Thursday, August 20, 2020

Down The Rabbit Hole: The Glamorgan-Spring Bay By-Election

An odd Tasmanian council by-election is currently going on that has caused the Tasmanian Electoral Commission to issue not just one but two explanations of the counting process and the consequences of the election.  This seems weird enough for a suitably niche look at what this fuss is about, which I will update with the results when they are known.

Glamorgan-Spring Bay municipality covers much of the east coast of Tasmania, from Bicheno in the north to Maria Island and a random looking line through the Weilangta forest in the south.  The council has a recent history of turbulence.  In 2014, high-profile former supermarket boss Michael Kent defeated flamboyant incumbent Bertrand Cadart for the top job.  Kent hence became the first and in 2014 only candidate to successfully take advantage of a rule change allowing candidates to run directly for mayor without prior council experience.  However, Kent's term as mayor saw frequent infighting and controversy and he finished last in the 2018 mayoral election.  Both Kent and Cadart have since passed away, in 2018 and 2020 respectively.

Debbie Wisby was elected the new Mayor in 2018 but has since faced allegations of bullying, harassment and misuse of funds (which she denies) and has been criticised over the renting out of a short-stay property to council staff.  The council was issued with a performance improvement direction in recent months, and now Wisby has resigned the mayoralty and from the council.



This creates a vacancy for a Mayor and a vacancy for a Councillor.  Under the Local Government Act both are to be filled by by-elections.  Under the changes brought in in 2014, candidates from off council are entitled to run for the mayoralty, but they must be elected as a councillor in order to be eligible to hold the position.  The by-election will be counted on September 1.  51% of eligible voters have already voted as I write, and turnout in 2018 for this council was around 77%.

In theory, a candidate might win a mayoral race but fail to be elected as a councillor at a general election where a whole council is elected at once, but this is unlikely and has never happened - most winning mayors top the councillor poll, and most who do not top it are second or third elected.  A more likely situation, which has actually happened three times, is that the person elected deputy mayor fails to be elected as a councillor.  In that case the Deputy position is filled by a round-table election among the elected councillors.  This is more likely because quite often most of the leading candidates on a council will run for the top job because they are attracted to the higher salary or believe doing so will bring greater publicity, so it's not so odd for those competing for the deputy position to be well down the list of  Councillor results.

We don't have much experience of how single-seat mayoral by-elections that off-council candidates can run in may go.  So far there have been five, but in three cases no off-council candidate contested the mayoralty.  In the other two, a single off-council candidate ran for mayor, but finished last behind multiple incumbents and also failed to win the councillor ballot.

Glamorgan-Spring Bay is unusual in that only one incumbent Councillor is contesting the mayoralty, while two non-incumbents are running for Mayor and, necessarily, for Councillor.  Another two non-incumbents are running for Councillor only.  Also, the incumbent who is contesting is not an ordinary incumbent but is someone with a very long history with this council.  Cheryl Arnol has been on council for nearly all the past 25 years and is a former Mayor (1999-2005) who quit the role citing public abuse.  Arnol returned to council in 2007, losing the mayoral contest to Cadart by two votes after multiple recounts.  She lost the mayoral contest to Cadart again in 2009 and 2011, won the Deputy Mayor position in 2014, and was not elected mayor again, despite outpolling Kent, in 2018.  Arnol has run for the Country Alliance for the Senate and the Shooters and Fishers (then minus the "Farmers" at state level) for the Legislative Council.

The remaining by-election candidates are Robert Forbes Young and Pat Gadd (who are running for Mayor and Councillor, though Gadd did not submit a candidate statement) and Kenneth Gregson and Jenny Logie (who are only running for Councillor).  View candidate statements here.  

Among some voters who I suspect don't want Arnol back as Mayor, a view has apparently sprung up that if Arnol loses the mayoral race but the winner of the mayoral race fails to be elected as a councillor, Arnol will become Mayor automatically.  This isn't correct.  What would actually happen is that the mayoralty would still be vacant.  This would necessitate another by-election.  At least this is the TEC's interpretation of S 308 (4) of the Local Government Act, which I agree with, though someone might try to argue that the by-election provision was intended to apply to the initial presence of a casual vacancy, not to a case in which a by-election to fill a mayoral vacancy has already failed.  In the second by-election, someone would have to be on the council to be eligible to win.  Whether an ineligible off-council candidate could still stand - perhaps just for the sake of making a candidate statement - despite being unable to win is an interesting question.  Presumably if one did attempt to do so and that was considered legal it would not be too long before legislation stopped such a silly game.

