This Person And Why They Are Wrong: Episode 1, Wasted Vote Guy

 

The gloriously cooked tweet above reminded me of a series I'd been intending to start where now and then I would cover someone known in the online psephosphere who has a particular gimmick that I haven't previously addressed in detail.  The rules for inclusion in this series are:

1.  the person in question needs to be a published author on elections and not just a rando twitter pest  (though this first one is really scraping the barrel on the first bit) 

2.  they need to have some defining pet argument or recurring MO that makes covering what they do in one article worthwhile and effective.

3. they need to be someone who I've not already written multiple articles debunking, so no Dennis Shanahans will feature in this series.  

I should note here that the subject of this article has written Substack articles unsuccessfully criticising my comments about his nonsense on multiple occasions.  (This did come after I blocked him on Twitter in May 2022 for bogus triumphalism and misrepresenting my arguments - he not long after deleted his side of that exchange.) He may be small fry, but from time to time I do come across someone who has taken his eccentric claims seriously.  Often these are well-meaning people who do share genuine concerns about the under-representation of the Greens in the House of Reps and just don't realise that this particular version of those concerns is silly.

Our subject here has been known under various usernames including djrobstep, wheelreinvent and similar, but in offline discussions he often just gets called "that wasted vote guy" or words to that effect.  The extremely blunt style with which he's pursued his argument on twitter over the years (though not so much in the last six months or so) is instantly recognisable, even when somebody else is describing it.  It has emerged in recent years that wasted vote guy is Robert Lechte.  He was published in Jacobin on his pet subject and then the editors of Crikey chose to put him in a cage match (shamelessly dubbed "Friday Fight") with William Bowe.  He doesn't usually use his full name and I'm not going to either; I'm going to keep calling him wasted vote guy (WVG for short) for the rest of this episode. 

WVG is a fanatical proportional representation supporter, but one who serious adherents tend to think gives it a bad name.  Aside from his argument being an unsound misapplication of theoretical concepts (proof that taking electoral theory articles on Wikipedia seriously will certainly rot the brain), there's another core problem with his output.   While he will sometimes say that preferential voting is much better than first past the post, he often attacks preferential voting with language that seeks to scandalise.  It's as if he wants to have his cake and eat it too by on the one hand claiming that our system is really terrible and corrupt and on the other hand trying to not appear stupid enough to miss the massive daylight between it and first past the post.   

The primary claim WVG makes is that most of the votes cast in House of Reps elections and other single-seat elections are "wasted".  Where this departs from a common argument made by PR advocates about the number of votes that end up with the loser, is that he also includes votes that end up with the winner over and above the loser's 2PP tally, which he refers to as excess.

Different conceptions of "wastage"

PR advocates who refer to unrepresented votes for the loser as "wasted" are using a term that also has a specific meaning in criticising first past the post and PR systems with threshholds.  That meaning is important and different and in my view the term should be largely reserved for that context.  

In first past the post, any vote for a candidate who does not finish in the top two in the seat not only has no effect on who wins the seat but also has no effect on the margin.  In terms of how much the winner won by, this vote may as well not have existed and the voter may as well not have bothered voting.  This creates a strategic dilemma for the voter thinking of voting for a candidate who appears unlikely to finish in the top two.  Should they vote with their heart and risk wasting their vote on the third placed finisher and thereby perhaps helping the nastier of the leading two candidates to win?  Or should they sell out and vote strategically for the more palatable of the expected top two, perhaps at the risk that if their ideal candidate does better than expected they might help the mediocre candidate beat the good candidate, or even cause the bad candidate to beat both?   It's in fact impossible for even expert level voters armed with polling-based models to be able to predict vote shares accurately enough to be sure of making the best strategic choice. The fact that this strategic dilemma applies to quite a lot of voters but nowhere near all means that first past the post discriminates between voters and means that it is a violation of what should be considered basic rights to equal treatment.  There may be excuses for some countries that have it to keep it, but there is no excuse for any country that has ditched it to go back.

