With another Victorian upper house thread having extended beyond 200 comments, a further update would appear in order. At the time of the last post, Labor’s hopes for an upper house majority appeared to hinge entirely on Southern Metropolitan. Since then, the chances of a DLP win at Labor’s expense in Western Victoria – always possible, but somehow too bizarre to contemplate – have increased considerably. The DLP scored 2.6 per cent of the primary vote in this region, which is subsequently engorged by preferences from the Country Alliance and People Power, putting their candidate Peter Kavanagh fractionally ahead of Family First. Family First preferences in turn get Kavanagh ahead of the Nationals, unlocking enough Coalition preferences to get him ahead of both the Greens and Labor. At this point of the count, the Greens hold the narrowest of leads over Labor (130 votes, according to Antony Green); if they stay ahead, Labor will go out and their preferences will push Kavanagh over a quota. Otherwise, the Greens will go out instead and their preferences will deliver the seat to Labor incumbent Elaine Carbines. Another alternative scenario that might thwart the DLP is if what Antony describes as "a big whack of postals from a seat contested by the Nationals" put them ahead of the DLP at the earlier point of the count.
Southern Metropolitan remains on a knife edge, except that the Greens’ position has firmed in late counting – so it now looks like a contest between Labor (Evan Thornley) and Liberal (David Southwick) for the final place, rather than the three-way contest for the last two places that was in play earlier. According to Antony Green, the ticket votes alone leave Thornley 3844 short of a quota after the addition of preferences from Democrats, People Power and independent Rita Bentley, which the distribution of the Greens surplus should cut to around 2500; while David Southwick is 2934 votes short after receiving preferences from Family First and the DLP. However, there are more below-the-line primary votes for Liberal than Labor (5602 versus 4961), and in particular, there are more for Southwick than Thornley (1683 versus 633). Then there are the 5,275 below-the-line votes for parties other than Labor, Liberal and the Greens. The destination of these preferences look set to decide the issue, bearing in mind that many will exhaust given that voters are required only to number five boxes.
171 Comments
There is a distinct possibility that neither the Liberal or Labor candidate in SMET will achieve a quota due to the number of votes that exhaust. This to my mind leaves an “indeterminate” result, and is a traversty of democracy. Exhaustion of votes perturbs the purity of the Hare-Clarke system.
In a truly democratic election there is one vote one value; every vote is counted and every vote counts.
In Antony’s proposed “reforms” that limits the number of preferences allowable on a ticket, this would be exasserbated as whole groups of votes would exhaust, not just BTLs, and impose unexeptable bias to the result as discussed in the previous thread.
Not only “exceptionable” but “unacceptable”.
“unexeptable” is a non-spellers way of saying the same thing!
A travesty of democracy? If votes can exhaust, and you have two candidates left – why is it a travesty that the candidate with the higher number of votes is elected?
To remove this “travesty”, you’d have to have compulsory preferential voting, or say that the position will be unfilled, or perhaps filled at a by-election where a “real quota” is obtained.
Yes you have two candidates left, and a whole heap of votes that could have contributed to resolving the winner, but didn’t because they exhausted instead.
You’ve just made my arguement for retaining CPV as applies in the Senate.
Rubbish Ray. The two purist forms of Hare-Clark in Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, have ALWAYS operated with optional preferential voting, Tasmania for one hundred years and it is put up as the model for everyone else to follow. The last spot in each seat in Tasmania is nearly always decided by less than a quota.
Spot on Sacha.
Ray does have a point, that OPV can produce winners that don’t reach a quota.
But the only solution, CPV, produces winners with quotas that are often highly artificial. A solution that is more unsatisfactory than the problem.
Oh, and is a ‘truly democratic election’ one where a voter must choose between equally objectionable candidates, or randomly fill remaining squares, or slavishly follow a how-to-vote card, just so that their vote will be declared formal and be allowed to count towards the candidates they do know and do want to vote for? The debate about compulsory voting (or more precisely compulsory attendance at polling places) is one about civics and minimum levels of participation. No such argument applies to compulsory preferences. If you have to vote, you should only have to vote for the candidates you want to vote for.
Because it has operated in another state for a hundred years makes it right!
I’ll leave you to come up with the Latin expression that exposes the falsesness of that logic.
Although, if the method of calculating the transfer value used in NSW was adopted, you could minimise the number of exhausted preferences. When a candidate achives a surplus in NSW or the ACT, all votes that exhaust at that point remain with the elected candidate, while only those with further preferences would be included in the surplus calculation. A slight complication would be that both NSW and the ACT use the last bundle method while Victoria uses the Inclusive Gregory, but it could still be adopted.
Find me a credible advocate of pure Hare-Clark who supports compulsory preferential voting.
Ray – what is so “perfect” about me having to preference candidates I don’t want to preference? What if I think two candidates are completely equal in my judgement and don’t wish to preference one above the other? Is it “perfect” (whatever this means) that I be forced to preference one above the other ie the vote records something other than my actual judgement?
There are no such things as “perfect” electoral systems, as that famous theorem tells us (I forget its name).
Ray, you just sound annoyed that someone might be elected without a full quota of votes. So what if this happens?
The theorem is called “Arrow’s Theorem” (eg see Michael Nielsen’s (who’s a physicist) blog: http://www.qinfo.org/people/nielsen/blog/?p=254).
“Arrow picked out three properties that (arguably) you would like any good voting system to have – and then mathematically proved that no voting system with all three properties can possibly exist! What is especially remarkable about Arrow’s achievement is that there is no obvious a priori reason to suppose that these three requirements are incompatible.”
Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a wonderful piece of work and rightly deserved a Nobel prize. At its heart, the idea of a rational voter (or rational consumers in economics) presume one thing, the mathematical property of transitivity. If a voter prefers A to B and B to C, then they will also prefer A to C. However, in voting using fully expressed preferences, the accumulation of the choices by rational voters can produce an ‘irrational’ result in that transitivity is breached when all the votes are tallied, and the A to B to C assumption will not always be clear from the election result. Some have advocated Condorcet (not sure of spelling) as a solution but nobody has ever implemented it for anything other than council meetings.
Optional preferential voting helps avoids though does not prevent Arrow’s problem by recognising that voters hold some preferences strongly and others weakly. Voters fill in the preferences they do have and not the one’s they don’t have. It weights the election in favour of the preferences most strongly held by voters rather than compulsory preferential voting which gives equal weight to every preference, even preference that are random and filled in only to allow a ballot to be counted.
A response to Ray. Elections are intended to reflect voters desires. Everything adding up to a nice, neat 100% is only important as a check to ensure voters desires have in fact been properly accounted for. Your unstated assumption is that a voter determining that they don’t see a difference between candidates or parties and therefore don’t want to express a preference between them is in some sense illegitimate. It is not.
“None of the above” is as valid a choice in principle (regardless of the rules re compulsory or optional) as “Candidate X” or “Candidate Y”.
It is in fact the same in principle as an informal ballot paper deliberately left blank. How do you propose to address that “travesty of democracy”?
To repeat – Elections are to measure people’s wishes. Just because it messes up your table doesn’t make a refusal to choose illegitimate.
Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a wonderful piece of work and rightly deserved a Nobel prize. At its heart, the idea of a rational voter (or rational consumers in economics) presume one thing, the mathematical property of transitivity. If a voter prefers A to B and B to C, then they will also prefer A to C. However, in voting using fully expressed preferences, the accumulation of the choices by rational voters can produce an ‘irrational’ result in that transitivity is breached when all the votes are tallied, and the A to B to C assumption will not always be clear from the election result…..
And, not only that but in pair-wise comparisons, the judgement criteria may vary according to the pairs. It is perfectly OK for me to prefer bananas to oranges and oranges to apples, but apples to bananas. I’m voting on different things in each comparison.
…..Some have advocated Condorcet (not sure of spelling)
A good exposition of it all is in “The Choice of Voting Systems” in scientific American, in about 1976. The author points out that it would theoretically be possible to elect a President who was preferred by only 10% of the voters.
I disagree.
The break with transitivity only makes sense over a group, not an individual. Which I believe is what Antony was saying.
Or put it another way: how are you going to fill out your bananas v oranges v apples ballot paper?
Antony,
The argument about strongly held preferences could just as easily (and correctly) be used in favor of optional voting. Rather than being a civil liberties issue, the strongest agrument against compulsory voting is that it gives equal weight to “even preference that are random and filled in only to allow a ballot to be counted.”
See also: Paradoxes of Preferential Voting Peter C. Fishburn; Steven J. Brams Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 4. (Sep., 1983), pp. 207-214. [this is on-line]
….David Walsh Says: …Or put it another way: how are you going to fill out your bananas v oranges v apples ballot paper?
I exhaust after oranges (informal vote under the FPV rules).
In the 1990s there were a considerable number of voters who preferred Liberal to Labor but, when they were offered Pauline Hanson after 1996, preferred her to both…. but it turned out that they now preferred Labour to Liberal as 2nd&3rd (43% of them, on the average). This was their individual choice and not the kind of intransitivity to which Antony was referring.
Geoff – I’m sceptical. How do you know that these One Nation voters were Liberal and not Labor voters in the first place?
Didn’t One Nation take a few seats off Labor at the 1998 Qld state election?
Heck, Hanson herself probably never would have won Oxley were it not for her disendorsed status helping pull a chunk of otherwise Labor voters.
Sacha,
I’m not so much annoyed that the winner might not reach the magic number of votes that constitutes a quota, as I am annoyed that there are most likely a whole bunch of votes out there that exhaust where the voter probably would have preferred distinguish between the contesting candidates. But because the voter probably did not appreciate the implications of not filling in any more than five candidates, as was the minimum guidence, his vote may not contribute to the determination ultimate winner.
I’m sure if you were to ask which major party the voter who lodged the exhausted vote would prefer, you would get a definite answer, and yet because he didn’t think to extend his preferences beyond five, then that major party preference is not expressed.
Tragically in the case of this election, lack of counting of that expression may well determine the BoP of the parliament in Victoria.
It’s so weird to see the DLP come back from the dead that’s all i have to say.
Ray – people get the result they voted for. They’re responsible for it. I’m not in favour of the state requiring voters to fill in all the boxes because the state thinks that voters actually do have some preferences that they’re not showing (because they don’t need to). C’mon. I suspect you don’t like the fact that the DLP will win a spot on such a low primary vote.
Sacha – I was actually commenting on the situation in SMET not WVIC.
In WVIC it is weird indeed. Lazerus with a quintupple bypass. and no-one can blame CPV for it, because OPV applies. Its GVTs that are the issue here.
“Didn’t One Nation take a few seats off Labor at the 1998 Qld state election?”
It certainly did. I was campaigning and scrutineering for Labor’s Karen Struthers in that election, and I remember thinking, after seeing the size of the swing to Labor from the Liberals at the Salisbury booth (in Brisbane’s southern suburbs), that Labor was home and hosed if the swing was on across the board. Then I got home, turned on the TV and found that One Nation were winning seats like Caboolture (far northern suburbs of Brisbane) which were assumed to be fairly safe Labor. In the end Labor’s seat gains from the Coalition were entirely cancelled out by One Nation’s gains from Labor, and Beattie had to form a minority government supported by the independent Peter Wellington.
What I also recall from that election is people I knew to be left-leaning working class voters, who could best be described as disgruntled Labor identifiers, telling me that they and many of their workmates were voting for One Nation as a protest against all the other protagonists, even though they knew and didn’t like what One Nation stood for.
