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Bear with me, this could take a while... OK, so there's two elections going on simulateously - one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate. Ju

by caf 13y ago

Bear with me, this could take a while... OK, so there's two elections going on simulateously - one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate. Just as in the US, each electoral district (there are 150) elects a single member to the HoR, whereas each state elects multiple members to the Senate. In the case of the Senate though, each state is treated as one giant electoral district with proportional representation. Both the HoR and Senate elections use single-transferable-vote ("instant runoff"), but this obviously plays out very differently in single-member electoral districts versus multi-member proportional districts. HoR ballots tend to have a reasonably small number of candidates - between 3 and about 15, but usually somewhere nearer to 6. On these ballots, a full preferential ballot is the only option - you must number all candidates in order for your vote to count. Senate ballots, however, are ballooning somewhat out-of-control. At the upcoming election, the Senate ballot paper in NSW will have 110 candidates. Requiring voters to number all of these squares for their vote to count was causing the informal ballot count to increase substantially, so in the 1980s "above the line" voting was introduced. Under above-the-line voting, you can simply indicate a vote for your preferred party ticket, and your full preferences will be allocated according to the ticket that the party submitted to the electoral commission prior to voting. These preference tickets are publically available, and the current controversy surrounds the party tickets lodged by Wikileaks in some states. "Below the line" voting is still available as an option (and obviously one I personally will be taking up). There is growing recognition of the perverse results that "above the line" voting can cause, and of course 1-metre-wide ballot papers with over 100 candidates listed are absurd. There is some talk of allowing "optional preferential voting" above the line, so that you can just number the party tickets in your preferred order, rather than having to either number every single candidate individually, or accept your preferred party's direction of preferences in its entireity.

aspensmonster 13y ago
Thank you. Why is it that you must number 100+ boxes? I can certainly see why many would be put off having to do so. It would make more sense to me if you simply numbered the candidates you actually had a preference for, and anyone else on the meter-long ballot didn't get a vote at all. I imagine that would cut down substantially on fringe candidates cluttering up the ballot. It seems that the official parties actually do get this privilege --I've only heard of the major parties mentioning their relative preferences to each other, with no mention of 100+ rankings (edit: or is there indeed a full ranking the party submits, but only the top relative positions are typically reported in the news?). However, if you wish to vote purely according to your own preferences, you're saddled with a ballot that folks will undoubtedly scour for their handful of preferences to truly mark, and then blindly count up to 100+ from top to bottom so that their ballot "counts." EDIT: Many thanks to coffeecheque, Volpe, BlackAura, and any others that help to explain all of the news I've been reading recently :)
- Volpe 13y ago
  Every vote has to count to someone... so you can't have a "dead end" on a ballet (hence a vote isn't counted if it isn't filled out completely). They preference all 100+ rankings, but do it by groups (generally). i.e. Party A will preference Party B candidates, then Party C. Though some smaller parties do very individual preferences.
- BlackAura 13y ago
  Parties do indeed submit full rankings, which are published. http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/ Only the summaries get reported, for obvious reasons.
- coffeecheque 13y ago
  It's all published before hand. The deadline was the weekend, which is why we're seeing all the stories about preferences now. In the Senate, parties lodge Group Voting Tickets (GVTs) with the Australian Electoral Commission. If you vote "above-the-line" (say for the Liberal Party) the GVTs dictate where the preferences should flow. The AEC did have PDFs of the GVTs, but I can't find them now. The ABC has published them here (in an easier to follow format): http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/ The reason why the candidate quit was in part because of the NSW Wikileaks preference deal: http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/nsw/#gtv_nsw_i http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/n... You can see at spot 36 and 37 the preference going to Australia First. Its chairman is a former neo-nazi, convicted in the 1980s of organising a gun attack on someone from the African National Congress. The first Greens candidate is down in the 50s. As for why we have to number all the boxes, I'm not entirely sure. It probably didn't matter so much back where there were only a handful of candidates. It doesn't work so well when there's more than 100.
  - aspensmonster 13y ago
    I see. So each party typically acts as a cluster. They may have their own internal rankings within that cluster of candidates, but on the whole parties will typically only be concerned with cluster rankings. That is to say, most parties won't bother with going through 100+ candidates' platforms entirely individually, and you'd expect to see all (or most) of a given party in a block on the ranking, rather than sprinkled throughout. Senate Preferences for Party A: 1 - PARTY A - John 2 - PARTY A - Jane 3 - PARTY A - Mike 4 - PARTY A - Jennifer 5 - PARTY B - Napoleon 6 - PARTY B - Elizabeth 7 - PARTY B - Bob 7 - PARTY C - Austin 8 - PARTY C - Emily 9 - PARTY B - Patrick <- (For whatever reason, Party A just really doesn't like Patrick at all) 10 - PARTY D - NeoNazi <- (Crazies at the bottom) And so on and so forth for 100+ candidates. The abc.net.au preference listings seem to show this sort of line up. (And there seem to be a ton of parties: Stop CSG Party, Australian Sex Party, Help End Marijuana Prohibition, Smokers Rights Party, Stable Population Party) I can certainly see how administrative error could creep in here --and sabotage as well. I still find myself preferring an election system like this however even with the bloat :)

