At Last, the Big Day

Saturday, 30 November 2002

It's polling day here in Victoria, and soon I'll be off to the local primary school to perform my civic duty of defacing my ballot paper. Of course I shall only be defacing the one ballot paper, for the Legislative Assembly, the Victorian Parliament's lower house. In all the times that I have voted at state elections, I can't remember once being given two ballot papers so I have no idea what the Legislative Council's ballot paper looks like. We all know (if only vaguely) that there is some minimum property holding which is required to be eligible to vote for the Legislative Council and some time today I plan to do a Google search to find out why I am not considered a fit and proper person to vote in upper house elections.

Once the voting's out of the way, I might start work on my election post-mortem blog: I've already got a good idea of what I want to write and like any of the great op-ed writers in our papers, the only real use I have for any facts that might emerge in the counting of the votes is to confirm my existing opinions on what went wrong for the Liberal Party. I've already got my hypotheses, which I know are completely correct, it's just a matter of waiting for the data to confirm them. If the data doesn't turn out quite right, well I can always result to a little creative analysis and exclude any embarassing outliers and exceptions. That is the way it's done if you're writing for our national newspaper isn't it? While I'm only a humble blogger, I think it's a good idea sometimes to remember that there are well established standards for public commentary and that emulating the world best practice established elsewhere is a good way to improve my own meagre commentary.