In contrast, when some PR advocates try to call the votes that end up with the loser (or exhausted in a system where that's possible) "wasted", all they mean is that those votes did not finish up with anyone who won a seat.  This differs from FPTP in that there is not a "wasted vote problem" that subjects a voter to said tactical dilemma; it's just the case that elections have winners and losers, and single-seat systems have a lot of votes that are for, or in Australia's case finish with, losing candidates.

A better term to avoid confusion is "unrepresented" - in a PR system a much higher proportion of votes do end up directly with someone who wins than in any single seat system.  In 2025, on average the 2CP winner of each Reps seat finished up with 59.5% of the preferences in that seat and the other 40.5% finished up with the loser.  This figure doesn't change a great deal between elections.  In contrast in a Senate count it's normal for about 84% of vote values to finish up with a winner.  (In fact the proportion of voters whose votes at least partially contribute to electing someone is higher than 84%, and the proportion of voters whose votes entirely do so is lower, but never mind that for now.)  PR systems that use a very low quota can have even lower "unrepresented" vote levels than the c. 16% in Senate, though many such systems use threshholds that tend to result in about 10% of voters voting for parties that don't win a seat (these votes are then "wasted" just like votes for uncompetitive candidates in FPTP).

I actually don't think this unrepresented vote argument is a valid argument against our Reps system anyway. In a party system it's effectively a junk statistic.  It's true that about 40% of votes habitually don't end up with a seat winner, but in the case of votes for losing major party candidates there will (except in WA 2021 style wipeouts) be plenty of members of the party elected elsewhere, and the party may even win.  Every preference that reaches a major party that loses the seat contest in at least the competitive seats is a vote where the voter played a role in making the winning party work for that seat, which may in turn have helped the party that lost that seat to win elsewhere.  For some voters, not electing a specific major party candidate in their seat will seriously affect their view of the success of their voting experience, but the vast majority will care far more about the overall result.   The more effective argument for PR - which is not to say there are no counter-arguments - is overall disproportionality in single-member districts.   The leading party (in a close election both leading parties) gets a lot more seats than its vote share while minor parties with dispersed but reasonable support win few if any.  

Your Vote For The Winner Was Wasted??

Where wasted vote guy departs from the usual pro-PR complaint about votes that don't end up with the winner is that his conception of "wasted votes" includes many votes for the winner as well!  Specifically he regards the number of votes the 2PP winner gets above what they would have needed to beat the loser by one vote as "wasted", so if one side wins a seat 60-40, then he calls the 40% for the loser and also 20% from the winner's 60% "wasted", for a total of 60% supposedly wasted.  In optional preferential voting he includes all the exhausted votes as "waste" as well.

Now the first problem here is that this is simply absurd.  Someone who voted for the seat winner in our system is not going to think that their vote was wasted just because they could have voted for the other side and the result would have been the same.  They could (mileage varies) feel their vote for the winner was pointless if they live in an extremely safe seat where the result was never at any stage in doubt, but that's a smaller subset of the supposed wasted excess.  Victory for someone who really cares about their seat result is a collective experience and a win is a win is a win, especially if it's anywhere near a close one.  

There are some systems where a voter for the winner might have a genuine regret - if corrupt boundary drawers had deliberately put that voter in a seat their side was going to win anyway to stop them having more impact somewhere else.  The concept of wastage is useful in assessing deliberate gerrymandering of that sort (see below) but this does not happen in our system.  When one of the majors from time to time does slightly better than the other in terms of the point on the 2PP pendulum at which the two would break even on 2PP, this is because its vote is more efficiently distributed - through strategic, policy and campaign choices as well as personal vote effects, it just happens to be outdoing its opponent in bang for buck.  It is not because of any form of rigging.

In trying to avoid the absurdity of identifying individual "wasted votes" for winners, WVG has previously claimed that winning votes are "fungible", so that you know there are a certain number of wasted winning votes but nobody in particular's winning votes were identifiably wasted.  However WVG has also recently, perhaps out of rustiness as he's not been very active lately, claimed that "[..] 60% of voters receive literally zero representation (conceptually their votes are thrown in the bin due to being losing/excess winning single member votes)".  Well sure, if your concepualisation is daft and serves no purpose other than to prop up your own hostility to our system.  