David Walsh Says: Geoff – I’m sceptical. How do you know that these One Nation voters were Liberal and not Labor voters in the first place?
Examples of polling in early 97 (%ages)
Date ALP COAL HAN ALP_TPP
1-Feb-97 36.3 46.9 __ 45.6
15-Feb-97 36.1 47.7 __ 45.8
1-Mar-97 36.0 48.6 1.0 46.0
15-Mar-97 35.9 47.7 2.5 46.2
29-Mar-97 36.0 44.4 4.7 46.5
12-Apr-97 35.4 42.0 8.1 46.7
26-Apr-97 35.1 40.4 10.4 47.1
10-May-97 34.9 41.3 10.1 47.5
24-May-97 35.1 41.9 9.3 47.9
7-Jun-97 35.3 42.2 8.3 48.1
21-Jun-97 36.1 42.1 8.0 48.2
5-Jul-97 36.4 41.5 7.5 48.2
See how, when Hanson appears, her vote climbs, the Coalition declines, the ALP stays steady…. but the ALP TPP rises. [cut and paste into a spreadsheet]
The 43% figure is a long-term average from Morgan Poll and elections (Fed & Qld). The numbers above are means of 3 fortnightly polls from three pollsters. Before 1995, these people probably WERE ALP voters- but they weren’t in 96-97.
This site http://www.aph.gov.au/library/Pubs/rn/1997-98/98rn49.htm discusses voring figures in the qld 1998 election.
If it’s meaningful to mention, the six Labor seats that One Nation won were: Ipswich West, Caboolture, Thuringowa, Maryborough, Hervey Bay and Whitsunday. The first three were “safe” or “safish” labor going into the election while the latter three were marginal against the coalition.
From memory, One Nation came close to winning Ipswich, Cairns and Bundaberg, which then were usually labor seats (Cairns/Bundaberg are more marginal in recent history). One Nation did well in outer Brisbane seats eg Waterford, where from memory they got about 25% of the vote and the Labor candidate’s vote reduced to about 45%.
I’ve just been scrutineering in Southern Metro. Doing calculations on the btl votes. Votes below the line for the Lib number 1 almost all went to Southwick. Btl for Pennicuik went about eighty percent to Thornley but a number exhausted. There appeared to be a number of btl votes for Freeman on the ALP ticket giving next preference to Southwick, in fact a significant number. Didn’t see any ballot papers for Myers but these could be an important factor too. Perhaps about ten percent plus of Pennicuik votes btl exhausted.
Another interesting tit bit. Of the btl votes for Mayne none I saw went to Thornley. Most went to Pennicuik and about a third went to Southwick. PP btl voters appear to be a different breed to Mayne’s atl voters, who went to FF and ended up with Thornley before the Greens and the Libs. Also of interest was Bentley votes. atl these went to Thornley. btl most went to Southwick and some went to the Pennicuik, but not many.
I only did a very small number of votes being keyed in by data entry operators. I cannot give an overall picture. I have been accurate in local government elections in Darebin to within 3 or 4 per cent in a small sample, but the problem in SM region is I don’t know where the btl votes came from and there could be big differences in different parts of the region. I was totally wrong in my predictions in the election won by Abbouche in Hume, where I predicted a win for Yigit, but once again the particular ward in Hume covered a huge area, and my sampling was only on a few data entry operators, as it was today in SM region. Darebin is fairly homogeneous, and mostly the votes won’t differ much throughout parts of the various wards.
The exhausted votes could also hold the key to the final result. Liberal btl votes won’t generally exhaust as they seemed to almost be within the Liberal ticket 1 to 5. Exhausted Lib votes won’t matter. Nor will Thornley votes that exhaust. It’s the Pennicuik votes that exhaust, and also votes from candidates other than the top 2 Lib, Lenders, Southwick and Thornley that could be very crucial.
I support optional preference marking. The comments above for compulsory marking of preferences were originally made by Dr Evatt when pr was first introduced to the Senate, and were similar to those of certain correspondents above. The Coalition at that time did not want compulsory marking. How silly Evatt was. The Coalition probably prevented Labor from winning a majority in the Senate at the 1974 double dissolution because of the huge number of candidates, no atl voting, and the requirement on voters in NSW at least to mark about 76 preferences. The informal vote was over ten per cent, and probably most of these were Labor votes.
Another update on the VEC website. Anyone care to explain whether it gives any further light as to who will win the 5th spot in Southern Metro.
Word from the streets of Southern Metropolitan as of 3pm Friday afternoon is Thornley, that purveyor of crap dot com rubbish, is sinking slowly beneath the waves.
BTL votes are quite simply killing Thornley and unless the Greens have a whack of ATL votes left over quota then it’s goodnight to a true corporate grub. Rather than shed tears for the demise of this utterly flawed man, Premier Bracks in years to come will thank the Heavens and the people of Southern Metro for their collective wisdom in saving Victoria from this shonk.
The latest update leaves everything as it was . Makes almost no difference. Lyle’s comment on the Mayne preferences is important. Every BTL vote that gets to the Greens before the Democrat preferences increases the size of the Green surplus and increases the chances of Thornley getting elected.
Peter K, you quote of me is out of context. Under compulsory preferential voting, you have to express a preference for every candidate even if you don’t have it, just so that the preferences you do have are allowed to be counted. Hence my comment about people filling in random preferences just to get their vote counted. If you are a Green supporter and you want to vote for them and don’t care about the major parties, you still have to make a choice for either the Labor or Liberal candidates because you have to if you want your vote for the Greens to count.
That’s why voluntary voting combined with compulsory preferences can’t work. If I live in a seat with two candidates, say Communist and Fascist, and I don’t care for either, under voluntary voting, I wouldn’t have to vote. But if a third candidate of the Moderate party nominated, and I wanted to vote for them, then under compulsory preferential voting with voluntary voting, I would be forced to make the choice between Communist and Fascist if I wanted to vote for the Moderate. That’s a choice I wouldn’t have had to make if their had been only two candidates.
In the 1950s, the Liberal Party often opted out of the electoral contest in the NSW state seat of Cessnock, leaving the field to the Labor and Communist Parties. Whenever this occurred, there was always a huge jump in the informal vote. When the Liberal Party did stand, Liberal supporters were forced to make that choice and seemingly quite happily did so.
In relations to the 1998 Queensland election, in the seats where One Nation finished 3rd or did not contest, the swing to Labor was 4.7%. The swing was strongly against Labor where the Nationals finished third because the National preferences flowed more strongly to One Nation than the reverse. If you break down that election, it is pretty clear that One Nation may have taken a few percent off the Labor primary vote. Unfortunately for the Coalition, it also halved the National Party vote. If anyone is looking for a good thesis topic, an excellent one is what the Federal Coalition government was saying about Pauline Hanson and One Nation before the 1998 Queensland election, and the language it was using afterwards.
Though equally, every BTL that goes straight to Southwick makes it harder for Thornley. Funny, the BTL beauty contest between Liberal and Greens will decide Thornley’s fate. Under the Tasmanian, ACT and NSW rules, the BTL votes would carry more weight than the Green tickets.
Sacha: Labor only lost or came close to losing seats where One Nation outpolled the Nationals, not the other way around. The rise of One Nation prevented Beattie getting a majority in 1998, but the price the Coalition paid for heading Beattie off at the pass was the decimation of its own base vote.
The possible resurrection of the DLP is fascinating. It is also fascinating that along with that party’s possible resurrection comes the resurrection of anti-DLP feeling; e.g., on ‘Full house (part two)’, centaur_007 (December 8th, 2006 at 9:59 am) says: ‘I can’t believe it we’ve done it again FF then DLP. Whoever works out these voting tickets should be shot.’ I do not know whey ‘we’ is the chosen pronoun, but the ALP and the DLP did a deal on preferences, each thinking to gain from it, the ALP in Northern and Western Metro and the DLP in Western Victoria. The same applied to the ALP/Family First deal in 2004, which the ALP expected to re-elect Jacinta Collins on FF preferences. The ALP would have been right if its vote had not fallen so badly. Those who do not like preference deals have the option of voting below the line. If they choose not to inform themselves or exercise that option, so be it.
In the lead-up to the election, the DLP was hardly mentioned, while both the dead Democrats and the stillborn People Power got a few mentions. Yet the DLP out-polled both in the Legislative Council. After the election, the DLP does get a mention, but often in the same way as it did 30 years ago; i.e., with plenty of negative comment. It also seems that attempts to correct the negative comments and even straightforward inaccuracies will remain unpublished, just as they often were 30 years ago. I give as an example my so far unpublished letter of 6/12 to The Australian:
‘A little knowledge of political history would be useful to those who read the inaccurate claims still made about the DLP (“DLP on verge of breaking 30-year droughtâ€, 6/12). Even leaving aside Nino Randazzo, whose election to the Italian Senate was not under the DLP label, the last DLP MP was Kevin Harrold, who sat in the NSW Parliament from 1973 to 1976.
‘According to every public source I have seen, Steve Bracks’s “heated discussions†with his father were solely about capital punishment. Whatever Stan Bracks’s views, the DLP was consistent in opposing both capital punishment and abortion and campaigned against the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967.
‘The DLP was never “extremist†or even “right-wingâ€. It was the result of a decision by the men who controlled the federal ALP in 1954/55 to launch an unjustified and foolish attack on the Victorian party, thus destroying the parliamentary careers of a number of principled Labor MPs and condemning the ALP to a generation in the political wilderness – a mistake the current ALP would never make.
‘The real right wing is outside the DLP and takes every opportunity it can to denigrate the public sector and those who work in it. “Labor Party sources said Mr Rudd was likely to take an uncompromising position on political correctness in the education system and had spoken of placing the concerns of parents above those of pressure groups such as teachers’ unions“ (“Rudd calls on states to corner PMâ€, 6/12). This manipulative attempt to treat teachers as the enemies of education is a typically right-wing attack on the teaching profession.
‘The modern ALP knows that a bird needs both wings to fly. The ALP gained DLP preferences for its fourth candidate in the Western Metropolitan Region. If Peter Kavanagh succeeds in the Buffy-like resurrection of the DLP, I am sure that there will many in the ALP comfortable having a negotiating partner other than the Greens in the Legislative Council. What the critics forget is that both the ALP and the DLP are Labor parties.
‘Yours sincerely,
Chris Curtis
(Vice President, Victorian DLP, 1976-78)
‘e-mailed to: letters@theaustralian.com.au
as Labor Parties’
I have read attacks on the teaching profession for the 33 years I have been a member of it. These attacks are malicious and evidence-free, but they keep on coming. They work on the subconscious drip method; i.e., casual slurs are dropped into many articles and comments, almost always without any supporting facts, but the repetition of these slurs gives them a life of their own and people start to believe and repeat them without even knowing where they came from. Unions are nowadays treated the same way. The same process occurred so effectively with the DLP that it was driven to disband in 1978. The current DLP will get the same treatment.
These are examples of the way in which public opinion is formed without the public paying much attention to it.
If the current DLP wins in Western Victoria and if it retains the Labor philosophy of the DLP to which I belonged, I expect that its MLC will vote quite often with the ALP rather than with the Liberal Party. Of course, the ALP would prefer the numbers in its own right, but having to rely on a DLP vote will not trouble it.
Chris your letter was way too long (and some would argue pointless) to warrant inclusion.
You mention that the modern ALP needs both wings to fly. The fact remains, Western Victoria or not, the DLP is a dodo. Any win is not a resurrection but a fluke brought about by clever preference harvesting and some extremely fortuitous exclusions.
