How it works

how2vote compares your views with what parties have actually done in federal parliament — the votes their members cast, not what they said in a campaign. The method is a fixed set of arithmetic steps with no hidden weighting or tuning: the same answers always produce the same card, and every step below is exactly what the scoring engine computes.

Where the data comes from

Every division (formal vote) in the House and Senate is recorded in Hansard and published, in a machine-readable form, by the OpenAustralia Foundation's They Vote For You. For each issue, They Vote For You gives an agreement figure from 0 to 100 for every member — how often that member voted the way the issue describes. We use those figures under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), and we credit They Vote For You on every screen and every printed card.

From members to parties

Australian parties vote with very high discipline, so a party's record is a fair proxy for how any of its candidates would vote. For each issue we take the plain average of the agreement figures of that party's members (each member counted once), then place the party on a five-point scale by dividing 0–100 into five equal bands:

• 0–20 → 1, strongly disagree
• 20–40 → 2, disagree
• 40–60 → 3, equal merits
• 60–80 → 4, agree
• 80–100 → 5, strongly agree

Independents who have sat in parliament are scored as their own one-person “party”. A party or candidate with no member on the record for an issue simply has no position on it — it is never guessed, and it earns and risks nothing on that question.

Your answers

You answer each proposition on the same five-point scale (1 strongly disagree … 5 strongly agree), or skip it. When you review your answers at the end, you can star the issues that matter most to you as extremely important, which multiplies that one question's weight by exactly ten. Only your two strongest answers — strongly disagree and strongly agree — can be starred. Skipped questions count for nothing, for any party.

Scoring one question

For each question you answered, we compare your position with the party's using the plain gap between the two points on the scale — the distance d = |party − you|, a whole number from 0 (identical) to 4 (opposite ends). A party earns the most points when the gap is zero and fewer as it grows, down to none once the gap is wide enough. How much is on the table depends on how strongly you answered:

• a strong answer (strongly disagree/agree) is worth up to 4 points: max(0, 4 − d);
• a moderate answer (disagree/agree) is worth up to 3: max(0, 3 − d);
• equal merits is worth up to 2: max(0, 2 − d).

Marking a strong answer extremely important multiplies both the points earned and the points at stake by ten — up to 40 for that question: max(0, 40 − 10d). The “points at stake” (the most a party could have earned) is tracked alongside the points it did earn, so a bigger question counts for proportionally more in the final total.

For example, if you answer strongly agree and mark it extremely important, a party recorded at agree (a gap of 1) earns 40 − 10 = 30 of a possible 40, while a party recorded at strongly disagree (a gap of 4) earns 0.

Your overall match

Across every question you answered, we add up the points each party earned and the points it could have earned. Parties that have merged or been renamed between parliaments are combined at this stage — we add their raw earned and possible points together first, then compute a single percentage, so a merged party is treated as one continuous entity rather than an average of two rounded scores. The match is then

match % = round( points earned ÷ points possible × 100 ).

A party you never had a scorable question in common with (it had no position on everything you answered) has no denominator, so it shows as no data rather than 0%.

Your card

We compute a percentage for every party this way, then place those scores on the candidates actually printed on your ballot — your House electorate and your Senate state. The card suggests a preference order you can write straight onto the ballot paper, or adjust to your own judgement. Every party's score links to the divisions behind it, so you can check any number.

The scoring engine is open source and covered by tests that pin these numbers exactly; any change to the method is versioned and shown here and in the footer.