Victorian Labor Kicks The Group Ticket Can Down The Road

(Coverage of Victorian by-elections tonight from 6 pm.  Live page will go up around 5 pm).

Victoria is the last place in Australia where Group Ticket Voting persists in upper house elections.  The system was invented in the 1980s because the Democrats, who are to blame for everything, forced the Hawke Labor government to retain full preferencing in Senate elections.  Because requiring voters to number all the boxes for Senate elections often caused extremely high informal rates, Group Ticket Voting was created as a way to retain full preferencing while cutting the informal rate.  A voter could vote 1 for a party and their party would allocate their preference for them.

Initially this system lacked obvious downsides but its potential for exploitation was obvious as early as the 1987 federal election, where a Nuclear Disarmament candidate with 1.5% of the primary vote was elected.  A series of farcical GTV elections around the country since led to the abolition of the system in NSW, federally, SA and WA leaving only Victoria.  Problems exposed with the system have included:

* parties winning off tiny vote shares defeating much more popular parties when they would not win under any other system

* confusing and deceptive GTV preference allocations that are beyond the understanding of most voters if they tried to follow them

* preference harvesting in which ideologically unrelated parties band together to try to secure election off each others' group ticket preferences

* creation of unnecessary tipping points that should be irrelevant to the contest, making it easier for elections to be voided (eg WA Senate 2013)

* creation of bogus near-100% preference flows between parties when, if asked to choose preferences for themselves, voters spread preferences in a much less concentrated fashion

* corruption of parliamentary voting behaviour, in the form of party votes on electoral reform being influenced by fear of losing the ability to work with Glenn Druery, as stated by Druery himself in the Angry Victorians sting video

* denying voters the ability to direct their own preferences between parties above the line (which they will be used to doing so having done so twice since the last state election) and throwing away their stated preferences and overwrites them with a group ticket vote if they do. 

*confusion between the Victorian system and the Senate system

Tasmanian Government Agrees To Increase Size Of Parliament

This Wednesday there was a surprise in Tasmanian parliament with the Premier, Jeremy Rockliff, announcing that his Government would introduce a Bill later this year to restore the House of Assembly to 35 seats.  

Unlike most states and the federal parliament, Tasmania has an "upside down" system with the House of Assembly (lower house) elected by the Hare-Clark system of (more or less) proportional representation, while the Legislative Council (upper house) has single-member seats, elected on a rotating basis.  Tasmania has used Hare-Clark statewide since 1909, always with five electorates that match the state's five federal seats.  

The state elected six members per division from 1909 to 1956, but the death knell of that system was sounded in 1955 when the election that year produced a 15-15 Liberal-Labor tie.  An unsatisfactory system in which the loser of the primary vote (in this case the Liberals) provided the Speaker in order to enable the winner to govern was tested to its limits when Labor's Carrol Bramich defected to the Liberals, giving the Liberals a floor majority.  The Cosgrove Labor government secured a dissolution (aided by the Liberals having let the House adjourn rather than using their numbers to take control of it as they might in theory have) but the result again was 15-15.  From this point on, the state used 35 seats.

Tasmania 2021: Voters Who Voted In One House Instead Of Two

This year Tasmania controversially had Legislative Council elections on the same day as a House of Assembly election, for the first time ever.  With the election being called for May 1st on March 26 with no prior warning the Tasmanian Electoral Commission had very little time to adapt to the logistic challenges of some voters having to vote in both houses.  These voters were the voters in the eastern Launceston division of Windermere, which occurs entirely within the Assembly division of Bass, and voters in the large division of Derwent, which is mostly spatially in Lyons but includes many voters in the northern suburbs of Glenorchy within Clark. 

The initial controversy around the holding of the elections on the same day concerned potential unfairness to candidates.  Party candidates could benefit from generic party funding for the Assembly campaign while independent Legislative Council candidates were restrained by the Council's strict spending caps.  There were arguments about whether parties could even legally run generic campaigns without in the process incurring expenditure on behalf of their Legislative Council candidates, though so far in terms of post-election challenges this aspect has not come to anything.  As it happened voters voted quite differently in the two houses, so while the Lower House campaign may have distorted the Upper House outcomes, there isn't any clear sign that the latter are different to what would have been expected anyway.

