How not to stuff up your vote at the Tasmanian election this month
With yet another state election looming, these questions are again at the forefront of Tasmanians' minds.
As politicians and political hopefuls scramble together their campaigns ahead of the upcoming poll, the authority that runs it has been working on a campaign of its own.
Tasmania leads the country in casting informal votes — votes that do not meet the rules and are not counted towards the election result.
At the 2024 state election, 6.31 per cent of voters cast informal votes, up from 5.13 per cent at the 2021 poll.
The increase in the informal vote has prompted the Tasmanian Electoral Commission to ramp up its efforts to educate people on how to make their vote count.
Some probably are, but the TEC's analysis of informal ballots papers from the 2024 state election found while some were deliberate, most of them appeared to have unintentional mistakes.
More than 9,500 votes were deemed intentionally informal, compared with 13,895 that appeared unintentional.
Tasmanian Electoral Commissioner Andrew Hawkey said ballot papers classified as intentionally informal are those left blank or have messages or comments, rather than those that show an attempt to fill out candidate boxes.
Thanks for asking — here are the rules you need to follow.
Numbers.
Don't be like the 4,527 Tasmanians whose vote didn't count last year because they used ticks and crosses.
That figure has been steadily on the rise since the TEC began tracking informal votes in 1992.
The numbers can even be written in a language other than English, as long as your vote includes numerals from one to seven and they are legible.
A minimum of seven.
You have to write a number in at least seven candidate boxes, but you can number up to every box with your preferences.
At last year's election, Tasmania's House of Assembly increased from 25 members to 35.
In our multi-member Hare-Clark electoral system (see the video explainer for that below), it meant we moved from electing five members in each electorate to electing seven members in each.
It changed how voters needed to fill out their ballot papers, from numbering a minimum of five boxes to needing to number at least seven.
According to the TEC, that change appears to have contributed to the increase in the informal vote last year.
"Where there were columns with less than seven candidates, there was a higher number of people who voted in those columns that did not go on to seven," Mr Hawkey said.
So, on our mock ballot paper, even if you're a devoted fan of Team Marsupial, because that party only has five candidates you'll need to number at least two others from different columns to make your vote formal.
Ask the friendly polling booth staff for another ballot paper and start again.
Most of the unintentional informal ballots last year were from people making errors in their numbering.
The common mistakes were missing numbers from the one to seven sequence, repeating a number or writing some numbers but no first preference.
"We have seen where if we call the formality rules a sequence of numbers from one to seven, we're seeing that that gets broken, either because there's a number missed or a number repeated," Mr Hawkey said.
It won't count — your vote needs to be anonymous.
You should also fold your ballot paper before putting it in the box, to help keep it a secret.
Perhaps surprisingly, yes, you can!
While adding artistic flair isn't necessarily encouraged, it's not against the rules, as long as your numbers remain legible.
"Over the years, we've seen a lot of interesting artwork on ballot papers, there's the traditional ones that I'm sure people know what I'm thinking about," Mr Hawkey said.
"But we see some lovely artwork at different times.
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