A far more sensible way to look at it - and much more in keeping with WVG's "water" analogy - would be the way surpluses are distributed in the Senate.  When a candidate polls over a quota on primaries in the Senate every vote for the winner contributes an equal part of its value to electing that candidate, and the remainder of every vote is surplus to that candidate's requirements and flows on.  Likewise in the Reps, every voter whose vote contributes to the winner's election has equally helped the winner to win, and no winning voter is unrepresented.  As with a surplus over quota, it only makes sense here to talk about a surplus of total value over what is required.  It does not make any sense at all to say that there were any individual votes for the winner that did not contribute to the overall result.

A further issue I have raised with WVG's "wasted" mathematics is that if one assumes that all voters who voted formally were always going to do so, the excess in a compulsory preferencing election needs to be halved, because in that case if the voter didn't preference the winner they would preference their opponent, a net change of -2 to the margin.  

Herpetpsephology Fail!

As if dragging in the language of "wasted votes" from anti-FPTP theory is not bad enough, WVG also tries to pretend that the maintenance of our current single member system is a form of "gerrymandering".  The electoral map amphibian that is the gerrymander is widely misidentified in Australia (often being used to refer to malapportionment, for instance) so he is hardly unusual in this.  Gerrymandering is actually the manipulation of electoral boundaries to deliberately achieve certain results.  It is classically used as a pejorative for cases where, given a population relatively evenly split between two parties, the mapmaker might create five seats that fairly narrowly but comfortably enough favour one party and two that massively favour the others.  (It should be noted here that in some cases this kind of process can be used as a force for good - if an area too heavily favours one party it is sometimes good to draw a district that favours the minority so that they get some representation rather than none.)

Wasted vote guy has run a completely tinfoil (and IMO not completely intellectually honest) argument in which parties that vote to maintain the current Reps system are supposedly "engaged in the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage".  In fact they're not manipulating the boundaries, they're simply preserving a system that has that many boundaries, and that same number of boundaries could be put anywhere within practicable reason and WVG would still complain and allege it was all a wasted vote plot.  

A further point here is that WVG in 2023 complained about the Nationals and teals doing so well in seat terms relative to their vote, but failed to mention that this is not only down to concentration of support but is also down to both these forces not running everywhere and, in the Nationals' case, being shielded from a potentially effective competitor (the Liberals) by the latter's voluntary withdrawal from nearly all the seats they contest.  

PR Obsessives For First Past The Post!

Another characteristic of WVG is the way he quite often flirts with anti-preferencer talking points.  The tweet depicted on this thread is an example (suggesting Albanese didn't really win, making a big fuss about Labor's modest primary vote and attempting to stir up contempt for the Prime Minister) but the Jacobin article contained others.  Despite him being outraged by me pointing out that he was pushing FPTP tropes, he did in fact in his Jacobin article claim that the Coalition would have won in 2022 under first past the post (they only led on primaries in 73 seats, which might or might not have been enough to cobble a minority government together, and would most likely not have even won all of those with strategic voting at play).  

He also said that "when used in combination with single-member electorates, it nevertheless creates a mechanism that reinforces the two-party duopoly on power by funneling minor-party votes back to major ones." (This is not true, it is the single-member electorates by themselves that are the issue, preferences tend to counteract it).  

Finally the "so-called illegitimacy" comment deserves a response, because I've unfortunately seen a fair few left-wing posters retweet claims that Maduro was a legitimate President into my feed - no it does not follow that just because he was abducted by Trump he was therefore a good guy.  The Venezuelan Presidential election "won" by Maduro was a massive, blatant and comically inept case of vote figure fraud, as confirmed by rounding fraud evidence, collected vote total returns, polling, exit polling and the lack of satisfactory official figures.  Nobody who knows anything about elections would use "so-called" in this context.  

That's the end of episode 1 (beyond any updates I may add based on the inevitable reaction).  There are at least another two I have thought of that may appear in this series in the future!