Holding The House Of Assembly And Legislative Council Elections On The Same Day

Having completed the initial runs of my Lower House guides it's now time to move onto the Legislative Council.  But before I do there is a general matter about the Legislative Council elections that I wish to cover in its own post.  For the first time in the state's history as a state (I am not sure about colonial elections) this year's Legislative Council elections are set to be held on May 1, the same day as the House of Assembly elections.  While there are advantages in holding the elections on the same day, I believe this is unfair to independent candidates because of the Council's strict spending restrictions, and that for this reason the Legislative Council elections should have been moved (perhaps to May 29) and should be moved if this is still possible.  

Historic cases of elections held close together

The following table shows cases where the House of Assembly and Legislative Council elections were held close together:

(Source: Parliament House website).  In the early days, Legislative Council elections seem to have been held on a range of days of the week, resulting in some cases of the elections falling four days apart.

Coronavirus And Australian Politicians And Elections

Just a post to comment on some aspects of interest regarding the current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak and its impacts on Australian politicians and elections.  (Note added April: this article is being updated continually but no further politicians have been diagnosed for a while.)

Politicians

In the last week three federal Coalition MPs (Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, Senator Susan McDonald and Senator Andrew Bragg) have tested positive to COVID-19.  Dutton is believed to have caught the disease in the USA, Bragg at a wedding in Australia and McDonald via unknown community transmission.  No state politicians have been reported as testing positive, but that's surely just a matter of time.

Politicians represent a tiny percentage of the world population, yet there have been many cases of them testing positive, a fact already attracting much attention.

A rough and doubtless incomplete tally of politicians who have tested positive, culled mostly from this Wikipedia page, accepting their description of "politician" status blindly but excluding those who I could quickly and clearly see were only former politicians, is as follows:

The table shows that countries that have politicians who have tested positive usually have more than one.  Of the 13 countries with more than one known infected politician, Australia has the fourth lowest ratio of total cases to political cases, currently above only Brazil, Romania and Iran.  Some countries with high coronavirus counts have none so far (such as South Korea and Switzerland) while China has relatively few.

Unintended Informal Voting In Tasmanian State Elections

Advance Summary

1. In Tasmanian state elections for the House of Assembly, any vote that fails to have the numbers 1-5 each once and once only is ruled informal and does not count.

2. A Bill to expand the Tasmanian House of Assembly would result in this being changed to 1-7. This would be likely to increase the rate at which voters voted informally by mistake.

3. The current rules very slightly advantage the Greens over other parties, especially Labor and most fourth parties and independents.  However, this hasn't decided any contest for a seat between parties in the last 30 years.

4. It is plausible that requiring voters to fill seven boxes without error would further increase the advantage for some parties over others, however the evidence on this is insufficient.

5. Unintended informal votes where a voter mistakenly omits or doubles numbers could be included in the count using a savings provision system already used in the ACT.

6. The view that the ACT system causes massive exhaust rates compared to Tasmania is based on a misunderstanding of the ACT computer counting system, which continues to distribute votes, creating spurious exhaust, after contests are actually over.

7. The ACT system may even help address exhaust issues partly by discouraging minor parties from needlessly running full slates of candidates.

8. Including more votes makes elections more inclusive!  We should do it. 

Response From ABS to Marriage Law Postal Survey Questions

On 16 August I sent the ABS a list of fourteen questions regarding the conduct of the Marriage Law Postal Survey, in particular regarding count quality assurance issues.  Some of the questions were answered in subsequent public debate.  The response below was received today, September 11, from Michael Wilson of ABS and is reproduced in full.  My questions as sent are in italics.  My thanks to the ABS for their detailed responses at this busy time.

I have added some comments of my own below the responses, and may add more later.

