NSW election 2023: Interactive sausage map helps voters satisfy hunger while visiting polling booths

Barbecues are lit as voters across New South Wales head to the polls for the State Election 2023.

Voting booths across the state opened at 8 a.m. Saturday, and millions of people are expected to cast their ballots.

Regardless of how residents choose who will get their vote, there’s one thing that unites everyone on Election Day and that’s a sausage.

And to make sure no one leaves empty-handed, a website has been set up to map out where democratic sausages can be bought.

Millions of NSW voters head to the polls before grabbing a sausage at voting booth barbeques

The Democracy Worst Website on an interactive map showing all polling locations in NSW, with icons showing where sausages and pastries are available.

The website crowdsources real-time data from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Voters can use the hashtag #democratiesausage or send a direct message to the site to track food availability.

On Saturday morning, 397 voting booths with sausages were available, most of them in eastern Sydney.

Some schools have added their own flare to the food offerings in their voting booths.

Burwood Public School serves pork and chicken BBQ sandwiches, har gow (shrimp dumplings), and siu mai (pork and shrimp dumplings), as well as lychee drinks and lemon tea.

While at Summer Hill Public School, the cake stand offers a selection of candies with tongue-in-cheek jokes aimed at state politicians.

Among them is a ‘Chris pepper-Minns crunch slice’, ‘Barilaro’s big apple crumble’ or a ‘Jo Haylen happy face biscuit’.

More than a million people have already cast their votes since early polls began a week ago.

Dominic Perrottet, who became prime minister 18 months ago after the resignation of Gladys Berejiklian, hopes to defy the odds and lead the Liberal-Nationalist coalition to a record fourth term.

But Labour’s Chris Minns is likely to be NSW’s next prime minister with The Australian Newspoll, released on Saturday, pointing to Labor winning a government with a slim majority.

The coalition government has 45 seats – 33 for the Liberals and 12 for the Nationals, Labor 36, the Greens three, while there are nine independents, including two former Liberal MPs.

Labor went into Saturday’s election and needed to win at least nine seats to claim government.

But Newspoll’s bi-party vote of 54.5-45.5 represents a 6.5% swing against the coalition, which would give Labor up to 10 more seats.

That would give Labor the 47 seats for a majority without the support of the cross bench, but a uniform result is doubtful.

In another boost for Labour, Mr Minns has scored a two-point lead as preferred prime minister over Mr Perrottet for the first time in this Newspoll.

Mr Minns, who was relatively unknown when he started the campaign, won a major victory in the final debate of the campaign on Wednesday, when he and Mr Perrottet met on the Sky News/The Daily Telegraph People’s Forum.

Of the 100 undecided voters, 48 ​​said they had been persuaded to vote for the opposition, 32 chose the coalition and 20 remained undecided.

Both leaders campaigned hard to the end on Friday.

Voting on Saturday closes at 6 p.m. Counting starts immediately and ends at 10:30 PM and resumes on Monday.