2024 ACT Election Quicklinks

Click the button for what you want to find.

We recognise that who you vote for is your choice. We want to help you, the voters, know your candidates as people.

In a representative democracy voting is one of our citizen powers and knowing your candidates is crucial to knowing who to preference.

Please share these webpages widely.

At elections, it is up to us to select the candidates who we think are most suitable to represent us.

CAPaD invites you to ask each candidate to tell you, at every election, why they are qualified to represent you, how they will strengthen democracy and how they are going to work for your electorate's interests.

You will find links to each election's page in the relevant tab below.

Assisting voters - who helps voters decide?

The organisations and sites listed here all offer candidates a place to share information about themselves, in addition to their party and personal websites, Facebook and other social media sites.

They offer voters a place to find out about their candidates (a sort of one-stop-shop for voters).

 

 

Find out which electorate you are in.

 CAPaD is a community supporter of Vote Easy, a non-partisan platform designed for candidates to share information with voters. Like Vote Easy, CAPaD believes voters should be able to find candidate information easily, and an informed voter will make good choices.

 

Information about the Elections ACT legislated candidate information statements can be seen here.

A link to the actual statements will be provided soon after September 25th, when candidates are declared.

More Elections ACT information for voters on voting is here.

ABC Vote Compass is a tool developed by political scientists to help you explore how your views align with the major parties. Usually federal elections.

For a more complete list of organisations, please see Sites helping voters get to know their MPs and candidates better at our Resources Hub.

Lists of candidates by electorate, and their record of engagement with the Democracy in Action! outputs.

We will update the lists as we learn about new candidates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Find out what electorate you are in

ACT Government

The Legislative Assembly (the Assembly) is the ACT's parliament. There are 25 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs).

The ACT has five electorates: Yerrabi, Ginninderra, Kurrajong, Murrumbidgee and Brindabella. Five MLAs represent each electorate.

Find out which electorate you are in here.

ACT Assembly elections happen every four years on the third Saturday of October. This year, 2024, that is October 19th.

 

ACT Voting made easy

Voting

Vote for at least the number of candidates as there are positions available.

A vote is a number in a box on the ballot paper (no ticks, no crosses, no other marks). At present for ACT electorates there are five positions available.

Put at least a number 1.

Your vote will be counted up to the point you stop numbering.

Ideally, to make sure the people you want elected are elected, number every square.

 

How votes are counted

Under the ACT’s Hare-Clarke voting system (see here for more detail) we elect five MLAs for each of the five electorates to the ACT Assembly.

Candidates are elected if they achieve a certain proportion of the vote (called a quota). Candidates who reach the quota are elected and have the rest of their preferences distributed among the other candidates in the order that each voter has put them on the ballot paper.

Candidates who don’t reach a quota are eliminated from the count after each round of counting, starting with the person with the least votes at that stage.

This continues until five MLAs are elected for each electorate.

That's why it is important to number every square, so all your preferences count.

 

Our 2022 election page with advice and suggestion to help you make an informed vote is here.

You can find the report against our education campaign here.

This figure, courtesy of Lee Yingtong Li (right click & open in new tab/window to enlarge and scroll) shows the preference flows for the second ACT senate seat. It confirms the importance of numbering every square on the senate ballot. Preference flows matter.

 

2019 Federal election

The 2019 Federal election showed us that a Federal election presents a different level of organisation compared to an ACT election. The issues are different and the number of candidates across House of Representatives and the Senate makes it a much larger exercise. All major party and most other minor party and independent candidates ignored our requests for candidate statements.

Our website traffic however increased: visitors grew to nearly 2000 from less than 100, and visits went from under 500 to 4000 during May 2019. So some one was interested in our candidate statements.

This comprised about 1460 views of candidate statements, as well as 337 reviews of the 2016 Federal election and 581 views of the 2016 ACT election pages.

 

2016 ACT Election Candidate Statement Exercise

The 2016 ACT Election is the first election that the Alliance attempted this type of exercise. It provided a valuable learning exercise for the Alliance in how to run such a process, and the importance of giving people the chance to know more about their candidates, separately to their Party platforms.

ACT Elections 2016 Document Downloads

 

 

Statement of non-partisanship

The Canberra Alliance for Participatory Democracy (CAPaD):

  1. Is strictly non-partisan in electoral matters;
  2. Does not support nor endorse any political party, their candidates or independents;
  3. Is committed to facilitating community participation in the political system including informed engagement in elections;
  4. Will share information about events and materials that invite community level participation but not formal campaign, Party or individual candidate material.

 

Authorised by Peter Tait, Canberra Alliance for Participatory Democracy.