In the wake of the (still to be finalised) recent election results there has been quite a bit of commentary about making changes to the senate. I’m in fairly broad agreement with the opinions given by Antony Green here, but do have a few comments of my own to add.

So what is the problem? The main motivation for changes seems to be that candidates with very small primary votes are looking like winning seats. I would suggest that this on its own is not necessarily a problem. For example consider an election for 6 senators (so a quota of about 14%) where 30% vote Labor, 30% Liberal, 16% Green and the remaining 24% of the vote is spread roughly evenly between 12 candidates. Clearly 2 Labor, 2 Liberal and 1 Green would be immediately elected but then each has a surplus of 2% to go towards their next candidate and there are another 12 each with about 2% so you have at that point 15 different candidates each with about 2%. Who should the last candidate be? There is no obvious winner without distributing preferences, but if the 24% who voted for small parties predominately prefer that anyone except the big three get elected, then a perfectly democratic outcome would be for one of the candidates with a very small primary of about 2% to win. Now suppose a similar setup, but with one of the 12, candidate A, quite popular with 8% and the remaining 16% shared between 11 candidates, so after electing 5 senators we have 3 bigger parties on 2%, 1 on 10% and 11 with 16% between them (let’s say none bigger than 2%). Then it appears that candidate A should win, but suppose that all of the other small parties have similar interests but don’t like candidate A, and the big parties don’t like them either. Then of the remaining 28% or so (there is a rounding error that stops it from adding up precisely here) of votes, 8% like candidate A but 20% would prefer for any of the other candidates to win, so it is perfectly reasonable for a candidate with about 2% to beat the candidate with 8%. So a candidate getting up to win with a small vote is not necessarily bad. To some extent this is what has happened in the current election, many people have voted for small parties and do not want senators from larger parties, quite often the biggest of these votes are for the likes of the Sex Party or Family First, but most people voting for one of these do not like the other, however they, and various other small party voters, would prefer the likes of the Motor Enthusiasts or the Sports party to the larger ones. It is not completely unreasonable that such candidates are the preferred choice of this large constituency disillusioned with the more established parties.

The real problem is that the preferences as allocated might not reflect people’s true preferences due to Above The Line (ATL) voting. In principle every voter should give a full choice of preferences for all candidates, in practice this tended to result in a level of informal voting deemed to be unacceptable so the alternative was to vote for one party above the line, with your full vote then coinciding to a preference ticket provided by the party to the AEC. Some people are rather misguided in raging against secret deals and complaining that their votes have been traded around by the parties. This is not how it works, the parties must provide their preference tickets in advance, they are published before the election and are available to view at polling booths, they are not secret. You still have full control over your vote if you choose to vote below the line. I don’t think any individual has reasonable grounds to complain about what happened to their own vote, however if lots of people aren’t aware of these things and some preferences are allocated in unusual ways this is something that one can reasonably be concerned about when taking an overall view of the outcome. For example there is the possibility of parties being formed with a name to appeal to certain voters which then channels their votes to someone they wouldn’t normally preference.

Tied in with this is the problem that ballots are becoming very large and difficult to deal with, with a disincentive to vote below the line due to the time taken and higher possibility of failing to number it correctly and rendering it informal.

So how to deal with this issue? Some people think that preferences themselves are inherently the problem and are unfair, they take a simplistic view that if only each voter had just one vote then it would be fair. This is very, very wrong. First past the post is one of the worst voting systems and would lead to less democratic outcomes.

Another suggestion is to have a minimum quota of first preferences for someone to be elected, but as I pointed out above, people being elected on small votes isn’t really the problem, so I don’t see this as the solution.

The real problem is above the line voting.

The simplest way around this is to allow for preferences above the line. A voter would have the choice of either numbering every party above the line or every candidate below the line. This would make the count more complicated but I think would be worthwhile.

Something else often suggested is allowing optional preferential voting. I tend to prefer full preferential voting, but in an election for multiple candidates such as in the senate, then optional preferential with a reasonable minimum number of preferences required would be acceptable. My problem with optional preferential is that it allows for many votes to exhaust, so at later stages of the count candidates can be elected from a much smaller subset of voters. This is balanced by the problem that in the senate there are so many candidates that voters know very little about, so it is not necessarily meaningful for them to rank them in order of preference.

