Senate flows
I hope this is easy to follow. This is my attempt to simplify the flow of preferences in an ACT Senate election. Each 'row' (or node) in the Sankey chart is a turning point in the vote count. The bars are parties (their size is their vote tally) and the grey bands between the rows are votes flowing to another party according to voters' preferences. The interactive above includes the past five ACT Senate elections.
I first attempted this visualisation at the ABC to show how difficult it was to wrest an ACT Senate seat from Labor or the Liberals. As only two senators are elected in the ACT, it's a good place to show how Australian voting works. In 2022, David Pocock went on to become the first ever ACT senator who was not from a major party.
This is a fuller version of my ABC charts, but it's still simplified. Candidates are grouped into parties, because following every Senate candidate through the count makes the visualisation too difficult to read. I think it works well enough.
The numbers are the Australian Electoral Commission's distribution of preferences for each count; they match the official results, give or take the rounding of surplus transfers.