As well as encouraging voters to vote No.1 for a particular party or candidate for the House of Representatives, these how-to-vote cards show how they would like voters to indicate preferences to other parties or candidates.
Preferences are likely to play an important role in the result of many House of Representative seats, including the seat of Newcastle.
In the contest for control of the Senate, preferences always play a key role. Typically, Labor and the Coalition win four or five of the six Senate seats up for election in each state, and the last one or two are won by smaller parties.
Because Labor and the Coalition usually win a very similar number of Senate seats, the smaller parties often hold the "balance of power" in the Senate, ensuring that it plays a more effective role as a genuine house of review, rather than acting as a rubber stamp for the government, as it infamously did in 2005, when the Howard government used its Senate majority to ram through its WorkChoices legislation.
Senate preferences are rarely indicated on how-to-vote cards.
When voters fill in their Senate ballot paper, they have the choice of either numbering all candidates (in sequence, starting with 1) "below-the-line", or just numbering 1 in the box of their preferred party or group "above-the-line".
In this election, electoral authorities will be providing magnifying glasses for voters having problems reading the small fonts they had to use to squeeze the 110 candidates in 44 different parties or groups onto the record-breaking metre long NSW Senate ballot paper.
It's easy to see why the vast majority of voters will choose the much easier "above-the-line" option.
Below-the-line Senate voters can allocate their preferences among the 110 candidates any way they want, but preferences for "above-the-line" votes are distributed according to the registered ticket that the relevant party or group has lodged for this purpose with the Australian Electoral Authority.
This is where it can get tricky, because sometimes these registered ticket preferences don't go where voters might expect.
In this election, for example, the registered ticket of the Wikileaks Party in NSW allocates preferences to extreme right-wing parties such as the Shooters and Fishers Party and the Australia First Party before The Greens, who have strongly supported the cause of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
The Wikileaks Party claims that this was an administrative error. Whatever the explanation, NSW voters who vote for Wikileaks above-the-line in the Senate may find that their vote inadvertently helps to elect a candidate from a party at the opposite end of the political spectrum.
This isn't the only aberrant preference flow in the registered tickets that have been lodged for the Senate election.
So, if you value your democratic right to vote, and you want to make sure that your Senate vote goes where it accurately reflects your political views, either take the plunge and vote below-the-line, or at least make sure you check the registered ticket of your preferred party.
These are posted in every polling booth on election day, or you can check them out on the Australian Electoral Commission website at: http://www.aec.gov.au/