I do think that lots of people want optional preferential for the wrong reasons, for example someone might resent that they have to number the Liberal candidates because they are a Labor or Greens voter, but leaving a number blank is not a vote against someone, it just means that once all the ones you do number are elected or eliminated you’ve given up your right to have a say. With optional preferences I would still allocate a preference to the Liberals even though I don’t like them because there are others I like less, for example, if it ended up coming down to a choice between Liberal and One Nation then I’d certainly still want to have my say and would happily prefer the Liberal. In such a scenario those who exhausted their preferences might be quite happy to say they didn’t vote for either, but they could effectively be helping One Nation to win the seat. By allocating as many preferences as possible you don’t have to make guesses as to who might realistically have a chance at each stage of the count, you get to express preferences regardless of what happens. Something like this is happening in the current Tasmanian count, after the Greens candidate is elected there is a surplus to be distributed and the remaining candidates are Liberal, Palmer United, and Liberal Democrats. Most Greens voters probably don’t like any of them, but at this stage one of them has to be elected, not because of the distribution of Greens surplus, but because the vast majority of other voters who are still being counted like one of them. In such a situation, I would rather choose between three options I don’t particularly like then say nothing at all.

So basically, I think that a combination of above the line preferencing, and optional preferential but with a high enough minimum number to stop too many votes exhausting would be a reasonable reform.

A further reform to help keep ballot size reasonable and to stop people trying to exploit the system with ‘front’ parties would be some tightening of the rules for candidature. It would seem reasonable to require parties to be registered for longer before an election and to stop the same people registering numerous parties. I think the required number of party members should be counted for a single party only as well (i.e. parties can still allow dual membership but their submitted list of members to qualify for party status on the ballot cannot include members counted for another party). I would be wary of setting the bar too high though (particularly with regard to monetary cost) so as not to make it too difficult for genuine new parties to contest elections.

 

A “Langer” vote, named after Albert Langer is a method for casting an optional preferential vote which is not normally formal in our voting system. Lately I’ve seen a few comments around the place from people advocating this kind of vote, I think that it is not a good idea since mostly it only serves to deal with a non-existant problem and may achieve an outcome that is not what you actually want. I’ll explain why below, but first I want to make it clear that this is not a criticism of Langer, he simply advocated a way of effectively doing optional preferential voting, I do not condone his imprisonment or have any problem with people talking about this type of vote, I just think there are good reasons not to use it. Note that this is only being discussed with regard to the Senate, this method no longer gives a valid vote for the House of Representatives. Even with the Senate I’m not entirely sure it counts, and an error could easily result in it being counted as informal.

• Optional Preferential Voting (OPV). Our voting system is full preferential (FPV) in both houses, meaning that to cast a formal vote you must preference all candidates. By contrast, in an optional preferential system you do not need to preference all candidates, most commonly you can preference as many as you want, though conceivably there could be systems involving a minimum required number of preferences. OPV is used in some state elections. In a previous post I described why I think preferential voting is better than first past the post (FPP). OPV lies in between these two extremes. If everyone decided to preference every candidate then it is indistinguishable from FPV, and if everyone decides to only allocate a first preference then it gives the FPP outcome. At the most basic level I dislike it because it pushes along the continuum from FPV which is good, towards FPP which is bad. In more detail, the advantage of FPV is that everyone gives the maximum amount of information about their preferences for the candidates. In OPV, once people stop allocating preferences then their votes exhaust, so potentially the final candidates are elected from preferences of a subset of the electorate rather than everyone, I believe that this is less democratic, it is better for everyone to have their say at every stage.
• FPV does not help the major parties. The reason given by many people who want OPV is that they think that FPV only helps the major parties. The major parties do not win because people who vote for other parties have to allocate lower preferences to them, they win because of all the people who give them their first preference. It’s that simple, they win because people vote for them. If you don’t like them, then at the point when your preference goes to one of them, everyone you do like has been elected or eliminated – taking out your vote at this stage does not make them any less likely to win, unless they are going to lose to someone else you didn’t preference. The only way your exhausted vote can stop the major parties being elected is by allowing someone you like even less to be elected instead. By exhausting your vote you don’t get to say you like the majors better than say Australia First, or One Nation for example. You might not like the Liberals, but if it comes down to a race between the Liberals and One Nation then by exhausting your preferences you’ve just decided to sit that one out, you have no opinion. You have to ask yourself whether that truly is the case. Keep in mind that for the Senate it is very difficult to know for sure who has a realistic chance of being elected. Instead I suggest it is much better to have your say over who you prefer at every stage when your vote might still be counted.
• OPV does not stop candidates being elected on a small vote. There are numerous instances of candidates getting elected to the Senate on a small primary vote, for example Family First’s Steve Fielding or the DLP’s John Madigan in Victoria. In principle I don’t have a problem with this, if everyone’s ballot papers are a true representation of their actual preferences then it is quite possible that someone who is not a first choice of many, but who many prefer to the other candidates who are not their first choice, can be quite reasonably be elected (for example, most people like A or B, but neither has a majority, the people who like A hate B and the people who like B hate A, so third choice C, even with the smallest primary vote, may be the most acceptable to the electorate as a whole). The problem is that due to above the line (ATL) voting it is not necessarily the case that ballots do truly reflect actual preferences. In theory this needn’t be a problem, if people take some responsibility for being informed then you can have full control over your vote, you can view preference tickets in advance and decided whether an ATL vote really does reflect your preferences and if not then you can vote below the line (BTL). In reality however not many do this, and it seems likely that many voters end up with preferences allocated in ways they wouldn’t do themselves. OPV has been proposed as a way of avoiding the problems with ATL voting, either by allowing some sort of ATL preferencing, or allowing OPV below the line, this would deal with the problems of “preference harvesting” to some extent, and I would consider OPV as potentially worth considering to deal with these issues, but as an individual casting a vote, OPV (and particularly using effective OPV due to the Langer method when it is not used by most of the electorate) is not a good method of taking control of your vote, allocating preferences to everyone yourself is much better. If your vote exhausts then it means that all of the other votes in the preference flows directed by deals are actually counting for more since the exhausted votes have been taken out of the picture. Once again as above, if lots of people decide the Labor and Liberal parties are as bad as each other and exhaust their votes then it opens the door for others to get in on small votes, others who presumably you like even less since you didn’t give them a preference.