What will Peter Kavanaugh talk about in his maiden speech? The threat from Communist Vietnam? The Domino Theory? Give us all a break.
Well said Chris. Any chance of coming back to the party!
Isabella- you are soooo ignorant. have a look at the webpage and get educated for a change. http://www.dlp.org.au
I read the DLP policies a few days ago and they seemed right wing to me.
It all depends how far left you sit! Comrade
The only issue that really motivates the current DLP (which is not legally the same party that Chris belonged to) is abortion. It is no more than a front for the Right To Life consisting largely of the Mulholland family. Those members of the old DLP who considered themselves to be part of the labour movement came back into the ALP when Hawke brought the “Grouper unions” back into affiliation, and as far as all sensible ALP people are concerned (ie everyone except the Tomato Left), they are very welcome home.
Of course it is a travesty that a party with 2.5% of the vote wins a seat when the quota is 16.7%, but any system of multi-member preferential PR requires preference deals of this kind, and there is always the risk that they will backfire as happened with Fielding in 2004 and now with the DLP. Labor never expected to retain control of the Council anyway so I don’t see anything particularly tragic about this outcome. Any “left” bill that Bracks wants to pass (there won’t be many) will get through with the support of the Greens. Labor lives quite happily with upper houses of this type in WA and SA.
Isabella,
I tend to write at great length because I want to cover all the facts I can. That is probably my history training. Letters to the editor can be edited if space is the reason for non-publication. The point of the letter was to not leave factual inaccuracies and misrepresentation unchallenged. The point of the post was to suggest that the ALP will not find it difficult to deal with a DLP MLC who holds or shares the balance of power.
I do not know Peter Kavanagh or what he will talk about if he gets to give a maiden speech, but I can make an informed guess. It won’t be the non-existent threat from communist Vietnam, though he may make a reference to the suffering of the people there. I think he will talk about life itself, about his grandfather, about persistence in a cause you believe in, among other things, but I am content to wait and see.
I do not see the DLP’s possible win as a fluke but at least partly as the result of some astute assessment of potential voting numbers and preference flows made before the election.
Tom the grouper,
Thank you, but I will not be coming back to the party. I will, however, speak up for what I see as historical truth.
Dave,
The terms ‘right’ and ‘left come’ from the where members of the French National Assembly sat more than two centuries ago. They deserve a discussion in their own right, but that can be left to another occasion. It does depend on where the centre is. The Kennett Liberals were way to the right of the Hamer Liberals. The Howard Liberals are to the right of the Fraser Liberals. The Rudd ALP is to the right of the Whitlam ALP. The DLP is to the left of all the Liberal incarnations mentioned, but to the right of the Whitlam ALP. I do not know how different the current DLP’s policies are to those of 30 years ago, but I was the DLP’s policy review convenor then and you would be hard-pressed to call those policies, outside of foreign affairs and defence, right-wing. Only last year, I showed the DLP’s environment policy from then to a member of the German Greens. His verdict was that it was advanced for its time.
Isabella: the nasty attack on Thornley is uncalled for!
This board is not the place to personally attack public figures!
To return to Ray’s point about the final seat possibly being decided by the candidate with the higher number of votes, but short of a quota:
I would argue that mathematically that’s perfectly proper. Effectively a BTL voter who chooses not to complete the full available list of preferences submits an informal if s/he doesn’t express a preference between the last two surviving candidates (there is absolutely no way the counting process can infer a preference). The consequence is that the quota for the fifth spot therefore is reduced, since there are now fewer effective formal votes.
I think the in principle objection to ATL votes is much more powerful, that the voter is denying themselves the right to allocate their preferences, and passing that option to Stephen Newnham, Julian Sheezel and their corresponding executives in other parties (Faceless men and women?). When this coughs up results that people didn’t intend, that’s a direct consequence of the system. Whether you can blame people for their limited engagement with the system, or whether the system should be blamed for exploiting that reality is an issue worth discussing.
But is the alternative a return to the pre-1984 system, when voters had to number the entire Senate ballat paper in the correct order? This led to informal rates of up to 10%, effectively disfranchising large numbers of (mainly working-class and non-English-speaking) voters, and also encouraged the tactic of ballot-flooding, running large numbers of dummy tickets to make the ballot bigger and voting harder. This was how the Liberals stole a crucial Senate seat from Labor in NSW in 1974 (there were 73 candidates). This episode led directly to Mick Young’s reforms of 1983, introducing ATL and BTL voting.
And led to the Wran government adopting optional preferential voting when it reformed the NSW Legislative Council. The speeches by Labor members on the bill all referred to this as a measure to stop a repeat of the 1974 Senate election informal vote.
Lyle,
I was also scrutineering, and had a smaller sample than you to go on. However, my impression of Mayne’s BTL votes was that they broke 40% Green and approximately 30% each to Liberal and Labor. That would reduce Labor’s vote (cfd. to an assumption that all BTL votes follow the ATL preference allocation – in this case to Labor). However, there were also FF votes going to Labor (certainly in smaller numbers), and doubtless DLP votes likewise, so the leakage in net terms impacts on Labor, but IMO not disastrously.
Where preferences from candidates formally favouring Labor go to the Greens, this only matters if they and the Greens’ votes subsequently exhaust or favour Southwick.
Incidentally I had a sample of Pennicuik’s BTL ist preferences, of which 15-20% exhausted, less than 10% went to Southwick, and ca. 75% went to Thornley. That’s a leakage from the votes ET needs for his quota (surplus Greens assuming they win the 4th seat), but it’s not on a scale sufficient to change the result.
I reckon Thornley’s margin over Southwick is a theoretical excess of 2,000; extrapolating from the previous paragraph, that figure is narrowing, but by less than the Liberals need. Also Southwick’s gain through much of the earlier post-polling day count seems to have stalled.
Barring a further change of direction of the count (bearing in mind 90%+ has been accounted for), I think Thornley has just about made it.
Just an addendum to your note Peter. Remember that any BTL votes that get to the Greens before the Democrat ticket votes are distributed is subsequently swamped by the Green ticket. Every extra BTL vote going to the Greens increases the size of the Green surplus and effectively releases a little bit more of the Green ticket. When the surplus calculation is done, all of the votes held by the Greens are included along with the Democrat ticket, meaning that 85-90% of the Green surplus will be ticket votes with preferences for Labor. Every BTL for Southwick that first goes to the Greens gets de-valued and helps release a little bit more of the Green ticket with preferences for Labor. Labor would rather have preferences locked up and devalued with the Greens than sloshing around at full value with a free choice between Southwick and Thornley.
The fact that votes become exhausted is not the only explanation for someone to win the last seat without a quota. In a five-seat electorate with 300,000 voters, the quota would be 50,001 votes. Four quotas would total 200,004 votes, leaving 99,996 votes to be shared between eventually two remaining candidates, who could get 49,999 votes and 49,997 votes respectively, with the former to be elected despite falling short of a quota.
Can someone explain what would happen under the extremely unlikely scenario of an exhaustion of votes which occurred with only three seats filled and which left insufficient votes remaining to fill the two remaining quotas? Would the quota be re-calculated? If so, how?
The quota would not be re-calculated. Candidates from the bottom would be excluded until three candidates remained. The top two candidates remaining would be elected.
I understand that under Meek used in local government in NZ there is a floating quota, but this is mathematical madness. This counting method requires a sophisticated computer program, and to do an audit by hand would take months if not years. There has to be a compromise between practicality and mathematical perfection. Meek may be mathematically perfect and pure (I do not believe it is) but I don’t believe it is a practical system. How NZ ever fell for it I do not know.
Thanks, Lyle.
Floating quota (progressively recalculated downwards as votes exhausted) has also been used by the National Union of Students; I scrutineered several Tasmania University Union elections in which this system was employed for the NUS counts. Indeed the NUS not only used floating quota but also retained votes to very small fractions (I forget how many decimal places it was, but several) and threw the whole of a candidate’s votes rather than just the last parcel to determine their surplus.
The system as applied to student elections was absurd, since a single ticket order meant that donkey voting and other ballot order effects (most notably partial donkey voting and also what I call “proximity voting”) introduced massive impurities in the measurement of genuine voter intention that made retaining several decimal places and recalculating quotas totally pointless. Prior to ATV the whole process would be extremely longwinded, and even with ATV it was slow.
(As for this “proximity voting” (if anyone knows a technical term for it please let me know) – I have noticed that where a voter is directing preferences between “independent” candidates presented in a single long vertical list, they are significantly more likely to direct their next preference after a given candidate to another candidate near that candidate on the list than to one further away. This effect is stronger in a downwards direction than an upwards one, but also works upwards as well. I have analysed a lot of data on this from the 1994 and 1996 Tasmanian council election reports.)
A floating quota makes plenty of sense to me.
(Going forward that is. I wouldn’t advocate a retrospective adjustment to the quota applied to the candidates already elected.)
At all times the quota would be equal to the number of remaining votes divided by the number of seats to be filled plus one (rounded up).
So in Chris’s example, the quota could be lowered to 50,000 after the election of the first candidate. (Since 249,999 votes would remain to elect 4 candidates.) That’s assuming no exhaustion. Where a variable quota really would come into play is when there is a fair bit of exhaustion.
I don’t see much madness about that.
Ah yes, NUS elections as a model for democratic practice, just what we need.
The best way to handle OPV is to have a reiterative count every time you exclude a candidate you start counting again miunus teh candidates that have been excluded/ |Any exasutiove votes are accounted fvopr an do not form part of the revised quota. Any revised system MUST be based on the value of teh vote and not the number of ballot papers. You could also have a single tranbsaction per candidate. KISS Keeping it Safe and Simple.
See my updated spreedsheets/ Question is will the VEC pub liosh the below the line preference data or do we have to FOI it. Relioying on FOPI would be an abuse of the system. One way or the other it will be published along with polling booth data. Sadly we are being kept in the dark durionmg this count whioch is an indictement againts the VEC who continue to undermine public confidence in the system/ Already evidence is exisits that they have double counted votes in Western Metro and acessed the e-voting system prior tpo teh close of the polls on Staturday Nov 25.
The link to my spreedsheets is http://melbcity.topcites.com
Chris
You mentioned Kevin Harrold yesterday as the last DLP MP in NSW who held the posh North Shore seat of Gordon from 1973 until 1976.
Harrold’s win was, believe it or not, caused by the failure of the sitting member, Askin government Health Minister Arnold Jago, to renominate for his seat. Jago thought that nominations closed on a Friday when in fact they closed on a Thursday. The only candidates were from the ALP and the DLP, and the Liberal Party then advocated a vote for the DLP candidate.
I think a later DLP MLC in Victoria Paul Jones was elected to the seat of Indi in Victoria in the federal parliament in 1928 for the same reason. There were two candidates, and the Country Party sitting member Robert Cook failed to nominate on time. This had consequences for the ALP in 1929 when the Bruce Page government was defeated on a no confidence motion by one vote. The ALP in 1929 won the subsequent general election, but faced a hostile Senate and the world economic depression.
These errors, of failure to nominate by individual candidates, can no longer be made by registered political party candidates, as the nominations are now made by their parties and not by the individual candidate.
