Another site called senate.io allows users to drag their preferences onto a list by party or candidate. It prints out the numbered ballot paper on one page. The site's creator, software engineer Cameron McCormack, said it had received 10,200 visits in the past month. Google's director of engineering created Cluey Voter in his own time. Credit:Andrew Quilty A third, BelowtheLine.org.au, creates how to vote cards for both the House of Representatives and the Senate. It also has links to official websites of candidates and their parties for each research. "In my view, the way the Senate voting works these days is broken," Below the Line's creator Benno Rice told Fairfax Media. "The group voting system where parties dictate preferences is opaque to voters." Mr Rice said he was motivated to create the site, which runs at his own expense, after Family First's Steven Fielding was elected in 2004.

"It irritated me because he is not the kind of person that a whole lot of Labor people would have voted for, but they did because Labor did a [preference] deal." All the sites run without any political or corporate links and the creators say they were inspired by a desire to improve political transparency. "With so many candidates on the ballot, I wanted to make it easier for people to vote below the line so individuals can choose take charge of their Senate voting preferences," Mr Noble said. A spokesman for the Australian Electoral Commission said voters were free to create how-to-vote cards, but must not distribute them to other voters. "Outside polling places, candidate representatives may give voters how-to-vote cards, suggesting they vote in a particular way, however ultimately that decision comes down to each individual voter. They do not have to follow candidate how-to-vote cards. If a voter wants, they can take their own self-made how-to-vote card into the booth to assist them in marking their ballot papers," he said.

When voting for the Senate Australians can either number one box above the line or number all the boxes below the line in order of preference. In the last election only 490,000, or 3.8 per cent, of ballot papers were completed below the line. This year the NSW ballot paper has 110 senate candidates, Victoria 97 and Queensland 82, and voters must number at least 90 per cent of these boxes to have the vote declared valid. However, using the short cut of voting above the line means preferences get allocated by political parties and voters usually have no idea where each party has directed its Senate preferences in each state, unless they search the AEC's website [EG: http://www.aec.gov.au/election/vic/gvt.htm]. Loading For example, in Victoria the Liberals have directed first preferences to Family First, but in NSW it has directed preferences to Fred Nile's Christian Democratic party. Labor has preferenced The Greens in both states. The Greens have preferenced Wikileaks in Victoria and the Pirate party in NSW.

Mr Rice suggested allowing Senate ballots to be numbered above the line would improve the system and give voters more control.