So in conclusion, the most likely reason for wanting your vote to exhaust at a certain point is because you don’t want any of the remaining candidates elected, yet there is no mechanism whatsoever for you to achieve this, all it actually achieves is stopping you having a say in who gets elected amongst those candidates. Furthermore, if you do it because you dislike both major parties, then it is possible that it will allow someone you like even less to get elected in their place.

 

 

 

 

 

Every time an election comes around I notice that lots of people have a poor understanding of how preferences work in Australian federal elections. I’ve written about them before but have decided to bring the blog back to life with a new post explaining how preferences work and tackling some common misconceptions.

The first part is an explanation of the basics of preferential voting without taking a position on who to vote for, but the latter part is mostly about why people who like the Greens should vote for them. If you don’t like the Greens then fine, don’t vote for them, the basic advice still applies regardless of who you want to vote for – preference all candidates in the order in which you like them.

Comments on preferential voting are welcome but this post isn’t for discussing the relative merits of the parties or candidates so such comments will be moderated.

Why have preferences at all?
For the simple reason that it is more democratic and gives a better representation of the electorate’s wishes than first past the post. Now there are all sorts of other changes which people argue for such as proportional representation or multi member electorates and so on, but if you fix all other features of our electoral system and just ask whether it is better with or without preferences then it is undoubtedly better. The shortcomings of first past the post are clearest in the situation where there are similar candidates which split the vote. Imagine that in an election nice candidate A is supported by 35%, nice candidate B by 25% and nasty candidate by 40%. In first past the post the nasty candidate wins, even though 60% of the electorate prefer nice candidates. A fairer system is to eliminate the least popular candidate and then compare those that remain. In some systems this is done by having run-off elections, so they run a whole new election with just the two most popular, with preferential voting it is essentially the same thing but all done at once so you don’t need to organise more than one poll. Nice candidate B is eliminated from the count, and their next preferences are allocated. Some opponents of preferential voting try to claim that this is unfair because those people get two votes, but from that perspective, everyone got two votes, it’s just that the supporters of the two leading candidates were able to vote for their favourite both times.

How do preferences work in the House of Representatives?

The House of Representatives (HoR) or lower house is where Government is formed. It consists of representatives of local electorates across Australia. When you vote, one of the ballot papers is for the HoR candidates in your local electorate. Typically you will have somewhere between 3 and 10 candidates in your electorate – it depends on how many people nominate for it. To vote you just number all of the candidates in the order that you like them. All of the first preferences are counted. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their second preferences are allocated at full value. This process is repeated until a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote.