Candidates can still, however, do stupid things. Robert Dean in Victoria in 2002 is such a case. Dean had been removed from the electoral roll because he was enrolled at an address in his electorate he owned but did not live at, and letters to him from the electoral commission were returned not known at this address. MPs and prospective candidates should always check that their names are on the roll, but not only did Dean not do this. A federal Liberal MPs office told Dean’s office on at least two occasions he was not on the roll and he should rectify this quick smart. Either the message was not passed on to Dean (in other words he employed less than capable staff) or he ignored the message, to the peril of the Liberal Party in Victoria. Dean’s office refused to employ a friend of mine, a good Liberal, in preference to a younger model who was also an applicant. It was the greatest mistake he ever made, for the same thing (not being on the roll) had happened to the unsuccessful applicant’s daughter, and she knew all about the consequences of not being on the electoral roll.
If Peter Kavanagh wins in Western Victoria region in the upper house he can thank Robert Dean. The Liberal Party campaign in 2002 collapsed after the Dean error, and Labor won a majority in both houses, and reformed the upper house to provide for proportional representation. Unfortunately the major beneficiary of the reform were the faction bosses, who ensured their candidates were imposed on the party rank and file in the various regions by the ALP national executive.
I think the floating quota is madness and unnecesarry. To cite the NUS as a paragon of good electoral practice is also flawed. Anything that leads to long counts (and I mean dozens of hours in the student context) is unnecessary, is unlikely to change the result, and only leads to advocates wanting a change to a first past the post system, which is a very much inferior way of electing multiple candidates.
In a student context it could lead to, say, the ultra left who normally do best at student elections, winning all positions. In the Senate under majority voting one party occasionally held almost all the seats, under both first past the post before 1919 and majority preferential until 1949.
Lyle,
You are certainly right about Kevin Harrold, and I think you are right about Paul Jones as I remember Tim Hayes, the grandson of Tom Hayes, referring to him as the “accidental member for Indiâ€.
The voters of Victoria can vote below the line if they want to override the faction chiefs, just as the rank and file members of the ALP can vote for non-faction delegates if they wish. That neither groups does so is simply a fact of life.
Melb City,
You state, “Any exasutiove votes are accounted fvopr an do not form part of the revised quota…the…tranbsaction…pub liosh…Relioying on FOPI… durionmg…whioch is an indictement againts…Already evidence is exisits…acessed… tpo teh close of the polls on Staturdayâ€
Anyone can make a typing eror – see – but I would appreciate it if you would do some proof-reading so I don’t have to scratch my head when I read your posts. You obviously know a lot about electoral systems, but I would like to understand what you are writing.
ALP internal rules use what is virtually the PR Society Model Rules with a couple of modifications. One is that votes are counted in thousandths. This is a good idea, and makes the count more exact. Remember that the quota for the POSC is about four (perhaps a bit more now with the increase in the size of Conference) and the other is the treatment of exhausted votes. Under the PR Society model rules the surplus was calculated by dividing the suplus votes by the number of transferable ballot papers. This was changed to be dividing the surplus votes by the number of ballot papers from the candidate whose votes achieved the surplus. This makes litlle difference in practice.
A claim was made by John Lenders that the change was made because in a Young Labor ballot a surplus was achieved by seven ballot papers, only one of which was transferable, and this one ballot paper went out at a value of seven votes. This is in my view wrong. I don’t believe any ballot paper should have a value more than unity. To get over the Young Labor madness the rules were changed to provide that the transfer fraction would be affected by the exhausted votes.
Don’t worry if this is confusing. In the end it would almost never affect the result, although it might have in one mad Young Labor election. Probably the same people who brought about NUS madness with the floating quota, which also probably doesn’t affect the result 99 times out of 100 or 499 times out of 500.
Chris Curtis, I have a historical question for you: Can you confirm whether the N. Randazzo who was the DLP candidate for Fitzroy at the 1964 election is the same Nino Randazzo who was recently elected to the Italian Senate as a representative of Australian Italians, who is a supporter of the Italian left-wing government? He would have been 27 in 1964.
Kevin Bonham Says: – I have noticed that where a voter is directing preferences between “independent†candidates presented in a single long vertical list, they are significantly more likely to direct their next preference after a given candidate to another candidate near that candidate on the list than to one further away. This effect is stronger in a downwards direction, but also works upwards as well.
And sideways too, as I think Antony Green pointed out.
Lyle Allan Said: I understand that under Meek used in local government in NZ there is a floating quota, but this is mathematical madness. This counting method requires a sophisticated computer program.
The guts of this program have been published…. I found it only yesterday while scrounging for background info. on this debate.
My understanding is that they press a button for WVIC on Tuesday. My informant wasn’t sure whther this was the real McCoy or some kind of dry run to test the system. I wouldn’t have thought all the data would have been entered by then. Until a quota is struck, a dry run would be merely a test of the system. It must be pretty hard to resist “giving it a whirl to see what happens”, though.
In the Assembly seat of Melbourne, several booths have returned 100% TPPs for The Greens. These were from the Vision Centres. I guess you would say such a one-way vote came from one-eyed supporters.
In general, the TPP for Greens wasn’t very much higher in the non booth vote in Melb, Rich, Brunsw and N’cote than it was in the booth vote. I think they expected better, especially from the “Early”s a.k.a “the bushwalker vote.”
Adam,
Senator Nino Randazzo is the same man who stood as a DLP candidate for, I believe, Fitzroy. DLP types are everywhere. I, of course, see nothing unusual about someone with a DLP background supporting a left-wing government, though it should be noted that the Italian Government, being a coalition of diverse parties, is only left-wing in comparison with its right-wing alternative.
Thanks. Of course that is so, but it is nevertheless interesting. To have been in the DLP Randazzo must have been a firm opponent of the PCI, yet he is now providing a crucial vote in the Italian Senate for a government in which the PCI (now called the DS) is the largest component. It is of course a much reformed party, and the government is led by Prodi, an ex-Christian Democrat. I will note this in Randazzo’s Wikipedia entry. You might like to look at the DLP entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Labor_Party) and advise me of its deficiencies.
Adam,
Thank you for the invitation on the Wikipeida article on the DLP. I amended its articles on the DLP and Frank McManus early this year. From memory, I fixed up the closing down date and included the promise by Billy Snedden that there would be a joint ticket with the DLP for the 1974 Senate election. I have some other changes in mind, but I have left them until I have some more time.
I think it would be great to have the DLP in the LC, hopefully sharing the BoP with the Greens. It will effectively bring out from the Labor caucus and into the parliament for debate the idealogical differences between the Labor factions. The Greens effectively the Labor left, and the DLP the Labor right.
Ironically, the party that could prevent this from happening would be Family First who are probably most closely aligned to the DLP, representing the Protestant and Catholic Christian vote respectively. Probably the tightest exclusion point is with Family First in WVIC. FFP will be hoping there vote edges to the 4% to get funding for their campaign, but this would probably cause the exclusion of the DLP, and open the possibility for the election of the Greens.
I wonder how they are praying.. the cash or their soul?
Did you here about the Victorian DLP MLC (ex. Catholic priest) and the FFP Senator (ex. AOG Pastor) who unexpectedly died and went to heaven.
Now Peter was so surprised to see them, as he had worked so hard on the Victorians in their respective campaigns to get them miraculously elected. He said:
“I’m sorry guys, because I wasn’t expecting this, I haven’t had time to prepare the rooms that are becoming of your status. I do know that Lucifer had prepared rooms as he normally does for all corrupted politicians. But it would appear that you have not been there long enough to be so tainted.â€
“But this is what I’ll do. If you don’t mind I’ll send you both down there as a temporary measure, until I have prepared your room.â€
Begrudgingly, they both accepted. They were politically astute enough to realise that compromise is sometimes necessary.
Now they had not been there two weeks when Lucifer sent an urgent SOS direct to God. He said:
“It’s unfair for you to send me these two politicians, they are really men of the cloth in disguise. This DLP guy is forgiving everyone here of their sins. And as for this FFP guy!! God, did you train him well. He’s already raised enough money to air condition hell.â€
SMET is has its own ironical twists. As the scutineers have been reporting, there are a significant number of Green votes exhausting, as will many of the votes for minor parties. If sufficient exhaust, this may work against the commensuate election of the Labor candidate on the Green surplus. I wonder how many of those Green voters would have extended their preference beyond the minimum five that were required for a formal vote if they had understood that failure to do so could elect a Liberal candidate over a Labor one. OPV only truly reflects the electorate desire if people are educated to understand that they need to extend all their preferences beyond the minimum requirement for formality. I wonder what Green-by- name and Green-by-nature has to say about that scenario.
To put an ironical twist on an ironical twist, if the ALP miss out in WVIC also, then the ALP would be resticted to 19 seats and the Greens would hold the BoP. If the ALP win in SMET but not WVIC, the Greens will most likely share the BoP with the DLP. If ALP win both they control the parliament.
Ho ho ho. I must say that if I were either a Catholic or a Protestant, I would be most offended at the suggestion that the DLP or Family First represented my views. Both parties, let us recall, got less than 5%. The great majority of Victorian Catholics vote Labor, while I imagine (I’m less certain about this) that a majority of practising Protestants vote for the Coalition.
Chris: Yes Snedden double-crossed you shamelessly, didn’t he. I imagine he’s in the far corner of hell now, right next to the toasting fork. We in Melbourne Ports had great fun seeing off his charming daughter in 1998.
What the DLP article really needs is some details about the modern DLP – their organisation and policies, and why so many of them are called Mulholland.
Ray, any Green voter would be glad to know that their exhausted votes have assisted to elect a Liberal, even Southwick, over Thornley, and have given the Greens the BoP. If Green voters had chrystal balls I am sure a lot more would have done so.
I as using a Turkish keyboard and limited time. The text looked ok on my screen but the charector transalation is not the same. Sorry
I think the meeks system is an overkill but a re-iterative counting system which is rest and reposcessed at each exclusion is not out of the question particlulary if and when you adopt a value based counting system and a single transaction (suplus opr exclusion) per candidate.
The PR society rules are not wrth looking at. They were designed at a time when manual counting was the obly viable option. I would not advocate them as a guide to proportional representation counts anymore.
The sooner the PR society revises its rules the better
Anthony
Life Member Proportional Representation Society of Australia.
I must ask Bob Brown next time I see him whether he has crystal balls.
The VEC is its never ending quest to prove it is the interior of the two public electoral commissions still reports that not all booths have been counted in the upper house yet the Lower house all polling places have been accounted.
http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/state2006resultbyelectorateUH.html
Certainly one of the worst managed counts in recent history.
Lack of information, openness and transparency undermine public confidence and brings the State Electoral Commission into disrepute.
I will update my reports later today… http://melbcity.topcies.com
If I was in Istanbul I’d have better things to do than fulminate about the VEC. Go and have some kebabs.
Melb City – the comments on the VEC’s conduct of the elections seem slightly obsessive to me, which is fine, but is it really a worthwhile thing to be so concerned about?
‘The VEC…the interior of the two public electoral commissions’? Sounds like the TARDIS.
Adam,
I can’t help you with the current DLP. Maybe Tom the Grouper can.
Perhaps MelbCity can start a new thread called “Talking Turkey about the VEC.”
Incidentally, in Turkish elections parties have to poll 10% of the national vote before they can get into Parliament at all, regardless of how high their vote is in a particular province. This is of course designed to keep the Kurds out.
Similarly the use of a threshold by Greece prevents the election of Greek Moslems (that is, ethnic Turks) to the Greek parliament. A couple of Greek Moslems were elected, I think, before the law was changed.
