You'll see phrases like ''Vote all Liberal. Only Liberal. It's the only way to be sure'' and ''If you vote for any other minor party or independents before you vote for ACT Labor you risk a Liberal government cutting local jobs and services''.

Basically, they are trying to scare you into just voting for their party and, hopefully foolishly, relying on the fact that the ACT's Hare-Clark system can appear a bit daunting at first, especially to newcomers.

But it's really not that hard; at its simplest, there are several politicians elected in each electorate and you just number the candidates in the order you like them. It also gives your vote much more power than in many other voting systems, including the ability to influence not only which members of your preferred party get in, but which members of the other side - or sides - do, too. But to do this, you need to put down the how-to-vote card and be prepared to jump across the columns.

Do you support one of the parties, but aren't too keen on their current MLAs? Then vote for that party's other candidates first to send them a bit of a message to sharpen up.

Helping you here is an addition called Robson Rotation. This takes away the parties' ability to order the ballot paper, and effectively gives you a random order. It lowers the effect of the donkey vote, and has candidates battling against fellow party members as much as - and sometimes more than - their political opponents.

The other thing to keep in mind is that no one party is going to hold all the seats in an electorate, so if you stop voting when you have finished numbering your preferred party's candidates (or at least the ones you think are deserving, because, let's face it, chances are there is at least a dud or two in there … ), it's in your interest to keep going. Some of the ''other side'' are always going to get in, so you might as well have a say in who they are to help ensure the territory has the best minds debating the issues.

Conversely, someone looking to cause trouble might try to help get the poorest performers of the party they don't like in so that it looked bad come the next election - but then you risk having to suffer through four years with them in the Assembly.

You even have a little bit of financial control. The ACT has publicly funded elections, and anyone who gets to 4 per cent gets $2 for every vote. Think about who deserves that money when you pick up your pencil.

Knowing how the system works gives you the power to vote strategically like this - or play games like trying to make your vote stay alive in the count for as long as possible by voting for the candidates least likely to get in.

Canberra - just like in so many other ways - is not like most of the rest of the country when it comes to voting. Tasmania is the only other Australian jurisdiction to use the Hare-Clark system.

While it sounds complicated, at its most basic, it is a way to ensure we get a parliament that represents the views of the electorate as a whole, rather than just most of it.

It uses what is known as a single transferable vote - your vote can help several people to get elected.

There are 17 spots up for grabs today and 74 people vying for them. Each one of them is trying to get a quota. Get one of those, and you get a seat in the Assembly.

A quota is effectively a fancy way of saying that you have enough votes that no one can knock you out.

In Brindabella and Ginninderra, that means a candidate needs 16.7 per cent of the vote (roughly 12,000 people) or 12.5 per cent in Molonglo (13,500) to get elected.

As a voter, all you need to do is put the candidates in the order that you prefer them. Your favourite gets a 1, your second favourite a 2, and so on until you run out of names or want to stop. If you want your vote to count, make sure you don't use the same number twice and be careful to just use numbers; not ticks, crosses or anything else. The electoral commission asks that you vote for at least the number of seats in your electorate. That's five in Ginninderra (based in Belconnen) and Brindabella (based in Tuggeranong) and seven in Molonglo (central ACT). If you are into just doing the bare minimum, then all you really need to do is put a 1 in a box, drop your paper in the ballot box, grab a sausage sandwich from the school fete and head home.

But where would the fun be in that. For a start, your vote will effectively not count if your preferred candidate doesn't get enough support. It also means you forfeit the right to complain about government decisions for the next four years because you forfeited your chance to influence who made those decisions.

And you would miss out on what for many is the best bit of election day - putting someone dead last. But as satisfying as it can be to put the biggest number possible next to the candidate you dislike the most, there is an even better option: leave their box blank. Nothing shows your disdain for a particular candidate more than numbering every single other person, except them. It has the added benefit of making sure there is no chance at all that even a fraction of your vote goes to that person.

Because under the Hare-Clark system, your vote can be split-up into fractions and spread across multiple candidates. For example, at the last election former chief minister Jon Stanhope got 13,461 votes. A quota was 10009 in Ginninderra - so that was 1.3 quotas, or 3452 more votes than he needed to get elected. Under another system, those 3452 votes could be lost. They weren't needed to elect Stanhope, and these people might have voted for another candidate if they had known he didn't need their votes. Under Hare-Clark, those votes still get counted.

But how to determine which 3452 people's votes need to be passed on to their second preference? The simple answer is you cannot do that fairly, so a share of the votes (worked out by dividing the number of surplus votes by the total number of ballot papers with more preferences on them) of each of the 13,461 people who supported Stanhope were then passed on to whoever had a number 2 next to his or her name.

Once these surplus fractions votes are distributed, the commission checks to see if these votes have helped anyone else get elected. If so, then the process begins again.

It's at this next point that the count gets a bit cruel. The candidate with the fewest votes gets excluded and the commission looks at their ballot papers, and transfers all these votes to the candidates with 2s. Again, the commission checks to see if someone else has been elected, and repeats this process over and over again until there are enough people elected.

All this counting and recounting and allocating fractions usually takes about a week, during which time candidates' hopes will soar and be dashed repeatedly, until we get the final result. Then, these 17 lucky men and women will get together to decide who will be chief minister for the next four years.