It's almost midnight on August 21. Australia has spoken. Something along the lines of "bugger off".

A hung parliament is the fitting outcome to the worst election campaign in my lifetime. Neither side deserves to win, and it will probably be days before we know who will form government, and how they will do it.

For federal elections in the recent past, I have followed the Greens above-the-line ticket. This time, I chose not to, bit the bullet and voted 1 to 84 in the bottom half of the senate ballot. Making sure that I did my research first.

My main reasons for this were that I wasn't too keen on the Greens' flow of preferences (especially their high ranking to the Australian Sex Party), and that I wanted to choose the six people who I wanted to be my six New South Wales senators. (Is that too crazy a thing to ask?)

I voted yesterday at the pre-polling booth in Ashfield. Which leaves a strange feeling of personal anti-climax this morning. Nonetheless, It's Time to Turn On The Lights, Move Forward and See It Through with my traditional "How I Voted" blog entry. (See previous posts from the 2004 and 2007 federal elections.)

For the House of Representatives seat of Grayndler, I voted thus:

Just think - sometime next week, this man could be one of the most powerful people in Australia:

In this federal election, I am voting for Sam Byrne of the Greens in the House of Representatives seat of Grayndler.

In the Senate, for New South Wales, I am giving my first preference to Lee Rhiannon of the Greens in a below-the-line vote which I shall explain separately.

My preferences in both houses lean towards the Labor Party ahead of the Liberals.

Although the Murdoch empire is generally perceived as pursuing a pro-Liberal agenda in this election, this clearly evidences itself only in its loss-leading broadsheet "The Australian". As for the "Daily Telegraph", famously endorsed by Kristina Keneally as "the people's paper" a while back, there is only one over-riding agenda - to make money.

A continuation of my Twitter log of election comments, mostly but not all under the #ausvotes hashtag. Part one of this digest covered the period to Friday 30 July.

Friday, 30 July 2010:

Looks like the Liberal Democratic Party's website isn't quite launched yet. http://www.ldp.org.au/ #ausvotes
Friday, 30 July 2010 11:49:31 PM

It's nine days since I have written a proper blog post about the federal election. It's not that I haven't been paying attention - apart from my abject refusal to watch television (except for video-on-demand). It's just that there hasn't been enough for me to meaningfully comment about.

You know something? Here's some of the best places to go for bloggage about the 2010 federal election, moving forward. That'll stop the boats!

"With just over two weeks left, that’s 16 24-hour media cycles or, in less mathematical phrasing, an eternity."

- Bernard Keane, in a paywalled article for Crikey, 5.8.10