Senate flows
On the left is every party that took part in that ACT Senate election. On the right are the candidates still standing when the last seat was decided.
When I was at the ABC I spent a while trying to show how Senate voting works. The ACT provides a good, simple example, as only two senators are elected here. It's easy, even on a smartphone, to visualise the count from start to finish.
ACT Senate elections had resulted in the same outcome for decades: one seat to Labor, one to the Liberals. The Democrats and Greens made several serious runs but never got there. In 2022, David Pocock became the first candidate outside the main parties to become an ACT senator. I made my first version of this chart back then to show how he won.
This interactive includes the past four elections. I use the Australian Electoral Commission's raw ballot data to trace preference flows, rather than rely on its published distribution summary. This allows preference flows to be mapped beginning to end.