Oops!... I Did It Again: Multiple Participation In Opt-In "Polls"

Recently I was involved in a Twitter exchange (of sorts, given the other party's predilection for blocking people they are arguing with) with the founder of a boutique poll-shaped object that I consider to be pretty much complete nonsense.  This "poll" operates by a combination of panel surveying (I wouldn't call it a panel poll as such, since every panel member can respond) and opt-in responses.  

During the (mostly now deleted) tweets in question I have formed the view that the person involved has some unusually serious mental health issues (at least intermittently). Given the way they characterised the experience of being replied to by me and another chap with similar interests, I'd rather soften the impact by not naming them.  However, during the exchange they dared me to vote multiple times in their poll (implying they would detect and remove duplicates), and I said I would do it.  In the interests of science, I publish the details and offer a hypothesis for falsification - if the other party is up to it.  My hypothesis is that I can participate multiple times in this agency's polling and the founder will not be able to catch me.  

Postal Plebiscite: Australia's Biggest Bad Elector Survey

(Note added Aug 2017: This article from April has received much interest lately.  For new comments go to Electoral Process, But Not As We Know It: Postal Plebiscite V2).

The federal Coalition went to the 2016 federal election with a commitment to hold a national non-binding plebiscite on marriage equality (aka "same-sex marriage") prior to any further parliamentary vote on the issue.  The plebiscite was, as noted here before, a bad idea in policy terms, though it was mostly successful in neutralising marriage equality as a campaign issue.  The plebiscite plan was voted down in the Senate, leaving the whole issue apparently unable to progress within this term.

The option of simply changing the law seems impossible because religious reactionaries within and supporting the Coalition won't allow it.  (They're the ones who don't understand why people keep talking about marriage equality, but would bring down the Prime Minister and/or destroy their own party even in a failed attempt to stop it.) Leaving the issue as a festering distraction til the next election isn't too attractive either, so along comes Peter Dutton with a proposal to have the plebiscite anyway, but to do it by post.  Voting would be optional.

The idea of holding a voluntary ballot that does not need the approval of parliament is not new; this option of a "fee-for-service" ballot under Section 7A of the Electoral Act was discussed in the Senate plebiscite report. The option was not costed at the time because there was no proposed legislation to implement it.

Senate Reform Has Been Passed

It's all over bar the High Court challenge(s).  On Friday, the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill 2016 finally passed both houses of parliament and was quickly whisked off to receive royal assent.

I've never been a fan of the now presumed-dead group ticket system, but my own campaigning to change it really dates from 30 August 2013.  On that day I discovered that the Family First candidate who had a dream run on the Tasmanian preference allocations, including from Labor, the Greens and various left micros, was an anti-gay extremist.  There was a high risk that socially progressive voters innocently voting above the line for their preferred parties would elect someone whose views would horrify them.  So I wrote this article.  In the end the disaster was avoided by just 821 votes.

I found it was uphill work convincing people to vote from 1 to 54 below the line (let alone the number of squares required in the larger states!) and that party operatives were concerned that I might cause their voters to vote informally.  Around the same time the Truth Seeker site was predicting Senate chaos with numerous micro-party wins based on tight preference flows between micro-parties.

What was most concerning, when the votes were finally counted, was not just that Truth Seeker had been right in a big picture sense, but also that the micro-parties that actually won or nearly won were frequently those that were not even on the radar of those trying to model the election in advance.  Trying to alert people to the consequences of their preference flows and do background checking on which micro-party Senators were going to win was a nightmare when not even expert modellers and not even preference whisperers could determine which micro-parties were going to get up.  Other results of the 2013 election showed that the system was not only absurd on a massive scale, but also a sovereign risk.  The voiding of the WA election would not have happened under the same circumstances but with voter-directed preferences.

Another Unsound Attack On Proposed Senate Reforms

Advance Summary

1. A recent article by a former NSW politician argues that proposed Senate reforms will create an effectively first-past-the-post system that advantages the Coalition and eliminates minor party candidates and independents.

