Though the corflute sign springs up every election season, other analogue campaign strategies such as the mailed pamphlet are well and truly dead. 

While some candidates flew and others floundered in the social media meme-cum-marketing-fest of the 2025 federal election, non-partisan digital political tools also made the rounds on Instagram and TikTok, vying for the attention of young, disengaged voters. 

What are these tools and how do they work? Are they truly non-partisan? Do they claim to be? 

Build a Ballot

For  the 2025 federal election, Build a Ballot was the new browser-based political tool helping voters make informed decisions at the polling booth. 

One month out from election day, climate advocates Tegan Lerm and Lizzie Hedding launched Build a Ballot via their non-profit organisation Project Planet.

In their own words, the tool was for ‘your friend from run club who’ll ask “is there an election?” three  days before the vote.’ 

Build a Ballot involved a nine-part survey in which users selected policies to address major election issues. Unsurprisingly, five of the nine questions were cost-of-living related, covering topics from the housing crisis to healthcare affordability. Three more addressed environmental issues, while one targeted integrity and transparency in the Australian political system. 

On completion of the survey, users were matched by percentage with the candidates who ran in their electorate. They then created a mock ballot on their phone in preparation for the polling booth––a far less embarrassing option than wrangling multiple how-to-vote cards along with the wingspan Senate paper on election day.  

In a video authorised by Project Planet co-founder Lerm, Cheek Media’s Hannah Ferguson promoted Build a Ballot to her 184,000 Instagram followers as a gateway for conversations with friends and family about the preferential voting system. 

Build a Ballot was also positively covered by Pedestrian TV, ELLE and Marie Claire. 

The Daily Telegraph accused Build a Ballot and political compass tool Vote Guide of duping voters into preferencing Labor and the Greens. It claimed that Coalition policies such as the fuel excise cut had  been ‘blatantly’ left out of the survey’s policy options to trick voters into preferencing left-leaning parties. 

Analysis conducted by Farrago found that 92 per cent of the policy options proposed in the Build a Ballot survey aligned with the Greens, while 46 per cent aligned with Labor and 28 per cent with the Liberals. 

The skew towards the Greens and Labor may have been explained by the limited number of questions posed by the survey, which only addressed a cross section of policy areas–albeit, important ones. Cost-of-living, a major focus of the 2025 election, and climate change issues tended to favour the progressive economics and environmental focus of leftist parties.  

As a Build a Ballot spokesperson noted to The Daily Telegraph, policies from across the political spectrum were excluded from the program because they were announced after the tool’s finalisation. The Coalition’s notoriously late policy announcements during the 2025 election campaign likely exacerbated its lesser representation.

Speaking to Farrago, Project Planet and Build a Ballot co-founder Hedding (UoM alum 2018) said the program ‘prioritised policies that were most likely to be effective’, collaborating with non-partisan experts including economists to determine which policies would most likely offer long-term benefits. This approach unavoidably inscribed a degree of pre-judgment into the tool. On the user’s end, questions were positively geared towards progressive parties and negatively towards conservative parties, creating potential for unconscious bias. 

However, Project Planet and Build a Ballot are unabashedly climate focused. This predilection is not hidden within their tool but openly promoted. As well as appealing to disengaged voters, Build a Ballot aimed to put climate ‘back in the mix’ of public debate, according to Hedding. The decline of School Strike 4 Climate/ Fridays for Future has seen the youth-driven climate change battle disappear from the headlines; questions around energy policy during the 2025 election tended to focus more on cost-cutting measures than the environmental impact of power generation. 

Rather than asking ideological questions and aligning these responses with policy behind the scenes, Build a Ballot challenged users to consider and engage with policy options directly, encouraging them to think deeply not only about issues but also solutions. 

Vote Compass

Ye old and trusty, the ABC’s Vote Compass has been online since the 2013 Federal election, when onion-crunching Tony Abbott beat out a resurrected Kevin Rudd. In the 2025 federal election, Vote Compass posed 30 statements addressing issues across the political spectrum and asked users to select on a scale the extent to which they agree with each statement. There were also questions on the trustworthiness of the party leaders. Based on their inputs, users were pinpointed on a political graph relative to Labor, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Greens and One Nation. 

Speaking to Farrago, University of Melbourne political science Professor Dr Aaron Martin noted that unlike their counterparts in many Western European democracies, political parties in Australia do not produce party manifestos clearly stating policy positions. So, for Australian voters, clearing a path through verbose rhetoric to the nuts-and-bolts of policy can be a challenge. That’s where digital tools like Vote Compass intervened, allowing voters to quickly and accessibly reflect on their alignment with the political parties. 

Vote Guide

Featured alongside Build a Ballot in the The Daily Telegraph’s ‘duping’ investigation, the accusations against Vote Guide were more serious than schoolyard exclusion. According to analysis by The Daily Telegraph journalists, Vote Guide aligned voters with Greens and Labor on the political compass even if they input Liberal-aligned policies. 

Vote Guide’s most recent blog post claimed more than 10,500 people undertook its survey from January to April 2025, but the Vote Guide quiz is currently inaccessible as steps are being taken to improve its accuracy. The site also contained warnings that its content may have been generated with AI. Using the program ZeroGPT, Farrago detected that up to half of the blog post outlining its survey results may have been generated by AI. 

They Vote for You

Created by the transparency and integrity organisation OpenAustralia Foundation, They Vote for You provided your Member of Parliament’s voting record. It collated data on MPs’ formal voting habits dating back to 2006 from Hansard, the transcript of all Australian parliamentary proceedings. 

Users could search by ‘People’, ‘Policies’ ‘Divisions’, electorate or postcode. The gamut of available information prior to the 2025 federal election was extensive. Yet, as the Australia Institute pointed out, comparisons of politicians’ formal voting patterns can obscure the detail of their policy positions as it excludes informal votes and instances of parties voting on behalf of individual MPs. Nonetheless, They Vote for You offered a highly valuable resource because, let’s be honest, we didn’t pour over Hansard to check how our MP voted on Tasmanian salmon farming–but it may have impacted our vote.  

Being an ‘informed’ voter

We won’t judge whether it was easier during the 2025 federal election than in elections gone by to filter through the noise and nail down the best use of one’s vote. Whether the tools discussed here clarify or confuse, they certainly offered a starting point. Ultimately, it is difficult to capture the nuances of democratic elections in any algorithmic tool based on policy. Some voters vote on issues, others strategically and some by whim. After all, we don’t vote for the decisions that will be made but rather for who will make those decisions, and the decisions made by voters and their elected representatives will not always be predictable, or rational or moral.