 How do preferences work in the Senate? 
The senate, or upper house, consists of representatives from each state and territory. At a regular election half the senate is up for election, which means 6 senators from each state (also the 2 from each territory as well). The voting system is different to allow for multiple members to be elected, but also uses preferences for the same reasons as for the HoR. In the lower house with 1 person being elected, they need 50% plus 1 vote, which is 1/(1+1)*100% + 1. If you wanted to elect 2 people you would expect the required amount to be approximately 33% + 1 vote which is 1/(2+1)*100% + 1. For an election to elect 6 candidates the quota is 1/(6+1)*100% + 1 which is about 14%.

There is an added complication here, a candidate can get in excess of a surplus, to take an extreme example, suppose 90% of people likes one particular candidate, then they would be elected easily, but it wouldn’t be fair to then elect 5 other candidates from what just 10% of the electorate want. As a result, the surplus is redistributed. One way you could do it would be to just use up enough votes for a quota and then allocate the remaining ones to their second preference, but this is rather arbitrary so instead all of them count for their next preference but at a reduced value so that the total number of votes left after electing the first candidate is the total minus 1 quota. For example, suppose you had 100 people and a quota was 14. Let’s say 30 vote for candidate A, so we want to allocate 14 votes to elect them, and have 16 left over that go towards other candidates, so we keep all 30 votes in but now they each have a value of 16/30 each, so the total number of votes in the count are the 70 who voted for someone else plus 30 votes at a value of 16/30, which is 70+30*(16/30) = 86 = 100 minus a quota of 14.

So anyone with over a quota is elected first and their surplus distributed. At the end of this, if there are not yet 6 elected, the procedure is similar to the lower house, you eliminate the least popular and distribute their preferences. You do this until someone else gets over a quota, and if all the spots aren’t filled yet you distribute their surplus and so on until 6 candidates have been elected.

What this means in practice is basically the same as in the HoR, the best approach is to number the candidates in the order in which you like them, preferential voting means you don’t have to make judgements on who is likely to win or not, if your top preferences get eliminated your vote still counts.

Above the line voting

Since there are a large number of candidates in a typical Senate election, meaning a lot of boxes to number, above the line voting was brought in, the justification being to cut down on informal voting. This means that rather than number all of the candidates yourself, you number a single box labelled by party, and your preferences are distributed according to a ticket lodged with the AEC by the party. It is important to realise that these are not secret, they are published online before the election (here http://www.aec.gov.au/election/downloads.htm) and you can ask the officials to view a copy at the polling place. The problem is that many people vote above the line without knowing how the preferences are being directed and then are not necessarily happy with the outcome. This is easily avoided, view preference tickets, if you agree with the one for the party you want to vote for then you can vote above the line, if not then vote below the line, or ignore the tickets entirely and vote below the line.

For the 2013 election some things to be aware of are that the preference allocations of the Wikileaks party have been very controversial, in some states they have preferences right wing parties quite highly, and in WA their preferences could help elect a National Party rather than Greens Senator Scott Ludlam who has been the most outspoken parliamentarian on the issues that they are campaigning on. Here in South Australia preferences from independent Nick Xenaphon go to Labor and Liberal.

So What Does All This Mean For How I Vote?

I agree with the advice usually given by ABC psephologist Antony Green – just vote for the candidates in the order in which you like them. In particular this means there is no need to worry about where your preferences are going – if you number them yourself then nobody can change where your preferences go, preference deals will mean nothing for your vote. It also means don’t worry about who has a realistic chance or not, just vote for who you like, in a preferential system there is no “wasted vote”. Also make sure you do number all of the candidates to make it a formal vote, an informal vote really is a waste.

But if I vote for a minor party does that risk letting the major party I don’t like winning?

No. To make it clearer, consider a specific example, you want to vote Green but don’t want it to let the Liberals win. If the Liberals win then at some stage in the count they achieve over 50% of the votes, let’s say 51% for the sake of argument. Then at this point your vote is with the other 49%, which includes everyone who preferenced Labor above Liberal. Even if you and every other Green voter who doesn’t want the Liberals to win were to change their number 1 to Labor it would not change any of the votes in the 51% who have put Liberals above Labor, so they still win.

There are some complicated scenarios where a change could affect the outcome, these usually involve 3 or more candidates who are very close, but without knowing what everyone else would do there is no real way of predicting the outcome, you are best off voting for who you like best. (There is in fact a mathematical theorem which essentially says that no voting system can avoid these sorts of problems, so it is not a particular weakness of our system).

What’s the point of voting for a candidate who won’t win anyway?