by caf 13y ago

aspensmonster 13y ago

Thank you. Why is it that you must number 100+ boxes? I can certainly see why many would be put off having to do so. It would make more sense to me if you simply numbered the candidates you actually had a preference for, and anyone else on the meter-long ballot didn't get a vote at all. I imagine that would cut down substantially on fringe candidates cluttering up the ballot. It seems that the official parties actually do get this privilege --I've only heard of the major parties mentioning their relative preferences to each other, with no mention of 100+ rankings (edit: or is there indeed a full ranking the party submits, but only the top relative positions are typically reported in the news?). However, if you wish to vote purely according to your own preferences, you're saddled with a ballot that folks will undoubtedly scour for their handful of preferences to truly mark, and then blindly count up to 100+ from top to bottom so that their ballot "counts." EDIT: Many thanks to coffeecheque, Volpe, BlackAura, and any others that help to explain all of the news I've been reading recently :)

Volpe 13y ago
Every vote has to count to someone... so you can't have a "dead end" on a ballet (hence a vote isn't counted if it isn't filled out completely). They preference all 100+ rankings, but do it by groups (generally). i.e. Party A will preference Party B candidates, then Party C. Though some smaller parties do very individual preferences.
BlackAura 13y ago
Parties do indeed submit full rankings, which are published. http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/ Only the summaries get reported, for obvious reasons.
coffeecheque 13y ago
It's all published before hand. The deadline was the weekend, which is why we're seeing all the stories about preferences now. In the Senate, parties lodge Group Voting Tickets (GVTs) with the Australian Electoral Commission. If you vote "above-the-line" (say for the Liberal Party) the GVTs dictate where the preferences should flow. The AEC did have PDFs of the GVTs, but I can't find them now. The ABC has published them here (in an easier to follow format): http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/ The reason why the candidate quit was in part because of the NSW Wikileaks preference deal: http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/nsw/#gtv_nsw_i http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/gtv/n... You can see at spot 36 and 37 the preference going to Australia First. Its chairman is a former neo-nazi, convicted in the 1980s of organising a gun attack on someone from the African National Congress. The first Greens candidate is down in the 50s. As for why we have to number all the boxes, I'm not entirely sure. It probably didn't matter so much back where there were only a handful of candidates. It doesn't work so well when there's more than 100.
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  I see. So each party typically acts as a cluster. They may have their own internal rankings within that cluster of candidates, but on the whole parties will typically only be concerned with cluster rankings. That is to say, most parties won't bother with going through 100+ candidates' platforms entirely individually, and you'd expect to see all (or most) of a given party in a block on the ranking, rather than sprinkled throughout. Senate Preferences for Party A: 1 - PARTY A - John 2 - PARTY A - Jane 3 - PARTY A - Mike 4 - PARTY A - Jennifer 5 - PARTY B - Napoleon 6 - PARTY B - Elizabeth 7 - PARTY B - Bob 7 - PARTY C - Austin 8 - PARTY C - Emily 9 - PARTY B - Patrick <- (For whatever reason, Party A just really doesn't like Patrick at all) 10 - PARTY D - NeoNazi <- (Crazies at the bottom) And so on and so forth for 100+ candidates. The abc.net.au preference listings seem to show this sort of line up. (And there seem to be a ton of parties: Stop CSG Party, Australian Sex Party, Help End Marijuana Prohibition, Smokers Rights Party, Stable Population Party) I can certainly see how administrative error could creep in here --and sabotage as well. I still find myself preferring an election system like this however even with the bloat :)