Even though the concern about the possible outcomes was mis-perceived, the elections still create a strategic dilemma issue for some groups of voters.

Contingency Table

The following table shows who becomes Mayor depending on the different possible incomes of the independent Councillor and Mayor ballots.


In six of the twelve possible combinations, the Mayoralty remains vacant, with a subsequent by-election that could be contested by any of the current Councillors and also the newly elected Councillor.  These combinations involve:

* Either Gregson or Logie winning the Councillor ballot while Arnol fails to win the Mayor ballot.

* One of Forbes Young and Gadd winning the Councillor ballot while the other wins the Mayor ballot (highly improbable).

The main voter class with a strategic dilemma here is voters who prefer one or both of Gregson or Logie over both Forbes Young and Gadd, but prefer at least one of the latter over Arnol.  If one of Gregson or Logie wins the Councillor ballot then this causes Forbes Young and Gadd to be ineligible for the position of Mayor, meaning that such a vote could in theory cause a by-election that Arnol, or someone else these voters might not support, might win.  So these voters may be tempted to vote for a Councillor candidate who is not their first choice in order to increase the probability that their choice for Mayor is also elected as a Councillor.  On this basis it appears to be a strategic advantage for the Councillor ballot to run for Mayor even if one is not that keen on being Mayor.

A strategic dilemma might also apply if there were any Arnol supporters who preferred Forbes Young or Gadd over Gregson and/or Logie.  They have a possible (if weak) incentive to vote for Gregson and Logie as councillors because this might in theory cause a Mayoral by-election that Arnol could contest, as opposed to one of Forbes Young or Gadd taking the mayoralty.

I believe this situation is an unintended consequence of opening mayoralties to all comers.  One possible solution would be to simply ban off-council candidates from running for mayoral by-elections, but that might prove unsatisfactory in cases where a council was in disrepute and new blood was needed.  That said, in many such cases the council would be dismissed or put into administration instead.  The ideal solution in theory would be to elect the new Councillor first and then hold the ballot for Mayor, but this would be too expensive and time-consuming.  Having the Deputy Mayor take over instead of having a by-election is unsatisfactory given the tendency of leading Councillors to run for Mayor, which means Deputy Mayors do not have a real mandate to take over permanently.  Filling mayoral vacancies by round-table election of the councillors is another option, but the "Rats In The Ranks" system is open to political games and corruption, and replacing an election process at risk of strategic voting with no election at all seems difficult to defend other than from a cost perspective.

I'll update this article after the release of results on Sep 1.  Perhaps nothing interesting will happen here but sooner or later an odd result may arise as a result of conducting simultaneous ballots where the ability of one to fill a vacancy depends upon the outcome of the other.

Result (Sep 1)

The result is in and it's a fascinating one: Robert Forbes Young has won both positions from off council, but only just!  He won the mayoralty by 37 votes (1644-1607) and the Councillor position by 105 (1675-1570).  His main opponent for the Councillor position was Jenny Logie, who was not a candidate for Mayor, so had Logie beaten him there would have been another by-election.  

4 comments:

  1. What do you think the rationale is for s308(6) of the Local Government Act?
    It seems to me that the above possible problem of electing a mayor who is not a councillor at a by-election would be avoided if, when a mayor vacates both the mayoral role and councillor role:
    1) The councillor role is filled in accordance with s308 (1) - so by a recount unless that's not possible, and
    2) Then a by-election for mayor.

    Is 308(6) drafted the way it is just to ensure that a mayoral candidate can run in a by-election even though they're not an existing councillor? I can understand the rationale for allowing that at general elections, but is that a useful function for by-elections?

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  2. The system of having a councillor by-election at the same time pre-dates candidates being allowed to run for Mayor from off council. The rationale was that if you were committed to an election for Mayor, you may as well give the new councillor a direct mandate at the same time and allow new people to run for councillor who may not have contested the previous election.

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  3. Why not bump the deputy up to the position of Mayor, hold an election for councillor and then elect a new deputy from council? Didn't something like that happen when Ron Christie ended up Hobart Mayor? Seems the simplest solution to me but, usually being wrong maybe not.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Christie was bumped up only because the mayoral vacancy arose very late in the term; a mayoral vacancy that happens less than six months before the notice of the next election is filled in that manner. As to why not do this all the time, I gave a view on this in the second last paragraph of the article.

      Delete

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