Mackerras Piece Misleading On Senate Reform

As noted in the last part of my multi-volume series about people being Wrong On The Internet about Senate reform, nothing has happened publicly on this issue for some time.  But erroneous op-eds attacking the JSCEM-proposed model continue to appear in the media now and then, and the latest to muddy the waters (again) is Malcolm Mackerras in the Canberra Times.

While the consensus of psephologists Australia-wide favours scrapping the current Group Ticket preferencing system that has been gamed to death by preference-harvesters and other exploiters of confusing ballot papers (while retaining above-the-line voting for one or more parties), Mackerras has held out against this from the start.  Initially he argued that it would be acceptable to allow voters to stop after filling in 15 boxes below the line.  As the debate has progressed he has shifted to supporting a requirement for a minimum of six boxes below the line, which he now describes as "the easy and right thing" to do.  

Wonk Central: How Should Parties Count Member Ballots For Senate Tickets?

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Advance Summary:

1. A recent Tasmanian ALP member/delegate ballot for Senate ticket preselections has raised the question of how member ballots for Senate tickets should be best conducted.

2. The use of standardised Hare-Clark (or other similar STV systems) for these ballots should be avoided, because such systems are designed to conduct elections in which all positions won have roughly equal value.

3. The use of standardised Hare-Clark can therefore mean that a minority-faction candidate gets either an easily winnable or an unwinnable (without a high below the line vote) position, depending on the way votes split up between other candidates.

4. Such a system therefore creates a big risk of tactical voting.

5. This article suggests an alternative, which is to set the quota off the number of positions on the ticket that are expected to be automatic wins, rather than off the number of candidates to be preselected from the cutup.

6. This article also discusses (scroll way down) the Tasmanian Greens' Senate preselection system.

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This one's hugely technical, and is not aimed at a general audience.  Please don't say I didn't warn you.  There is just no other way.

Senate Preferencing Reform: Reply To Electoral Reform Australia

Advance Summary 

(Note: This article has had content added at the bottom, and one wording correction, following further debate.)

1. Electoral Reform Australia, the NSW branch of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia, has recently sharply criticised various psephologists and lawyers for their input into Australian Senate reform.

2. Some of these criticisms are invalid in that they suggest that psephologists did not provide reasons for proposals when in fact sound justifications were - in some cases - presented.

3. The critique proposes a version of full optional preferential voting (without above the line boxes) and a method of dealing with exhaust that is used, for instance, in NSW, the ACT and Ireland.

4. However the jurisdictions in which that method of dealing with exhausting votes is used differ from the group's Senate reform proposals in various ways, including (i) in NSW, having a very low BTL voting rate (ii) in the ACT, instructing voters to number a certain number of squares (iii) in the ACT and Ireland, having a long history of use of Hare-Clark in that system, as well as small enrolment sizes per electorate.

5. Criticising alternative reform proposals as "just plain wrong" when they are defensible is an unhelpful distraction from the consensus among serious electoral observers that exhaustive group ticket preferencing must go, and that any of a wide range of alternatives (including ERA's, despite its risks) would be better than it.

Warning: the rest of this article is long, and probably about Wonk Factor 3 4 out of 5. 

Update 3/9: ERA have now responded to this article.  Their response and my comments appear at the bottom of this piece.  And a very short comment was added on 4/9.
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Optional Senate Preferencing: Not An ALP/Liberal/Green Stitch-Up

Advance Summary

1. This article welcomes the recent interim Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters report into the Senate voting system and generally supports its recommendations.

2. One important issue in Senate voting reform not yet adequately addressed is the calculation of transfer values for surplus votes. 

3. A recent article by Malcolm Mackerras claims that nearly all Senators elected in 2013 were elected by informed voter choice and that major parties are changing the system opportunistically while their vote is falling.

4. However, the Coalition's Senate vote only fell in 2013 because of defects in the current Senate system.

5. At least four and possibly as many as seven Senate outcomes in 2013 did not fairly reflect the will of the voters.

6. The idea that micro-parties combined should be entitled to seats in proportion to their total vote share assumes that micro-party voters very strongly prefer other micro-parties generally to the bigger parties.