Your first preference is important, it determines the allocation of public funding. If you vote 1 for someone who isn’t really your favourite then you are denying funds to your favoured candidate and giving them to someone else. Also, a first preference for one candidate that goes on to help another candidate win sends a message to the winning candidate about what you think. For example Labor will pay more attention to issues championed by the Greens if they are elected on Greens preferences. Also if you do have a favourite candidate or party who are not likely to win, then if you don’t vote for them then they never will be likely to win. In 2001 the Greens got 15% of 1st preference votes in the seat of Melbourne. In 2010 the Greens won the seat. If the 15% in 2001 hadn’t bothered then it may never have been winnable. In 2010 the Greens got over 15% in many seats, including Mayo and Port Adelaide in South Australia.

I’m Going To Vote Greens In The Senate but not the lower house.

The Greens campaign is focused on the senate since these are where the most likely wins are, but given the discussion above, if you like the Greens then why not give them your lower house vote as well, you still get to have your say with your preference but you get even more of a say with your first vote and help to potentially make your seat winnable in the future.

I’m going to vote informal because my vote will only end up with one of the major parties.

Congratulations, you’ve just helped to maintain the power of the major parties, i.e. you’ve achieved exactly the opposite of what you wanted. If your vote ends up counting for one of the major parties then it means that everyone you like better has been eliminated from the count because the majority of other people did vote for the major parties. Your vote is not making them more likely to win at this point, everyone else voting for them has already done that, your vote is just expressing a preference between them. It is not saying you like them or giving approval for their policies, it is just allowing you to still have a say over who gets elected even though your preferred candidates did not get enough votes to stay in the count. If your vote was informal they would still get elected but the parties or candidates you do actually like lose funding and lose the chance to have be in a more winnable position in the future. Simplistically it seems like you’re denying something from the major parties, but you aren’t really, you are just hurting the party you like. If you cast a formal vote you are helping the party you like and hurting the majors even if your vote goes to them eventually, because your vote is helping to threaten the duopoly. What they really fear is other candidates getting elected. This happened in places like Melbourne, Denison and New England precisely because people cast formal votes for candidates not from the major parties. An informal vote will not change anything, a vote for a candidate you like has a chance to, even if they don’t get elected this time. Just to be clear, preferential voting in no way favours the major parties, in fact without it there would be much less chance of anyone ever being elected since people would be forced to consider whether it is worth voting for someone else they suspect unlikely to win and giving up their say on who actually wins. If you don’t like the major parties the only way to beat them is to elect other candidates, this may mean voting for candidates who aren’t likely to win this time but otherwise there will never be anyone able to build up enough of a vote to beat them in the future.

 

In the wake of Bob Brown’s announcement that he will retire there has been much speculation about the future of the Greens. For those who don’t like the Greens (e.g. anyone who writes for News Ltd) it’s another chance to excitedly declare the imminent demise of their sworn enemy.

From the perspective of a Greens member the idea that the party cannot survive without Brown is quite ridiculous. A key feature of the greens is commitment to grassroots democracy, the interior structure of the party is highly democratic. While there is a great deal of well-deserved respect for Brown, it isn’t as if he’s the party dictator. His position was as parliamentary leader, as elected by the 10 elected representatives in federal parliament. There is much more to the Greens than the federal parliamentarians, there are numerous Greens representatives in state and local government all over the country. The overall structure of the party is based on the states, and big decisions are made at conferences where representatives of the state parties meet. At times people have disagreed with Bob Brown on big decisions and he didn’t always get his way, and was happy to recognise the will of the party through its representatives.

Furthermore there is much more to the Greens that just Bob Brown. They are a party based on a set of principles (described in the charter), and are part of an international movement. While he has done a good job of attracting people to the party, they are ultimately there because of what it stands for, and that does not change with his retirement.

The Greens have consistently been growing in support for some time and that growth isn’t guaranteed to continue indefinitely, but an imminent collapse seems highly unlikely.

One more thing, I’ve seen a number of comments from people making some fairly bizarre insinuations about the timing of Brown’s retirement – basically that he knows that something is going to go horribly wrong (usually involving the carbon tax) and he’s getting out to avoid it. For a start this sort of behaviour would go against everything we know from about Brown’s past record, but it’s quite silly to even go looking for an ulterior motive. He has to decide now whether to recontest the senate. That means staying for another 6 years, and he’s in his late 60’s now. He’s been in state and federal parliament since the mid-80’s, it’s not unreasonable that he might want to retire now rather than commit to another 6 years. With the party now having elected representatives from all states in federal parliament, including one in the house of representatives, and an obvious successor in Milne, now seems like an ideal chance for him to finally have a break.

Update: an article about Milne’s good start as leader at The Global Mail.