Senator Helen Coonan has advocated a threshold for the Australian Senate. She has not been successful. The Howard government would not have a backstop in Senator Fielding if a threshold were in place, and for that reason Senator Coonan’s proposals are unlikely to be implemented.
Some members of the ALP advocated such a threshold to prevent the election of DLP Senators. Arthur Calwell advocated first past the post because of DLP preferences. Now preferential voting favours the ALP. In Western Australia it was a conservative government led by Charles Court that reintroduced first past the post voting in local government in that state in I think 1996. The conservative local government association in that state are running a scare campaign now that Labor is thinking of introducing PR in local government elections. Amazing how the same poliltical parties can advocate different voting systems at different times.
The similarity between Saddam Hussein and Little Miss Muffet was that the both had Kurds in their way.
I was actually going to say that the purpose of the 10% threshold in Turkey was to keep the curds a-whey, but then I thought ‘no-one will approve such a childish comment at a serious website.’
All of this makes we wonder what’s SO bad about the UK electoral system….you put all the votes in a big pile, and the person with the most wins…seems reassuringly quick and simple, non?
The use of electronic counting systems, reliant on accurate data entry, that cannot be properly scrutinised, seems to have entered into existence without proper debate. I believe that all will agree that the integrity of the ballot is the most important consideration in electoral matters. The manual system has proved itself to be foolproof in delivering transparent integrity for a century. Whilst electronic counting would seem to be a natural progression, I doubt it has significant cost savings (a system that cost lots to develop and do the data-entry). I therefore question its introduction. The extra step of entering data will have errors (the rate can be minimised, but not eliminated). I therefore ask the question, what advantage is there? It provides less transparency and more potential of errors. This needs to be more seriously debated.
Most of the time the UK system works reasonably well – but you can say that about any electoral system. It does produce strange results sometimes. There was a Scottish constituency (I forget which one and when) contested by Tory, Labor, Liberal and SNP, and they all polled almost exactly 25% of the vote. In theory you could have ten candidates polling 10% each, or 20 candidates polling 5% each, which means it’s just a lottery. This actually happens in PNG, where you get results like this:
KUNDIAWA OPEN
=======================================
Candidate Party Votes %
——————————————————————-
Joe Kuatowa 4,974 05.0
Peter Kuman 7,280 07.3
Mathew Numabo SIUNE PDM 8,118 08.2
Peter G Waieng * 5,747 05.8
51 others 73,365 73.7
——————————————————————-
Total 99,484
——————————————————————-
Siune is elected with 8.2%, so 91.8% voted against him. This is one of the reasons PNG politicians are so corrupt, because they are elected by accident and have almost no chance of re-election.
Londoner – it certainly is quick and simple. To me, it’s all about what the purpose of the electoral system is. If your goal is to have quick and simple results, and you like single member electorates, then great, first post the past is a good system. The drawbacks are that people can be elected although most people don’t support them, and majorities in parliament can be elected without majority support. If this isn’t a problem, well that’s ok.
If you want a parliamentary majority to reflect a “majority of voter’s opinions” across the entire country, well you need to do something different. Certainly preferential voting in single member electorates more often than not in the Australian context leads to majorities in parliament reflecting majorities of the 2PP vote. Preferential voting in single member electorates is pretty simple too. It’s PR systems that are complicated to count.
Lyle Allan says: In Western Australia it was a conservative government led by Charles Court that reintroduced first past the post voting in local government in that state in I think 1996.
Actually, it was Sir Charles Court’s son, Richard Court, and as far as I am aware the changes to the LG electoral system were contained in the Local Government Act 1995. The Local Government Advisory Board in WA (with a majority of sitting Councillors on it) recently decided to continue support for this system. A poor decision, with faulty reasoning IMO. The full report is available at:
http://www.dlgrd.wa.gov.au/LocalGovt/Docs/LGStructuralAndElectoralReformInWA.pdf
Single member electorates are only democraticly elect governments most of the time by chance and often lead to distorted majorities.
Single member preferential voting if introduced in the UK (there is some talk of this happening) could lead to a Liberal Democrat majority government espetialy if they had how to vote cards.
Actually one of the strengths of the UK system is that the party with a plurality of votes usually wins a healthy majority of seats. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. One of the problems with PR is its fetish with “abstract representationism” – the belief that if a party polls 2.67% of the vote it must get 2.67% of the seats. This leads to the situation in the Netherlands or Israel which have chronic weak and unstable government, and gives much too much power to minorities. There are in fact two criteria to judge any electoral system by: that it produces a reasonable reflection of the opinions of the people, AND that it produces a stable government. Some compromise of the first is often necessary to achieve the second. Electoral systems should discourage the proliferation of minor parties and reward the formation of broad-based national parties or coalitions.
Antony… Did Bob Brown consult you before he named his party.
At least he is not so egocentric to name it The Browns.
I am arguing that we should introduce Hare-Clarke which has multi-meber electorates so that elections are proportional to the vote to a large degree but not letting in micro parties. Look at Tasmania.
In the election for the Legislaive Assembly in Victoria this year the Nats got 5-6% of the vote getting them just over 10% of the seats while the Greens got 9-10% of the vote getting them no seats.
At the election in the UK last year Labour got 35-36% of the vote and a majority of the seats in the House of Commons. Democratic? Not really.
Well there’s two different questions there. I agree that the current system discriminates against minor parties which do not have a geographical base, like the Greens, and in favour of ones that do, like the Nats. On the other hand I think the result in the UK was perfectly democratic. The party with the most votes won, and minor parties (some very minor) got a voice, thus meeting the two criteria I mentioned above. I am opposed to any form of PR for lower houses, but I think the best compromise is the German MMP system, with a 5% threshhold. The Germans learned a very bitter lesson about pure PR in 1918-33 and I’m amazed that anyone still advocates it.
My preferred model is:
Lower House – Single member electorates elected using CPV.
Upper House – PR
It’s a good balance between Stability (LH) and Democracy (UH).
Good governance requires the occasional tough, unpopular decision.
These decisions should be blocked/vetoed at the upper house level, rather than the lower house where the entire government is destabilised as a coalition partner pulls out or passes a no-confidence motion in order to block legislation.
The problem with PR in Victoria is the quota is too high. 16.6% is unreasonable. The parties should be represented in the upperhouse according to their percentage of the vote.
There’s no reason for upper house regions in Victoria – they should ditch them, and maybe ditch Hare-Clark as well since Group Ticketing receives so many complaints. Just give a party a seat for each 2.5% it gets (rounded to the nearest whole number) – there’s your 40 seats. No harvesting, and a representative result.
I agree. I argued all along for the NSW / SA system – statewide party-list PR with a 5% threshold. That would have produced the following upper house result
ALP 19
Lib 15
Green 4
Nat 2
(I have allowed the Nats to sneak up from 4.8 to 5.0, as I think they would in a statewide vote).
Quick question: when calculating the 4% cutoff for funding for the upper house, is it the group total, or ticket votes + candidate 1 BTLs ? ie candidate 2,3 BTLs don’t count.
Thanks Stewart Jackson for pointing out my two errors. I must have had a mental block when I typed Charles rather than Richard Court, and also I was one year out.
I think WA local government wants fpp because the larger number of WA lg elections are unopposed. It wouldn’t matter whether it was fpp or alternative vote (preferential) the situation would still be the same. In Victoria until the Kennett government reforms making Councils bigger the majority of councillors were elected unopposed.
A stated reason in WA is it is cheaper to count the votes. Nine cents rather than eleven cents per ballot paper. What a load of hot air.
PR in lg would mean most lg elections would be contested. That would be better for local democracy. It would also mean a diversity of councillors. I understand the ALP doesn’t contest lg elections in WA and that is the case most places in Australia. Major parties don’t contest lg elections because councillors are rarely seen as people of great intellect, and when councillors play up the party gets a bad name.
Some councils in Victoria elected by single member wards consist of all members of one or other political party. In Darebin there are 9 ALP members out of 9. In Mornington Peninsula the same position exists, but it is Liberal Party interests who just about “own” that Council. On the Gold Coast the election there was won by property interests, who elected almost all the Councillors. There is a need for pr to try to keep lg honest.
Glen Eira Council in Melbourne has three multi-member wards and it has improved the standard of the council – the last one under the old system was sacked by the Minister after two Liberal councillors came to blows in the chamber over some murky property dispute.
I agree totally Adam.
PR also reduces dummy candidates, although these can never be eliminated. The WA lg report advocates fpp as a means of reducing dummy candidates. It won’t.
Under a fpp system the object of a dummy candidate is to split the vote. If you were running in, say Reservoir in northern Melbourne where the ALP normally wins and gets about fifty five per cent and you are an independent you would run a candidate who claims to be Labor, and this may seduce enough voters and your candidate might get in with about forty per cent, which an independent might normally expect to score. With preferential the object of a dummy is to funnel preferences to a preferred candidate. With fpp the object is to draw votes away from a candidate who might otherwise win. Bill Clinton probably owes his election to a conservative Ross Perot who drew votes away from Bush and caused a Clinton victory on a minority vote. Similarly Nader drew votes away from Gore, and certainly was as much a factor in Gore’s loss as the shonky chads in Florida.
The recent state election saw few obvious dummy candidates, but they were not needed. Family First was effectively a dummy party for the Liberals, and the Greens in most seats served the same purpose for the ALP. Crikey exposed one candidate in Oakleigh in 2002 who had run as an ALP dummy for the Monash Council in 1997 and as a Liberal dummy for the seat of Oakleigh in 2002.
The WA lg report is the work of political amateurs.
The VEC will soon be commencing representation reviews in local government. One problem they have is their policy that Councils have an odd number of Councillors. This is sensible, but it’s hard to have proper PR if a Council has 7 or 11 members.
Ideally all multi member wards should return the same number of Councillors, and these should be an odd number. In Wyndham, Glen Eira and Stonnington this is 9, and there are three three Councillor wards. This is sensible and works well.
In Hume there is a combination of two Councilor and three Councillor wards. This has produced some bizarre results, for example in Sunbury where a majority of votes results in half of the Councillors elected and not a majority of Councillors elected. In Cardinia there is a four Councillor ward, and three single Councillor wards, and this theoretically could mean a group with about 36 per cent of the votes throughout the Shire could control the Council.
A big problem is the Kennett legislation, and Dick Wynne will hopefully change this. The maximum number of Councillors is now 12, but if this were changed to 15 Councils like Greater Geelong, Greater Ballarat, Greater Bendigo, Greater Dandenong, Darebin, Mornington Peninsula and Boroondara, the bigger Councils, could be elected from five three Councillor wards.
Single Councillor wards, as well as multi Councillor wards elected by the former majority preferential system, are bad for local government because they do not enable sufficient diversity of Councillors. We have only to look at the former Glen Eira Council, where Liberal Councillors elected by the majority preferential system using multiple dummy candidates were unable to work together for the benefit of the people of Glen Eira. As Adam correctly points out PR has been a very desirable reform for that Council.
The introduction of pr in local government is opposed by faction bosses in the ALP, who want to win all seats in the Labor heartland. Nicola Roxon, for example, opposed pr in Maribyrnong. In Mornington Peninsula Liberal luminaries like Malcolm Fraser, Alan Hunt and Robin Cooper all opposed pr. Most Councils with pr, whatever their politics, are generally in favour of it.
I find myself in the position of supporting PR in local councils but opposing it in state and federal legislatures, for lower houses anyway. Somebody explain my logic to me.
What logic?
All level of government should be representative and democratic.
