Tall Cories: Bernardi's Bunkum About Preferences

I was going to leave a comment about this until the next SA roundup but I feel that Cory Bernardi's nonsense about compulsory preferential voting should be dealt with a little faster than that.  Normally writing a whole article about what may well have just been a two-word misspeak might be considered mountain/molehill territory.  However Bernardi's statement has been reported uncritically by at least one media source, circulated by the party, and strangest by far, given a free pass on social media by some people who have brains.  

One Nation have also claimed off the back of Bernardi's comments that "we will make preference deals a thing of the past by giving voters the choice to distribute their preferences or not. "  But in fact optional preferencing doesn't do that.  It reduces the rate of deals as some parties choose not to recommend preferences, but many parties do still recommend preferences (which is what people often mean when they say "preference deals") and may negotiate about these decisions (actual deals).  There were several accusations about "preference deals" in the 2023 NSW state election.  

Bernardi in an interview from Sky (where else) said this re One Nation when asked about what preferencing decisions One Nation might engage with for the upcoming SA election:

One of our actual key policies this year is to make compulsory preferential voting actually optional, so that people don’t have to, or are not forced to, vote for a party that is against their values, or is against their lifestyle or how they want to live their lives.

Now, firstly here, the hide of him!  This is Cory Bernardi spouting the virtues of people not having to have the slightest imposition that might be claimed to cut across their values, their lifestyle or how they want to live their lives. Cory Bernardi is best known for trying to stop same-sex couples from being allowed to get married.  

And secondly, the hide of him, again! This is Cory Bernardi who, seven months after being re-elected as a Liberal, ratted shamelessly and set up something called Australian Conservatives.  Did he ask those who voted 1 Liberal as to whether they minded having part of their vote in effect elect a party that was for sure against many of their values? (Not that they deserve that much sympathy).  

So we will not be lectured about respecting voter values by this man.  And indeed if I was voting in SA I would number every box on the Legislative Council ballot to put him absolutely last, because I don't forget.  Not that it would make any difference, but I must ask those who think his statement was OK, would I really then be "voting for" the person I put second-last?  

It's going to be eight years like fingernails dragging down a blackboard for SA voters of good taste to have Bernardi back in politics (if he lasts that long) and you all have my profoundest sympathies.  

The Misuse Of "Vote For"

But I do want to address Bernardi's rationale, because it is typical of the misleading emotional tactics employed by many OPV supporters, CPV objectors and so on.   That's not to say there are no valid objections to CPV (primarily, way too high uninteded informal voting rates), just that this is totally not one of them. And OPV is a superficially appealling but very overrated solution.  There are no shortage of better alternatives.

I called out much the same claim for the same reasons when it was made by David Crisafulli in the leadup to the Queensland election.  The core problem here is that Bernardi is using the term "vote for" to taint CPV with the idea that it is forcing someone to express positive approval of a candidate they do not like, which would if true be a morally bad thing to do.

But that simply isn't what "voting for" means.  You vote for the candidate you put 1.  You preference the candidates you put in high positions, particularly the candidate you put 2.  In a two-party context, you preference whichever major you put above the other.  You certainly don't "vote for" the candidate you put last, as despite putting a number in their box you've actually done everything in your power to vote against them and your vote can never reach them.  And it doesn't make the remotest sense to say you've "voted for" the candidate you put second last either, since the only thing you haven't done to vote against them is to put one even worse candidate below them.  For instance if there are 10 candidates in a seat, there are 45 possible final-two pairings, and your vote will only reach this candidate in one of those.  Nobody much when asked "who did you vote for in the election?" reels off their entire list of preferences.  They reply "I voted for X" or maybe "I voted for X and preferenced Y".

What one is really doing with candidates near the bottom of the ballot is not "voting for" them, it is ranking them.  And on that basis, the moral outrage Bernardi, Crisafulli et al are playing for with this loaded "vote for" nonsense just collapses, because what can be so bad about giving a bad candidate a bad ranking?  

In fact, your vote only gets down to the bad candidates if the good and mediocre candidates have all been excluded, and at this point a bad candidate is certain to win anyway, so you'd not actually assist any cause you care about by leaving a few nasties unranked.  Indeed, if some of the nasties are nastier than others, if you do so you could be helping the nastiest nasty to win.  

It is true that when you rank one bad candidate above another, that can cause your preference to reach that candidate.  It contributes to their final vote tally after preferences - but that doesn't make it a vote for them.  Rather it's a vote that reaches them, although you tried your best to send it to others.  But the typical audience for Bernardi's claim is a voter who hates both Labor and the Greens, and there won't be many seats (if any) in SA where a vote putting those two parties in the last two spots hits either of them.  

Such claims are also often applied to voters who hate both the major parties and put them in the last two spots, but I think such voters are actually quite rare.  Fringe right voters rarely find the Coalition worse than very disappointing and minor left voters ditto re Labor.   And plenty of either rank the major party on their side in the first few places.  

Those coming at the issue from a left perspective lately often raise the example of voters who can't stand the Coalition but are disgusted by Labor's stance or lack thereof on Gaza as a case of voters who should be able to withhold their preferences from either major, as a form of conscientious semi-objection to the voting process.  But it seems from Senate voting that where they had the chance to do so in 2025, these voters largely didn't do it anyway.  The main party supported by such voters was the Greens, but the 2PP rate of Senate exhaustion from Greens voters in fact went down substantially in every state (and was below 10% everywhere but Queensland) though these voters could have easily avoided ranking either major if there was an upsurge in desire to do so.  (The drop was probably largely caused by a reduction in the number of columns.)  

It is not new that One Nation have this position; I have seen them express support for OPV on their website going back several years.  However, whinging about preferences of any kind from the non-Coalition right has got particularly feral in the wake of the 2025 federal election, which is bizarre given that One Nation won two Senate seats on semi-optional preferences from behind.  It is so common to see One Nation supporters support first past the post that if the party ever did win government I wonder if that base would let it get away with stopping at OPV.  (Not that they would know the difference anyway. I have corrected numerous posts that hail Crisafulli for "scrapping preferential voting" when he is actually just saying that his government will make it optional.)  This continues even while we're looking at polling numbers like the latest SA DemosAU (Labor 44 One Nation 19 Liberal 18) in which the further one moves away from full preferences the worse the right could be obliterated.

Can false claims on this matter be illegal?

Bernardi's comment has in effect made the electoral system an election issue, however small the scale on which it does so.  This claim was something he said in a media interview, not party advertising.  But if One Nation attempts to repeat this claim in campaign advertising, they could be in breach of the law.

The reason for this is that South Australia has fully fledged truth in electoral advertising legislation.  Under S 113(2) of the South Australian Electoral Act, during the campaign period:

" A person who authorises, causes or permits the publication of an electoral advertisement (an "advertiser") is guilty of an offence if the advertisement contains a statement purporting to be a statement of fact that is inaccurate and misleading to a material extent."

Bernardi's statement is certainly inaccurate - indeed as read literally it's flat out false.  And it is materially misleading too because even if one accepts that when he says "vote for" he cannot really mean "vote for", it still implies that the current system forces voters to take a generally positive action in respect of a party they deeply oppose.  In fact the system does no such thing.  

Although Bernardi's claim misleads about the voting system, I doubt it would be found to fall within the narrower laws elsewhere re "misleading a voter in relation to the casting of their vote".  It is a false statement about the voting system, but not one that goes obviously to the mechanics of the voting process.  And this is not saying such advertising would be prosecuted in SA either, the normal initial response of electoral commissions to material that even looks like it might be in breach being just a firm request not to do it again.