How They Vote For You can mislead the voting public
There are lots of ways political campaigns can use and abuse the parliamentary voting record. That’s to be expected, and I’ve written about it before. What’s perplexing is when non-partisan voluntary organisations do it.
A few years ago now (2008), OpenAustralia Foundation, the non-partisan organisation behind They Vote For You copy/pasted and adapted their code base from They Work For You a similar project in the UK. The stated goal of the project is to make “parliamentary voting information accessible, understandable, and easy to use so that you can hold your elected representatives to account.” Its data platform was extremely innovative and still is valuable in the UK, where it remains the easiest way to collect and analyse parliamentary speech data.
However, users should be aware of some important caveats to using They Vote For You – either as voters or as campaigners – because the voting data summaries that the website produces can be seriously misleading. This is all the more concerning because OpenAustralia’s mission states its non-partisan credentials and They Vote For You exudes a vaguely progressive open-source credibility that will bypass misinformation alarms all over the country.
There are three reasons I think They Vote For You misleads the voting public:
- In summarising votes on issues, They Vote For You can lead to highly misleading conclusions about an individual’s (or more frequently their party’s) actual position on a political topic;
- incomplete (and unexplained omissions of) data;
- consistently framing MPs’ votes (particularly those from major parties) as personal preference, which they rarely are. Singling out individuals for party-level stances is misleading and adds to voter confusion.
Again, the people sharing images like the one above have a clear campaign objective. They will find ways to bend the truth wherever possible so my concern is not with them. My concern is that when people read the quotes from They Vote For You, they take them as fact, even though they know they are reading partisan campaign material.
But these voting summaries are not facts, they are subjective interpretations of parliamentary votes. Parliamentary voting is complicated and requires a fair bit of context to explain, but They Vote For You provides lots of data-driven conclusions and precious little reflection on their meaning. This creates an opportunity for partisans to amplify every bit of misleading content they can glean from the website and use it to maximum advantage. Not great.
Leading the voter to make wrong conclusions about the political positions of legislators and parties
In the photo above, the screen grab from They Vote For You states that Jane Hume “Consistently voted against creating a federal Anti-Corruption Commission”. That’s terrible!
Except she doesn’t hold that position. In the last parliament, the position of Hume and of the whole of Parliament was for the creation of some form of federal ICAC. And that’s exactly what happened. The bill passed both houses unanimously, and we now have a national anti-corruption body.
This bill faced many divisions but all were on amendments brought by the opposition, independents and minor parties, not on passing the legislation itself.
Most of Hume’s votes on the national anti-corruption bill (and the votes of both major parties) were not ‘against’ the passing of an anti-corruption act. They were against amendments brought by the cross bench. The Liberals brought their own amendment, which was also voted down. None of this filtered through into the vote summary from They Vote For You.
In the end, everyone nodded through the bill without amendment. They did so because they didn’t want to be seen to stand in its way (even if some disagreed with much of its content). Because Parliament passed it unopposed, it didn’t show up in the voting data. Even still, every legislator assented to the bill’s passing at first, second and third readings. That’s three ‘votes’ in favour for each member, easily wiping out the Libs’ prior record of voting down proposals brought by the Greens back in 2019.
You might say ‘the major parties watered down the provisions of the bill and ignored any and all advice from cross benchers’. You might also say ‘Hume and the Libs voted against federal ICAC in 2019’! Of course these things are true, but that’s not what the They Vote For You issue summary says. What they say about Hume’s position in 2025 is simply wrong.
If you’d like to see the record on votes in the Senate on this bill, you can check out a different source for information on parliamentary voting in Australia: The Parliament House website. It is admittely quite a bit harder to get a two second screen grab of someone’s record, but that’s probably just as well.
Incomplete Data
Another problem with They Vote For You is that their data isn’t complete. I first encountered this issue when researching the votes of the cross bench in the House of Reps. It’s still an issue.
For the year 2023, Parliament House lists 185 votes in the House. Here are the They Vote For You figures for the same period: I count 154 votes for the House (they don’t make it simple to count votes, even with the API, which limits you to 100 lines of data per request).