7. Analysis of actual Lower House micro-party preference flows shows that any such assumption is false.

JSCEM Comes To Hobart

Just a quick note that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters will be holding hearings into the 2013 Federal Election this Wednesday morning in Parliament House.  Here's the star-studded lineup:

The hearings are open to the public, unless the Committee grants a request from a witness to go in camera so they can disclose sensitive information.  They are also expected to be broadcast on the Parliament House website (I'm assuming this is the federal one).

SA Election: Libs Fall Short Of Majority, Again!

(Note re Tasmanian state election: the seat postcount threads below will continue to be updated when signficant news is available, in the evenings only from Thursday onwards but hoping for more often once the cutups start mid next week.  Links to them will remain in the sidebar on the right)

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Unfortunately I've been too busy with the largely-as-expected Tasmanian state election thrashing to even manage a proper devouring of some of my pre-election words on the South Australian election.  I thought that the Liberals had good chances to get a majority in SA since only one state poll (when properly interpreted) had pointed to a strong chance of a hung parliament, and even if the 2PP vote was below 53% to the Liberals, then they could have other avenues to majority victory.

As it turns out they've struck out on both their chances - the 2PP vote seems to have been closer to the final 52.3% Newspoll than to any other poll in the campaign (including the 55:45 final ReachTEL of which no other details have been seen) and the Liberals' performance in terms of seat-harvesting has been not much better or worse than random.  Their best hope of victory now is to scrounge a 23rd seat in late counting to place them on a better footing to deal with the two Independents, but even then, success is not assured.   If they can't flip any seat from the ALP's current lead (or even if they flip just one), then Labor may have pulled off an escape even more precarious than last time.  Of course, the Independents will have the final say about that, but it's much easier governing with a 25-22 majority than a 24-23 one.

Senate Reform: Change This System, But To What?

As noted at the top of the previous post, the pace of new material will be slow for the next few weeks because of work commitments, but there will still be new posts from time to time. Aggregate, Fairfax and WA Senate updates may also be a bit slow - I'll be aiming for daily, in the evenings (when there is actually anything to report), but don't guarantee to meet that target.

The Senate post-count isn't over yet as we've barely started the laborious WA Senate recount, which may well be followed by a court case depending on the margins and the outcome.  News on that process will be posted here.  But the results are final enough to make some observations on what the elections told us about the faults of the current Senate electoral system.  There will be a standard Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters review of the election and this is likely to pave the way for a process leading to reform including opportunities for public submissions and hearings.  Now is a good time for those interested in reform to be discussing ideas and priorities for alternatives to the current system.

In my view, the overwhelming priority is the abolition of group-ticket voting.  The various alternatives have their strengths and weaknesses, but all of them pale into insignificance compared to the importance of having preferences directed (or perhaps in cases exhausted) through the actions (or inactions) of voters, rather than by preference deals between parties.

LegCo Spending Limits Create Confusion

This site will have live election-night comments on all three electorates, from 6 pm 4 May.

(For election night, comments will still be subject to clearance but registration will not be required to post comments.)

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This is another in a series of articles about the 2013 Tasmanian Legislative Council elections.   Existing instalments include:

My Legislative Council Candidate Guide

Nelson LegCo Polling

I also have articles about the forestry peace deal, LegCo voting patterns and same-sex marriage.

Upcoming articles include my comments on the Nelson debate (see Simon de Little's video here if you missed it or want to relive it) with a roundup of other Nelson issues, which may be released in the next week or so.  These were originally in this article but I have held them back because it was too long and the Nelson-specific remarks did not mesh well with this issue, which involves all the electorates.  I will also have detailed projection attempts for at least Nelson and Pembroke which will be released sometime during election week.  To save the suspense in the case of Pembroke, I expect Vanessa Goodwin to win, and that it won't be close.  In Nelson there is a strong modelling and polling based case that Jim Wilkinson should win easily, but the nature of the contest is distinctive, and I don't consider it to yet be cut and dried.  This article explores one of the reasons why the fight for this seat could yet be competitive. 

