Beyond Three Choices: New tools to see how Australia really votes

Prof Dianne Cook, A/Prof Damjan Vukcevic and Linh Ngo, 2026

Purpose

Preferential voting data shapes elections, consumer research and recommender systems alike – yet existing tools could only explore up to three choices at once. Ngo, Cook and Vukcevic set out to break through that barrier.

Practice

The team built Prefviz, an open-source R package offering bar plots, pairwise heat maps and ternary plots that treat preferences as data on a simplex, extendable to many dimensions through projection tours – designed around integration, interactivity and tidiness.

Output

Tested on the 2025 Australian House of Representatives election and a 5,000-respondent sushi survey, the toolkit revealed dominant first-preference candidates, unusual preference flows between candidates, and Condorcet winners and losers – analysis simply not possible in a unified workflow before now.

Outcome and impact

The package is newly released, but its potential is clear: nuanced study of electorate preferences and swings from ongoing polls, opening new analytical ground for psephologists, politicians and consumer researchers alike.