Just to clarify (from a discussion way up the page) I wasn’t using the fact that NUS used a floating quota to argue in favour of the practice. Indeed in my experience, not confined to electoral system design, if the NUS does something a particular way then that’s at least half a good reason to do it a totally different way, or perhaps even not to do it at all.
I don’t have a strong view for or against floating quota but I assume the argument in favour of it is that once someone is mathematically assured of being elected they should be treated as such immediately, rather than having their unnecessary further presence in the count interfere with the natural outcome between the remaining candidates. It needs to be handled with caution, given that, for instance, in some versions of Hare-Clark there is the possibility of a very small “gain due to fractions” at certain counts.
Browns no Antony(mn for) Green.
It’s rather like the situation in the 1950s when the leading segregationist on the US Supreme Court was Hugo Black, while the leader of the black civil rights organisation the NAACP was Walter White.
VEC electoral funding is given to a party – as reimbursement of proven election expenditure and not as an unconditional gift as the Herald Sun falsely suggested last week – if the total primary votes won by its endorsed candidates exceed 4% of the total vote in that house. So there is no distinction beween ALT and BTL votes.
Although the thread seems to have gone off tangentily, can someone clarify something for me on the CPV/OPV question.
I’m afraid I’m not clear enough on the maths of it, but my understanding is that if you have OPV but with a requirement to preference at least as many candidates as there are spots, you’ll ensure that all positions are filled by a quota. Is that true?
I gather that’s why the Victorian election required me to vote BTL for AT LEAST 5 candidates. I am working on the assumption that is why the five figure was selected, rather than some arbitrary number.
If this is true, then that to me seems the ideal compromise. In general I’m a supporter of compulsory attendance and optional preferential. But with multi-member it would seem we are each effectively voting for all of the available positions, so it would not be unreasonable to ask an elector to form an opinion on at least that many candidates.
From http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/parties.html – “for each first-preference vote received where a candidate obtains at least 4% of the first-preference votes. ” This indicates to me that BTLs where people start at the fifth candidate and reverse number etc don’t get counted because their number one candidate doesn’t pass the 4% threshold.
The Glen Eira Council was not sacked because of Grossbard and Erlich having a brawl within the chambers and it certain wasn’t about property issues. Nor is Erlich a Liberal.
The Council was sacked in accordance to the Whelan Report for dysfuntional management with the infighting between all councillors over the past 8 or so years. Plus they were sacked for misuse of their expenses such as their mobile bill.
One councillor, Peter Goudge misused his mobile and use it during his 2002 Oakleigh Election Campaign as the Liberal candidate.
The Council was not Liberal dominated: 4 out of the 9 were members of the Liberal Party (Grossbard, Marwick, Hyams and Goudge), one was ALP (Sapir) and the rest were independents (Martens, Erlich, Esakoff and Bury [NB Bury is a former Liberal Party member, but was independent at the time of the sacking]).
3 of the 9 councillors were fresh blood to Glen Eira (Hyams, Bury and Esakoff). The Whelan Report revealed that these 3 did not contribute a lot to the sacking of the Glen Eira (except for one time when it was the mayoralty vote between Bury and Hyams).
But overall, the Bracks Government Local Democratic Reform Act has improved the Local Government Act and Local Governance for the long haul. PR is the best thing to have happened since bread and butter. It’s democratic and brings in a great amount of good governance to any city council. Glen Eira currently has one Liberal (Feldman), one ALP (Staikos) and the rest are independents and all councillors in that council are doing a great job and so far no infighting at all since most of the ex-councillors are no longer on the Glen Eira Council
The Electoral Act says at s.211:
(3) A payment under this section must not be made in
respect of votes given in an election for a
candidate unless the total number of first
preference votes given for the candidate is at least
4% of the total number of first preference votes
given in the election.
So it seems to require 4% vote for each candidate.
On the contrary, for the return of deposits at Council elections it says:
(f) was not declared elected but was a member
of a group of candidates at a Council election
and the combined first preference votes
received by all the candidates in the group
was at least 4% of the total number of first
preference votes in the election.
It seems there is nothing in the Act to give funding or reimbursement of deposits to group tickets in State elections. Which means a party really needs to recommend BTL voters to give a primary to their lead candidate before exercising an opinion.
From the Electoral Act202 s211:
“(2) The sum of $1.20 is payable for each first preference vote given for a
candidate in an election.
“(3) A payment under this section must not be made in respect of votes given in
an election for a candidate unless the total number of first preference votes
given for the candidate is at least 4% of the total number of
first preference votes given in the election.”
So there is a difference between ATL & BTL’s insofar as payment is not made on the whole ticket but only on the person getting more than 4% – ie; the no.1 on the ticket and the ATL votes combined, but not extending to any 1st preferences given to candidates further down the ticket. There doesn’t appear to be an extended definition of “first preference vote” in the Act so this would remain the reading of it (ie; it doesn’t say “for the purposes of entitlement under s211 all votes in a registered party’s ticket shall be deemed to be first preference votes.” or similar). Unless of course I’ve missed it somewhere (I can’t find it in the Regulations either).
I found this recently:
“An odd feature in an STV election”. I. D. Hill
A few years ago, there were 23 candidates in an election
for 15 seats, and there were 539 votes. The candidates’
names have here been coded as A, B, C, etc.
One voter gave preferences, in order, as: M D L R I
J C T B E H A O U F etc. Using Newland and Britton
(second edition) rules [1], the last candidate elected was
F and the runner-up was V. Amazingly, if that one voter
had put V instead of F as 15th preference, V would have
been elected and F runner-up. In other words, the election
result depended upon that one voter’s 15th preference.
Any chance of a repeat?
On the matter of fixed versus floating quota: One of my jobs is as a returning officer for student elections. Most of the elections we run use the floating quota method. However, we have on a couple of occassions run elections for universities that use fixed quota. However, for their NUS ballot they have to use the floating quota under NUS rules.
The idea that floating quota takes longer to count is simply wrong. For two years in a row we started the count at one campus for student council (fixed quota) and NUS (floating quota) at the same time, with two teams of roughly equal experience working on each. Both counts had similar numbers of candidates and places to elect.
Each time I was on the NUS team and we finished up to an hour before the fixed quota team. Whatever the arguements for the merits of the two systems, speed is not one.
Annother thing that would help improve the democraticness of councils is decreasing the say of non-residential votes in elections (I understand that the levels of non-residens vary between councils).
A Melbourne wide council might be a good idea.
There are no non-residential voters in Qld local elections.
Update from South Metro if anyone is interested:
* Preferences will be distributed tomorrow night at 5pm.
* Scrutineer reports suggest that Thornley will beat Southwick by about 1,000 votes.
* But it ain’t over til it’s over.
Sean & Stewart : I came to the same conclusion regards funding.
My funding calculations are here:
http://www.upperhouse.info/ArchiveView.aspx?EntryHeadId=80
It is possible the former Acts Interpretation Act (or Interpretation of Laws Act) might be used by the VEC to justify paying money on the basis of groups rather than individual candidates. The singular also means the plural unless the Act obviously refers to the singular. I’m not an expert on the interpretation of laws, and my argument could be wrong, but it may need to be tested in court.
Greetings all,
If you are here, clearly you have a strong interest in politics. In which case, I present to you Terra Politicus (www.mockparliament.com)
This is an online simulation of the Australian Parliament with mock parties and MPs who develop policy and run for office, with government, opposition, crossbenches and debate occuring through the media and the Parliament. I strongly encourage you to visit the website and take a look.
http://www.mockparliament.com
Peter,
With OPV applied to PR of a multi member region of five candidates, if two of your nominated five candidates are eliminated early in the count, then your vote has only contributed to the election of three candidates before it exhausts. Your vote will have no say in the election of the other two.
If you prefer to vote for minor candidates and don’t understand the implications of not extending your preferences beyond the minimum required for formality, there is a good chance that the majority (if not all) of your vote will be wasted.
Fortunately in this election OPV only applies to BTL votes so the impact of this is minimised. But in the close contests that we see here an “inderminate” result could not only determine who gets elected in each of two reqions but also who holds the BoP.
The proposal put forward by Antony will inevitably see large numbers of votes exhaust, exasserbating the problem for a large number of voters who vote ATL.
The problem people are trying to overcome is the nasty consequences of GVTs. OPV is only the answer if everyone is educated to understand that they need to complete the ballot paper to order all their real preferences, rather than the minimum required to lodge a formal vote.
Not ‘inevitably’. If a party is limited in the number of parties it can distribute preferences to, it will direct those preferences to parties that (a) are more likely to be in the final cut up of preferences and (b) the party is more likely to find itself in reasonable ideological agreement with. That’s why your attempt to simulate OPV ticket voting by simply looking at the current tickets misses the point. If the rules were different the tickets would be different.
Under the current system, parties are always tempted to put small parties unlikely to be elected ahead of parties they would prefer to see elected. And that gambling on preferences by major parties is how Family First and potentially the DLP get elected, by strange chains of preference harvesting followed by picking up the preferences of all the major parties whose guestimate of the minor party vote has turned out to be wrong and a potential flow of preferences has reversed.
Elections shouldn’t be about such gambles. If you limited the number of parties that preferences could be directed to, would a major party waste one of its limited number of preferences on a minor party in this way if it meant it lost the ability ot elect a like minded party. Would the Labor Party gamble away its preferences on a couple of minor players if at the end of its group preference ticket it found itself denied the opportunity of choosing between the Greens and the Liberals.
There is concern at preference harvesting being used by minor parties to get elected from tiny proportions of the vote. Apart from my proposal which makes life tough for the parties, the other possible solutions put forward are:
(A) Abolish GTV with full preferences below the line, just not on.
(B) Abolish GTV with full preferences above the line, increase in informal voting unkown
(E) Abolish GTV with optional preferential voting, but currently everyone just gags at the thought of Optional Preferential Voting so it won’t happen
(D) Introduce a threshold quota and retain GTV, which would actually make major parties put even more minor parties high on their ticket
(E) Huge increase in deposits or large deposits for tickets votes to cut the number of parties, as per the $10,000 introduced in NSW, along with a significant fee to maintain a registered party.
The NSW system has just simply done away with ticket voting and produced a fairer system than the old ticket system, as the only parties that can now be elected are those that attract votes. Getting elected on a preference deal is now impossible in NSW, but it does elect 21 MLCs so the quota is much lower and the proportionality can be maintained. With only six to be elected at a Senate election, the NSW system might require some tweaking to overcome too many votes exhausting.
The players who are terrified of optional preferential voting are the major parties. The Coalition is terrified of a One Nation style party exhausting preferences rather than choose between Labor and Coalition. The Labor Party is terrified of the Greens doing the same thing.
Anthony’s latter point is correct. OPV is always bad for Labor, because it gives the Greens the power to blackmail us by threatening to withhold their preferences unless we promise to abolish electricity or whatever. This doesn’t seem to matter much at state level, but it would be absolutely fatal at federal level, where elections are fought on a higher ideological level. Whatever genius thought of allowing OPV in Victoria ought to be sentenced to lentils for life.
The major parties might consider abolishing GTV with full preferences ATL – it gets rid of not very popular candidates getting elected on strange preference deals unless people actually vote that way, doesn’t allow minor party votes to simply exhaust, and has the compulsory preferential system applying in the lower house. Maybe the most likely compromise.
Adam, a few Federal Liberals have noticed this, but the National Party are just terrified of OPV thanks to their Queensland experience. But if the Queensland Nationals keep issuing how-tovote cards at state election with no preferences, they only have themselves to blame if voters keep voting that way.