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Over the last fortnight, the lobby group Tasmanians United for Marriage Equality (TUME) has been letterboxing the Legislative Council electorates of Montgomery, Pembroke and Nelson with leaflets.  These leaflets, versions of which are currently available on the TUME website,implore voters to "vote for marriage equality".  The initial versions contained pictures and names of most of the then-known intending candidates and ticks and crosses indicating their perceived positions on the issue.  The current versions indicate the three candidates who are known to be opposed to state-based same-sex marriage (Jim Wilkinson (Ind, Nelson), Vanessa Goodwin (Lib, Pembroke) and Leonie Hiscutt (Lib, Montgomery)) simply with large red crosses and wording such as "The current representative" or "The Liberal Party candidate", as well as ticks for two supportive candidates in each electorate.

Bonham on the ballot - again!

Apologies for the lack of posts over the past week.  One reason for that is that I've been in Sydney where I've actually been a candidate in a contested election (as well as being "on holidays", which is defined as getting away from Hobart's hottest ever day to go to somewhere 0.5 degrees hotter.)  The site bio here discussed the most interesting of my three previous contested elections as a candidate (also the only one I didn't win).

The election in question was a three-way race for two positions as Vice-President of the Australian Chess Federation.  Normally ACF elections are all uncontested but this year both President and Vice-President were contested while other officebearer positions were unopposed.

Chess politics is a rather curious branch of politics in general, because chessplayers tend to be quite good at strategic thinking, while also being prone to interpret the actions of other players suspiciously (What's he/she up to?  Is this a sneaky trap? etc).  Probably in 2014 I will post some stuff here about the elections for President of the world chess federation, FIDE.

The two Vice-President positions (confusingly, there is also a Deputy President) were added to the ACF executive several years ago as a compromise solution after a radical proposal to create an AFL-style Commission obtained majority support, but not a big enough majority to be enacted.  However, when the two positions were created, the question of exactly how to elect the positions when they were contested wasn't resolved.  The Constitution specified only "preferential voting".

After some discussion it was decided proportionality wasn't a big deal for a national body electing an executive and as a result the election consisted of a ballot for one vice-presidential position, followed by a ballot between the unsuccessful candidates for the first position (and anyone else who felt inclined to run) for the second.  Thus in theory a ticket of two candidates supported by just over half the meeting would both be elected.

Submission on Proposed Changes to Local Government Elections in Tasmania

 This is an old article that has been updated.  For the update scroll to the bottom.

You can see what this is all about over here.  Thought I would post my submission publicly just for the interest of anyone who might want to read it.  I believe it's pretty self-explanatory in conjunction with the discussion paper available at the link.  Might wish it was more deluxe and polished but I just don't have the time!  I have not canvassed all the issues raised in the discussion paper; eg my submission does not canvass whether or not Tasmania needs "Get Clover" laws.

For anyone else wishing to make a submission (especially for the hordes out there just wanting to cancel out mine!), you've got about 24 hours as I write.  Good luck!

[Site update: I've hopefully removed the prove-you're-not-a-bot thing that I believe was previously required for comments.  Any other usability feedback is welcome and can be emailed .]

[Note to later readers: apologies for the poor paragraphing in this piece; it's a strange formatting issue with just this article that I haven't yet been able to repair.]

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Dear Local Government Office,

I am writing to provide comments on some of the contents of the Discussion Paper on proposed changes to Local Government in Tasmania (http://www.dpac.tas.gov.au/divisions/lgsem/proposed_changes_to_local_government_electoral_arrangements).

I am writing as an interested member of the public with no electoral or employment connection to any council. I have experience relevant to the conduct of Tasmanian local government elections as a scrutineer at all Hobart City Council distributions of preferences since 1988. Also I am known as one of the state’s most experienced psephologists, for instance through my articles published on the website Tasmanian Times. (I have recently moved to my own website.) I have written many articles statistically analysing local government elections and council voting patterns, as well as conducting live commentary on council elections, and have been involved in many council election campaigns.