election day

Senior Labor figures concede Kevin Rudd has lost the election, as exit polls suggest Tony Abbott will be elected in a landslide.

*narrows eyes*

Now, I realise the journalist was probably just trying to phrase things in an interesting way, BUT if they'd tried to phrase things in an accurate way, they would have gone with this:

Senior Labor figures concede Labor has lost the election, as exit polls suggest the Coalition will be elected in a landslide.

Otherwise, unless the exit polls were purely polling people in Toby Abbott's district – and, somehow, Kevin Rudd was competing for the same district – there is no way that those polls could be predicting Toby Abbott, specifically, being elected in a landslide.


I despair for the political education of our future children, I really do.

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In other news, we had an election today.

Our House of Representatives voting is fairly simple: order the candidates from 1 to whatever-number, with 1 being your favourite, 2 being your second-favourite, and so on.

Senate voting is a little more complicated. Either you can order the candidates from 1 to whatever-number, as per the House of Reps ("below the line" voting), or you can just put a 1 beside your favourite candidate, and the rest will be filled in automatically ("above the line" voting).

Usually, I vote below the line. Which means I have to spend an extra minute or so filling in all 30 boxes.

Today? I took one look at the massively huge voting form, with its 97 boxes... and decided that I'd vote above the line.

I mean, 97 boxes? 97? Really?