Another howler from Ray:
It is next to impossible for your vote to contribute to the election of all 5 candidates you preference. Your vote will always be counted for a single candidate only unless that candidate is over quota, in which case a portion of your vote will flow to your next preference. It is not the case that by selecting 5 candidates your vote registers support for all five of them.
If in SMET you had voted:
1 Pennucuik
2 Davis
3 Coote
4 Lenders
5 Mayne
then your vote would help to elect Pennicuik and would have no other impact because it would never leave the Pennicuik pile unless she exceeds quota, but by that time all the others have been eliminated or elected. Even if the voter had filled out the BTL completely, her vote would still count in the election of Pennicuik alone and have no input at all on the election of the other four members. Your criticism of OPV is misplaced.
The Queensland 2001 election is very instructive for OPV: from memory, Labor won Burdekin on about 36% of the primary vote as the remaining votes were split between Nats, City-country alliance (former One Nation), One Nation (from memory) and maybe an independent or two. A zillion votes exhausted. Labor in Qld benefits handsomely from OPV.
You nmeed to lok again at the way the Surplus is calulated.
They didn’t in 1995 though Sacha. And in the case of Burdekin, those three parties were just tearing at each others throats all through the campaign. Rule number one of optional preferential voting, it punishes political division.
I mean Labor didn’t benefit from OPV in 1995. Lost a couple of seats through exhausted Green preferences.
Adam I agree my analysis shows that Thornley will cross the line with a thousand votes ahead of Southwick. The number of exhausted will not erode that lead. An exaughsted vote is the same as a split ticket.
I am still of the view that a five provoice 9 or 7 member electorates would have been the best outcome. I would not support any artificial quota and fully support preferential voting. As previously stated a reiterative count would be desirable provided it has a value of the vote based surplus formula(Not one based on the number of ballot papers) and a single transaction per candidate. Having undertaken extensive research on this subject and having been instrumental in the formation of the UH reform policy I naturally have a keen interest in the outcome of this election. Years I agree there are problems with above the line voting. But that is not proportional Representation. I advocate the right to preference above the line. The fact is that many people do not know about the Green Party. If the DLP manage to stay out in front then so be it that its our preferential voting system. Much better then the alternative party list system or the two round voting option we see in many Eastern European and Latin American countries.
Do not throw the baby out with the bath water. And do not try to design a system that delivers a particular outcome. Keep the principles true and honest. A value based surplus is a MUST. Single transactions per candidate can then follow. All else is refinement. NO artificial quotas unless it excludes the Greens
I will update my count sheets for those interested. http://melbcity.topcities.com
MelbCity, I presume you are across the fact the WA government is modifying the surplus calculation to adopt the weighted inclusive gregory method, to weight the votes by the value they arrive at a candidate, not the system used for the Senate, VEC etc where a vote can increase in value.
As far as I understand, they will continue to used a FIFO system, where votes are distributed in individual bundles. But the important point is that no vote will ever be able to increase in value when distributed.
Once one state does this and gets the software written to carry it out, I suspect the rest will slowly fall into line.
Antony said: MelbCity, I presume you are across the fact the WA government is modifying the surplus calculation to adopt the weighted inclusive gregory method. As far as I understand, they will continue to used a FIFO system. Once one state does this and gets the software written to carry it out, I suspect the rest will slowly fall into line.
How often is FIFO used? I noticed only the other day that the Senate cuts up in order of TV, but Vic LC cuts up in order of TV (after primaries). I hadn’t noticed this before, my simulations used the Senate method. It only took the changing of a “>” to a “
What happened to the rest of my post? (”who moved my cheese”?)
Anyway, the point was that fifo or lifo for SMET produces the same result, but the difference could matter sometimes.
WA and SA are the only states to now retain FIFO, where each count covers a small bundle of votes corresponding to an original source of primary votes. Those two states, like the old Hare-Clark system, would enage in hundreds and even thousands of counts to fill all the vacancies. However, both states use the inclusive gregory method, not the ‘last bundle’ method, to determine surplus.
Tasmania has now followed the ACT method of accumulating votes by transfer value, and undertaking distributions in order of decreasing transfer value. NSW of course still uses random sampling and will continue to do so until someone finally puts up a referendum to remove this archaic method from the Constitution.
Yes – I should have been more clear – Labor’s benefited from OPV in Qld in the last few years.
NSW’s random sampling method shows the silliness of entrenching technical counting details in a constitution – I don’t know whether the SA requirement of producing “fair” boundaries is also entrenched, but it’s pretty silly if only because it’s impossible to draw up boundaries to produce the desired effect before people cast their votes.
Oh yes, South Australia held a referendum to entrench that clause. The reason I remember is a very important historical footnote, Premier Bannon held a press conference the next day to announce that the State Bank of SA was rapidly disappearing down a financial plug hole.
I remember reading about the referendum in a newspaper and thought that it sounded like quite a good thing, especially given what happened in the previous SA election. No doubt a lot of people also thought that it sounded like a good thing.
Re cut-up order: (My use of angled brackets for emphasis completely garbled the fist post above.)
The message was
Senate cut-up is in DECREASING TV order;
VICLC cut-up is in INCREASING TV order
But the results are the same in SMET, which, on the late afternoon figures today, show 1,200 surplus for ALP, using the various BTL flows reported here last week.
How long will the count take tomorrow night? In the NSW 1999 LC election (10 times bigger all round), we waited 11 hours as the numbers ticked away and 268 candidates were slowly cut-up (time taken is some form of power law function of N).
Adam,
abolish electricity. Don’t tell me your into the spreading lies about Greens too? we have enough of that from Labor and the Bretheren.
Dinesh, I’m sure I read that somewhere. Why else does Bob Brown have a wind-powered laptop?
Geoff, that’s not right. The surplus goes out from the highest to the lowest, as in the Senate.
One problem Labor has is that once the Democrat ticket elects the Green, the Green surplus won’t be distributed until the rest of the Democrat BTL votes are distributed. I don’t think these will be enough to elect the Liberal, but it is one of those peculiarities of the count that complicates analysis.
Hi. I have updated my count sheet to Include Monday December 11 data for Southern Metropolitan.
http://melbcity.topcities.com
With Over 90% of the enrolled vote counted and Evan Thornley with a notional 0.35% advantage I would be highly surprised if the result changed again. The level of the lead in Labors notional value should see it survive any unexpected downturn due to the number of exaughsted votes. I know many here have written pipe dreams but unless they can provide statistical data and numbers to back up any theories I suggest they do more work on their expected outcomes and publish the data to back up any theories.
It looks like there was an undocumented/unpublished correction in the data with David Southwick going backwards in actual numbers of votes and the Alp/Greens moving forward. Again no published information on the VEC web site to explain where in the count and reason behind any change.
VEC
Anyone who has any doubt about the efficiency and lack of public accountability, openness and transparency in the VEC’s conduct of the count should seriously open their eyes and think again.
There is much more that can and should be done to improve on the VEC’s public reporting of progress in the counting process. Polling booth data and information on the number of postal and absentee votes issued should have been readily available by now.
Surplus value calculation.
I was not aware of the changes in WA and will look into it. Do you have a copy of the formula they intend to use? or links to the relevant documents? The change required is simple really, each vote is given a value and it is the value of the vote that is proportioned out when calculating a candidates surplus. If you adopt a value based surplus formula you can get away with a single transfer- one transaction per candidate. A reiterative count would be desirable to accommodate optional preferential voting. If segmentation is required (I agurge it is not) then it must be a full FIFO segmentation.
Whilst this does not have a significant impact with above-the-line ticket voting in elections such as local government elections in Victoria where above-the-line voting does not exist the impact is considerable and can add hundreds of votes effecting the final results.
It is my intention to make a submission to the Parliament in the new year advocating further review of the electoral process and the VEC and its lack of accountability, lack openness and transparency. In view of the documented indication that the VEC had in fact accessed and counted e-voting data before the close of the poll is of serious concern and raises question of doubt of the suitability of electronic voting systems in tits current form and administration. MUICH more needs to be done to ensure open and transparency of the electronic voting before public trust can be given. With the accessibility of the Internet much more needs to be done to improve the VEC’s reporting and accountability.
Again with the lack of information provided by the VEC candidates, scrutineers and the public are left in the dark within the VEC changing data on the fly. I have been scrutinising public elections for over 30 years and This would have to be one of the worst managed election counts I have seen in r3ecent times. In the past it was an excuse of inability to keep people properly informed. With the Internet this excuse no longer exists. Further We have always been able to obtain statistical data on the number of votes issued prior to the count and in case of apostles prior to polling day. Why this information has not been forthcoming is unacceptable.
I don’t think I have enough time to begin to address the BS issues raised by Londoner who advocates going back to the days of fist past the post voting. One of the most undemocratic voting systems in the world (Next to the USA which uses the same system) even with its faults in the system and the VEC’s lack of accountability I am still of the view that the reforms put in Place for Victoria’s Upper House are worthwhile and a huge step in the right direction, there is never the less room for improvement. the original proposal of a five region nine members per electorate is still worthy of consideration.
Is it certain now that the DLP has won in West Vic? And is Barlow safe in West Metro?
MelbCity, you’ve got the wrong segmentation on your South Metro distribution. The rest of the Democrat preferences will be distributed before the Green surplus. Couldn’t resist saying that considering how much you’ve gone on about segmentation
Who would’ve thought there was so much bitchiness among psephologists?
Antony Green referred earlier to the use of random sampling in the distribution of surpluses. The actual ballot papers transferred as part of a surplus were once determined at random for the Senate, and as Antony pointed out this is still the case in NSW.
This reference reminded me of two memorable posters of the Melbourne evening newspaper, the Herald. One is not relevant here, but I’ll mention it anyway as it may amuse some readers. The second is very relevant. The first was in November 1956 at the opening of the Melbourne Olympic Games. The poster read GAY CROWD AT OPENING OF GAMES. The second was in late 1964, when the poster read SENATE COUNT IS A RANDOM FARCE. I won’t mention the first again, except to refer to an article about a decade ago in the Jevhovahs Witnesses publication Awake which referred to keeping abreast of changes in the meaning of words. The second is worthy of some comment.
Random sampling was used in Senate surplus transfers from 1949 until 1983. They almost certainly never changed the result. In 1964 Frank McManus of the DLP was leading in the election for the fifth position, but lacked a quota. At a late stage in the count Communist preferences of Ralph Gibson were going to be decisive. These went to the ALP candidate Cyril Sudholz. After the distribution of Communist preferences Sudholz was just over 500 votes ahead of the Liberal candidate George Hannan. ALP preferences went to Hannan, who bizarrely was even more anti-Communist than McManus. If Sudholz was to achieve less votes at that stage of the count than Hannan his preferences would elect the right wing Liberal. Communist preferences, however, ensured the election of McManus by putting the Labor man on top, and Hannan’s preferences elected McManus.
The Commonwealth Electoral Officer for Victoria decided to hold a recount of votes after McManus had been declared the winner. The DLP challenged this in the High Court, acting as a Court of Disputed Returns. The High Court rejected the DLPs action, in which the DLP had argued that a recount would mean a new random sampling, which in fact took place. This was the reason for the Melbourne Herald poster and also banner headline.
The recount resulted in an almost identical result. Obviously the Liberal Party was supporting the recount, as was the ALP. The ALP ensured that it had numerous scrutineers throughout the recount, and their task was to ensure that as many ALP votes as possible were thrown out, such was the ill feeling at the time against the DLP.