What explains the discrepancy? I don’t know. They do say that some votes go ‘unrecorded’ and so can’t be included. But they are recorded by Parliament, so why not by They Vote For You?
This matters because they are coming from a position of educating the public. We might disagree about how to interpret data, but we should at least be talking about the same basic facts. We should also do better at explaining how and why we choose to include and exclude data.1
Misrepresentation of party MPs’ positions as ‘individual’ decisions
OK so this is more a matter of opinion but here goes: You shouldn’t present a party MP’s record as distinct from their party, unless they habitually rebel, which in Australia they almost never do.
MPs often do rebel in the UK, and the UK’s They Work For You ‘rebellions’ metric is useful to tell you how much different MPs are willing to part with their leadership on specific issues. It copies over badly to Australian politics because rebellions are so rare.
The picture above presents Jane Hume as Very Bad Person, and an enemy of her constituents (in this case from the vantage point of a number two Liberal Party list spot in the Victorian federal Senate race). But these are not just her views, they are the views of her party, and that matters quite a lot.
Being in a party of government implies personal compromise. You cannot represent all of your constituents all of the time, and often you have to vote against your own views and those who voted for you in order to keep the party and government together (independent MPs have no such responsibility, of course).
You might say that the parties are at fault for not allowing their legislators to vote how they like. But it is important, I feel, to explain why that doesn’t happen for a large number of institutional reasons.
We have a small legislature, strong agenda control, close elections, and the government relies on the confidence of the lower house. It’s not stated anywhere in the constitution that party discipline must be high, but it is an indirect consequence of the institutional design - not the individual frailties of party leaders or MPs.
We also have cabinet collective responsibility. Jane Hume is a shadow minister and her secure Senate position means that she either needs to remain on the frontbench or risk being downgraded to a not so secure Senate list spot, replaced by a newer, more promising candidate. So in that sense her position depends on her toeing the party line. The same is true for many backbenchers who would like one day to actually have executive responsibility (we do need to get ministers from somewhere and we get them exclusively from Parliament).
These incentives are created by our Constitution. The parties and their legislators respond to those incentives. Party discipline is no one’s fault, nor is it good or bad, it’s just a consequence of our institutional set up.
In conflating the individuals who take political office with the whole of the institution and its functioning, we do a disservice to voters, who are left more confused about what is wrong with modern democracy.
Data summaries aren’t facts
Whatever the intended use of a They Vote For You attack graphic (in this case to persuade left leaning voters to have a worse opinion of a right leaning politician), we can’t trust the data summaries it relies on as ground truth on its own.2 Data summaries are an attempt to analyse, and with enough context and caveat, we can learn something. They Vote For You made design choices that in my view strip away too much context, and this continues to negatively affect how they interpret and summarise voting data. These summaries can seem shocking (because they are often wrong) and find their way into highly partisan campaign slop, which misinforms voters. This is exactly what OpenAustralia didn’t want to happen! They Vote For You is supposed to educate, inform and empower Australian voters in a non-partisan way, but I think at this point it is in danger of causing more problems for voter education than it solves.
Footnotes
This might be a bit harsh, after all it is a voluntary organisation. But then again, it’s either a bit of part-time fun or a vitally important democratising mission. I don’t think it can be both, especially when dashboard numbers are coming up red like this. Everyone messes up with data, I do it all the time. If you come for me because I you think I have messed up with some data work, I will explain, amend or delete (in that order). I don’t want to make mistakes, but I will try not to prolong misinformation if I have caused it.↩︎
Even if we could (we can’t), it’s likely that Jane Hume’s own voters mostly agree with her take on these divisions. You wouldn’t vote number one Libs in the Senate if you didn’t feel some form of ideological proximity to their platform. Even the cherry picked examples of ‘bad’ positions displayed here are not necessarily red flags to a Liberal voter. Most (and many Labor voters too) support tougher positions on welfare. That’s partly how we got the robodebt mess in the first place. Privatisation is also quite a well known part of the Liberal Party agenda. This sort of ‘don’t threaten me with a good time’ self-own is not so much a fault of They Vote For You, but they do make it much easier to do.↩︎