How To Make Best Use Of Your Vote In The Victorian Upper House

This is just a quick piece to give my voting advice for the benefit of those who have seen the recent publicity about voting below the line in Victoria but would like advice on how to do it. This is what I advise as being the best way to make effective use of your vote.  

1. On the large ballot paper (Legislative Council), vote below the line for candidates.  Do not number any boxes above the line for parties.

The Victorian system is different to the federal Senate system.  In the federal Senate system, you can put the parties in an order of your choice above the line, but in Victoria you cannot do that: if you rank parties above the line as nearly all voters did in the Senate in May, your preferences beyond 1 will be ignored.  If you do vote 1 above the line then your preference is allocated according to a ticket lodged by the party you have voted for.  This system is called Group Ticket Voting.  It is long-discredited and has been abolished everywhere in Australia except for the Victorian upper house.  It results in parties using networked preference deals to elect MPs who have no real voter support (in cases less than 1% of the vote) at the expense of deserving candidates.  (For more see my recent article about the history of party policies around this disaster.)

The problem with voting above the line is that your party is highly likely to have sent your preference, at some stage, somewhere where you wouldn't have.  If you have checked your party's lodged preference ticket, researched all the parties your party is preferencing, and discovered that against all odds the lodged ticket matches how you would have ranked the parties more or less exactly, then you might safely vote above the line (but in that case voting below the line and numbering all the boxes adds very little to the effort you've already put in, and gives you the satisfaction of putting whoever you most disapprove last if you like that sort of thing.)  

Even when a party's first few choices seem reasonable there are often issues down the line.  For instance left parties often fail to put the anti-vaxxy Health Australia Party as close to the bottom as they deserve to be, increasing the risk that this party will someday be elected.  Parties from all sides tend to put "Druery parties" that are involved in the biggest preference-deal networks above their opponents, increasing the chance that more Druery parties will continue to be elected at the expense of more deserving candidates and making electoral reform more difficult.  Parties use fake ("Sack Dan Andrews") or deceptively benign ("Family First Victoria" - actually an extremist religious morality party) names to suck in votes.  Also some parties submit deliberatly confusing Group Tickets that may look like they help one party win but actually help another (for instance by juggling the order between the major parties).  It is safest to just vote below the line. You control your preferences and you know where they go.

2. Important: In most cases don't just vote 1-5.  At least include every party you like or think is OK in your below the line vote.

If you do the bare minimum below the line, which is a 1-5 and stop, your vote is probably only going to help one to three parties.  Once those parties are elected or excluded, your vote no longer helps any of the remaining parties beat anyone else.  If there are parties you like or think are OK, you should help them to beat parties you don't like, don't trust or have never heard of.  Depending on your views, this might mean you end up filling, say, 10 or 15 boxes instead of just 5.  If there is a particular candidate among the OK to good parties who you don't like, you might consider leaving that one out, but otherwise include all the candidates from all the parties you like or think are OK.  

3. Going further is fine if you want to.  The most effective way to vote (if you have the time and energy) is to number every box below the line.

Numbering every box is for dedicated voters but is the most effective way that you can possibly vote.  There is a widespread myth that numbering the boxes beside what you consider to be nasty parties can help them win, but in fact your vote cannot reach the nasty parties until every party you have put above them has been either elected or eliminated.  So if you want to vote all the way through and perhaps help the party you think is the second-worst beat the party you think is the worst, there's no reason not to do that and it is the most effective way to vote.  But it is not worth losing sleep over how or even whether you order the randoms and reprobates near the bottom as your vote is highly unlikely to get there.  The order you rank the top few parties on your ballot in is very much more important.

If you want to cut down the work you might consider only including the lead candidates for micro-parties you don't like or have never heard of. The only risk with that is if an elected MP is disqualified, but even then that only means you don't help that party's second candidate beat parties you have put even lower.

4.  What if you make a mistake?

Some people are scared to vote below the line because they fear that if they make any error their vote will not be counted.  Firstly if you are voting at a booth and make a mistake you can get a fresh ballot paper.  (If voting postally and you make an error, you can cross/rub it out and renumber, but make sure your vote reads very clearly if doing so.)  Secondly if you do somehow make an error that you do not notice, it will only invalidate your vote if one of the numbers 1 through 5 is either missing or present more than once.  An error further down just means your vote will not continue to flow if it reaches the point of the first error.  So you can safely keep numbering boxes.  (Do try to be legible!)

5. Useful resources

Handy resources for those who want to vote below the line and number lots of boxes

Cluey Voter (prepares a BTL sheet you can take to the booth)

Blatantly Partisan Party Reviews (written by André Brett from a "green democratic socialist" perspective but contains plenty of very helpful info about micro-parties for voters across the political spectrum).  

==XXX Sizzling Below-The-Line Sealed Section - Advanced Players Only - Tactical Voting! ==

Strong disclaimer: If you have read this section and are not sure that you completely understand it, please ignore it and pretend you never read it.

Normally when I write tactical voting comments on these guides I preface them with disclaimers about how the choice to vote tactically is a moral decision and some people consider it unethical, and how I do not recommend tactical voting but only provide information about it for people to make their own decisions.

In this case I have no such hesitancy.  The Victorian upper house electoral system was gamed to death by preference harvesters in 2018, is still gamed to death, and if you want to vote tactically to make your below the line vote more powerful at the expense of the above the line votes then I endorse such actions fully.

However, the Victorian upper house election is so complex that tactical voting mainly applies for major party voters.  If you care about fixing it you shouldn't be voting for either major party anyway but if for some reason you must, you can at least do it in style by voting 1 for a candidate who is way down your party's list.  That way your vote will bypass the surplus distributions for the leading candidates from your party, and if your party's second or third candidate eventually falls short and gets eliminated, then your vote will flow on at full value to other parties.  If Greens voters in Northern Metropolitan want to be cute about it they could also consider that Samantha Ratnam might get a quota on primaries so there could be value in voting for the minor Greens candidates first.  (See the linked Senate guide's tactical voting section for a discussion of how this all works.)

As noted in the Senate guide, the principle of not voting 1 for any candidate who will get a quota right away is especially important if for some reason you are voting across party lines because of views about specific candidates.  Also see the Senate guide for comments on the dubious art of "quota running".  (For Victoria it's almost impossible because of Group Ticket Voting so I don't recommend even trying it.)