Random sampling does affect the result in some NSW local government elections, as I think Antony Green correctly once pointed out, rare as these are. I think one case was in Canada Bay, but the number of voters was quite small. In Senate polls the distribution of the surplus was not done completely at random. The second effective preferences of a candidate with a quota were all counted, and by calculating a transfer value the number of ballot papers for each effective second preference to be transferred determined and the actual ballot papers to be transferred was decided at random. The likelihood of the random selection changing the result was very remote, although it could have happened if in the McManus case the margin between Hannan and Sudholz was around 10-20 rather than just over 500.
I disagree with random distribution of surpluses, like Antony, but I don’t feel they make much difference unless there are few voters, like in some of the very small country shires in NSW, or in the case of the Senate where the margins between two or more candidates who might affect the result is miniscule.
So Evan Thornley is going to be elected?
Will the DLP win a seat in the Upper House?
Surely there aren’t too many votes left to count?
Today’s Newspoll: The ALP leads the Coalition by 10 points on a 2PP basis.
How long will the Kevin Rudd Honeymoon effect last?
Lyle Allan said: I disagree with random distribution of surpluses, like Antony, but I don’t feel they make much difference.
Analyses have been done of this for Irish elections, based on the statistics of random samples. They come up with with an estimate that, over the years 2.2 to 2.5 “wrong” candidates may have been elected, when compared with Gregory-type methods. They can’t identify where (or even if) these occurred of course. As for fractional “numbers” of politicians like 2.5, this is not unusual in Ireland- nor in Tasmania- where many pollies can wear two hats without even trying (I can say that, I come from there).
Antony said: Geoff, that’s not right. The surplus goes out from the highest to the lowest, as in the Senate.
Urk!…. well, it WAS true, as version 14 of the Act from 2005 says:
the total number, if any, of other votes obtained by the excluded candidate on transfers are to be transferred from the excluded candidate beginning with the ballot papers received at the lowest transfer value, as follows—….
There are 20 versions of the Act on http://www.dms.dpc.vic.gov.au/Domino/Web_Notes/LDMS/PubLawToday.nsf Has anyone combed through them to see when the order was flipped? And why? Was the original a drafting error?
I don’t think the above was from Version 14. It may have been from Version 19, which now cannot be found on the site. I probably downloaded the version I have been working from from another site. Version 20, which is the current real McCoy, says it incorporates amendedments made up to 31-Oct-2006. Was it really amended for the LC as recently as that?
Geoff Lambert pointed out a statistical analysis of Irish election results on random sampling. Thanks Geoff for pointing this out. I think a similar mathematical exercise was done in Adelaide in the early 1980s. The late Henry Mayer referred to it in Politics once and it came to the conclusion one Senate election per century might be decided differently under random sampling.
The trouble with random statistical analysis is that they generally don’t use actual data. The only Senate elections which might have been different since 1949 have I think one in NSW where a candidate won by a very small number of votes, but that was after the adoption of the Weighted Gregory method in 1984. Anthony Green might know of other close results. I think the 1964 McManus result was one the DLP thought that random distribution might produce a different result, but that election was, I think, decided correctly and the chances of random selection producing a result that would be different from the Hare Clark (not weighted Gregory) method were in fact reduced by the method described in my previous correspondence on this issue.
I think off the top of my head that if a random statistical analysis were done of the 1964 Victorian Senate result it might show the chances of another random sampling producing a different result (that is, the election of Hannan rather than McManus) would be something like 998 or 999 in 1000 or even 9999 in 10,000.
Sean … I can’t believe I wrote that. I think it must have been somebody masquerading as Ray.
Believe me I do understand how Hare-Clark works and my concerns about OPV are real. However, as David points out the solutions to fix these may be worse than the problem. What others seem to find objectionable is the GVT system more so than OPV.
Guys I asked this question before but didn’t get an answer. Maybe someone could help me.
RE: SMET
When the Democrat votes (all .1of a quota assuming BTL follow the ticket) go over to the Greens and the Greens subsequently get elected, the excess votes go over to the ALP. Here is where I get confused. People talk about the vote being diluted when it goes over to the Greens and then the ALP. What does it mean by diluted. If one votes FF and then Liberal then obviously the Liberal Party get that whole vote once FF is knocked out. If someone votes Dem, Green and then ALP, what happens when the vote goes over to the Greens but the Greens have reached their quota.
Again for the sake of the exercise assume all BTL votes follow the ticket, does Thornley get .04 of the quota once the Greens take their .06 of the quota or is it a smaller number than .04 because of this term that I can’t get my head around “dilution of votes?†How is this dilution worked out.
Laymans terms please in your answer.
If a Democrat vote is excluded and the second effective preference is to Southwick, that goes out at full value. Effective second preference means that preferences to candidates already elected or previously excluded at the time of the Democrat exclusion are not considered at that point, that is the point of the Democrat exclusion.
If a Democrat vote is excluded and the effective second preference is to Pennicuik, the Green candidate, and the next effective preference is to the Liberal Southwick, the preference to Southwick is devalued. That is because it is included with all the other Pennicuik votes at the time of Pennicuik’s election. If, off the top of my head Pennicuik had 90,000 atl Greens ticket votes, 6,000 btl first preference votes 2000 votes from the Democrats and 2,000 votes from others, and a surplus above the quota of 40,000, all 100,000 votes would go out at a transfer value calculated by dividing the surplus by the Pennicuik vote at the time of her election. This means the 100,000 votes would go out at a value of 0.4.
Democrat votes that preference Southwick directly have a full value. Democat votes that preference Pennicuik and then Southwick are worth 0.4 when received by Southwick.
That’s why Thornley supporters would prefer Democrats and others btl who are not going to vote for Thornley as an effective second preference to preference Pennicuik first, for their vote will then go Southwick at a reduced value. That’s why the Democrat Southwick vote is diluted. Of course the Democrats who number btl Pennicuik and then Thornley also go out at 0.4, but the important thing for the ALP is that the votes from Pennicuik to Southwick will be a very small proportion of the total Pennicuik surplus. The Pennicuik surplus will be largely from atl votes, which go directly to Thornley.
Hope I’ve explained in simple terms John.
John said. Guys I asked this question before but didn’t get an answer. Maybe someone could help me. When the Democrat votes (all .1of a quota assuming BTL follow the ticket) go over to the Greens and the Greens subsequently get elected, the excess votes go over to the ALP. Here is where I get confused. People talk about the vote being diluted What does it mean by diluted.
Well what I think people mean is that only the excess over and above the quota flows on to Labor and it has to be diluted among all the other votes.
The DEMS give the GRNS about 6,200 PAPERS, worth 6,200 VOTES.
This contributes to the GRN an excess above the quota of about 4,800 votes.
Every single PAPER held by GRN then flow foward to the ALP (mostly) and the LIB (a little).
The GRN excess VOTE is only 0.079 of a quota, so the number of PAPERS going foward is mutiplied by 0.079 to work out how many VOTES they are worth. In the case of the DEMS, this pans out to about only 150 VOTES.
Thus 6,200 papers, worth 6,200 votes, come out of the GRN cut-up as 6,200 papers, worth only 150 votes.
That’s dilution.
Yes?
Geoff
Your example using approximate results is better than mine. The Greens on posted figures last night are about 1000 votes over a quota on ticket votes from the Democrats and the Greens plus first preference votes for Pennicuik. If the below the line exclusions go to the Greens before Pennicuik reaches a quota that is more votes that will be diluted. As you correctly point out a Democrat btl effective preference to the Greens will have very little value when it goes to either Southwick or Thornley, but what Thornley will want is for as many of these btl papers to be locked up with the Greens before the surplus is reached. Thornley will be the beneficiary of the Greens surplus because all the atl ticket votes from the Greens and the Democrat tickets go to him. I suspect a majority of btl first preference votes to Pennicuik will go to Thornley too, but I noticed when scrutineering of Friday a lot of these exhausted, but these exhausted votes will be a very small part of the surplus.
My example used made up figures for the purpose of explanation. I should have used real figures, of course, but I don’t believe my method is wrong.
I hope John that you can make better sense of it now you have a further explanation from Geoff as well as from myself.
Does anyone know the results?
I’ve done a quick ring around Tom, but no luck. Stay tuned though, you will hear it here first.
NEWS FLASH: DLP wins TWO seats, in Northern Metropolitan as well as Western Victoria. Thornley wins in Southern Metropolitan. Hat tip to Antony Green and Andrew Landeryou.
William who missed out in Northern Metro
The third Labor candidate, Nazih Elasmar. So the result there is Labor 2, Liberal 1, Greens 1, DLP 1.
Hat tip the Speaker who tipped DLP as probables in both West VIC and North Met, prior to the election.
Quite so, Ray. Props to Mr S – for my part, I was saying that these freak outcomes tend to come unstuck in late counting, which was pretty much based on the precedent of the Fremantle Hospital Support Group’s near miss in the WA election.
Well, I’m *sure* this will be the last I ever hear about “the Greens representation in parliament being out of proportion with their support base”.
Greens 10.6% of the primary vote, 5% of the seats
Nationals 4.5% of the primary vote, 5% of the seats
DLP 2.0% of the primary vote, 5% of the seats
Who’s off to attach an electrical cord to Evatt’s grave?
StephenL is right that floating quota itself doesn’t delay counts. Where I referred to NUS counts I observed being slow, the slowness was caused by the other two quirks of the system, especially when their effects were combined – the throwing of all a candidates’ votes for a surplus rather than just the last parcel, and the retention of several decimal places of detail (the latter stopped very small parcels from exhausting, which greatly increased the number of parcels prior to ATV).
(I’m personally a fan of throwing just the last parcel. I think it’s fair that those whose support for a candidate is probably softer, as indicated by their preference reaching that candidate later or at lesser value depending upon system, should have more say in the outcome for the remaining candidates. However I may just be saying that because just throwing the last parcel makes it easier for me to rort my vote to maintain its value through the count, beware!)
I’m not that surprised by Geoff Lambert’s case of the decisive #15 preference especially given the large number of candidates and positions and few voters in that example. Many years ago in a Hobart City Council election with roughly 16000 voters, 17 candidates and six or seven positions, some votes at full value were active with (for instance) 9 for one candidate and 10 for another at a point at which one of these two candidates lost the final position to the other by a fraction over 3 votes.
Isabella (December 8th, 2006 at 5:33 pm ) posted, “What will Peter Kavanaugh talk about in his maiden speech? The threat from Communist Vietnam? The Domino Theory? Give us all a break.â€
I replied (December 8th, 2006 at 6:08 pm ), ‘I do not know Peter Kavanagh or what he will talk about if he gets to give a maiden speech, but I can make an informed guess. It won’t be the non-existent threat from communist Vietnam, though he may make a reference to the suffering of the people there. I think he will talk about life itself, about his grandfather, about persistence in a cause you believe in, among other things, but I am content to wait and see.’
Yesterday, Peter Kavanagh gave his maiden speech. He did not talk about the non-existent threat from communist Vietnam, though he did talk about the fight of democracy against communism. He also talked about life, about his grandparents, and about persistence and about much else besides. (Jo Chandler, “I see DLP people: Kavanagh raises ghosts in the upper houseâ€, The Age, 14/2/2007). See for report:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/i-see-dlp-people-kavanagh-raises-ghosts-in-the-upper-house/2007/02/13/1171128974013.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Or go to the Legislative Council Hansard for a more rounded account – the speech itself.