where the money is eaten up in Centrelink and recipients are treated like dirt is the single worst aspect of the Howard excesses. I blame him, it suits his purposes of re-election, even though a true Liberal party person would fix up the welfare system. Maybe you should write an article about Centrelink too, I think one is badly needed.

Penekiko comments that optional preferential voting is a less accurate measure of the consensus of the electorate, that compulsory preferential voting is good as voters reach a compromise, rather than in a first-past-the-post system.

For a whole series of technical reasons (try searching on 'Arrows Impossibility Theorem' or 'Paradox of Voting'), that is only true in a system of two dominant parties. In multi-party contests, compulsory preferential voting can become wildly unrepresentative because the final result is badly affected by the order candidates finish and whose preferences are counted.

At its heart, every voter can be assumed to 'rationally' order candidates so that if the prefer A to B, and prefer B to C, they will also prefer A to C. Whatever logical or illogical reason voters use to choose between candidates, this condition will still hold. Technically, it is a condition known as transitivity.

But if an election is the sum of thousands of individual votes, then transitivity can be breached, and a rational ordering of candidates cannot be deduced. Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize for Economics on the subject in relation to consumer behaviour, but the problem applies equally to systems of full preferential voting.

It comes about because all preferences on a ballot paper are treated as equally firmly held when in all liklihood they are not. One solution is optional preferential voting which effectively weights a contest towards the higher preferences, presumably the ones most strongly held.

In 350 words, it is impossible to go further on this arcane bit of political theory. But for those who think it can never happen in real life, have a look at the 1998 Queensland election, when the rise of One Nation produced a result where while Labor ended up forming government, the result came perilously close to being completely indertiminant. Goodness knows what the result would have been with compulsory preferences.

Antony, what are your thoughts on condorcet voting methods?

Some of us vote informal because it is our right to vote informal as much as it is to place a formal vote. It is just here in Oz that we have to attend a boothe to do so. Senate is a bit different but in the lower house nominations if you don't want labor or liberal to become the government and have no other representatives from other parties who do you vote for to voice your dislike? (One nation was the other candidate but we won't go into that)

As for the senate. I am sorry but doing the research required to decide which order to place 60+ candidates, assuming they tell the truth on their websites, is utter rubbish. Realistically I would like to place my preferences along the divisions a through o rather then either a 1 above the line or 60+ numbers below the line.