2. The article exaggerates the impact of the proposed system on minor party candidates, since minor party candidates would have won at least three seats in 2013 under the proposed system.

3. While parties polling very low vote shares would not win without group ticket preferencing, this is not specifically because many votes would exhaust.  Rather, it is because strong preference flows between obscure parties would not exist even if all voters assigned their own preferences.

4. The article's claims about the impact of exhausting votes on preference transfers from Green to Labor and vice versa are undermined by those transfers being much less often important in Senate than in House elections.

5. The article's assumption that it would always be an advantage to run joint tickets rather than split tickets (eg for the Liberals and Nationals, or for Labor and the Greens) is incorrect.  Whether it would be better to run joint or split tickets would vary depending on party vote levels.

6. There is simply no reliable evidence that proposed reforms disadvantage any of the Coalition, Labor or the Greens, or any other force with serious support in any given state.  They disadvantage who they are designed to disadvantage: preference-harvesters.

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Godless Wealthy Greens? Too Rich By Half

Advance Summary

1. A recent article claims that Greens voters are likely to be rich and to be atheists, agnostics or others who do not believe in God.

2. While the connection between Greens voting and irreligion might be sound, the connection between Greens voting and very high wealth is not.

3. Booth patterns in electorates with high Green votes tend to show that very rich booths within these electorates vote Liberal rather than Green.

4. The use of family income data for inner-city suburbs overestimates the proportion of very wealthy voters within them.

5. As income is also highly correlated with Liberal voting, it is much more likely that some high-income suburbs are attractive both to very rich voters and Greens voters, but for different reasons and without much overlap.

6. There is a tendency for higher-income voters to be more likely to vote Green overall but that tendency probably weakens among the very rich and is probably strongest among those with moderately high incomes.

7. Census data by electorate is an unreliable source of information about the reasons for minor party voting.
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Tas Labor Push-Polling? Not As Such, But ...

Wirrah Award For Fishy Polling (image source)

In the final week of the Tasmanian state election campaign, the Tasmanian ALP has been accused of push-polling.  This follows the apparent leaking, by forces unknown, of an internal Labor UMR poll.

I have also obtained the contentious poll, which was conducted by telephone interviews with a sample size of 300 voters in each of Lyons and Franklin.  The Liberal Party needs to win three seats in at least one of these electorates, and is very likely to do so in Lyons, but lineball in Franklin.

The questions for the two electorates, conducted 5-6 March, appear in a results section entitled "Messaging".  Each question has the opening question "Does the following statement make you more or less likely to vote Labor in the state election or does it make no difference?"  The statements then are:

PUP's "Internal Polling" Claims Are Ludicrous

Porcupine Fish Award for Ultra-Fishy Polling (image credit)

Advance Summary:

Clive Palmer has claimed to have internal polling showing the Palmer United Party on track to win the Tasmanian election.  The claim that PUP polling shows any such thing should not be taken even remotely seriously because:

1. The level of detail concerning this "poll" that has been released is grossly inadequate.

2. The poll was not carried out by a neutral polling firm or even one with any demonstrated record of competence.

3. Many Palmer United "internal polling" claims in the leadup to the federal election were shown to be wildly excessive by the actual results.

Are Foxes Widespread And Established In Tasmania?

Advance Summary

1. A recent refereed paper claims that foxes are widespread and established in Tasmania and likely to become increasingly so.

2. This paper uncritically accepts some data items that, while not discredited entirely, are in some cases very dubious.

3. This raises concerns about whether the authors are familiar enough with all the data they use to be very confident that most of the data items are valid.

4. Similar concerns relate to the continued presentation of some dubious fox data items as hard evidence by the Tasmanian government.

5. On this basis, both scientists publishing on the question of foxes, and the Tasmanian government, need to present data accurately and with reservations properly discussed and explored if their claims about foxes are to be considered credible.

6. At present neither the claims that foxes are widespread in the state, nor the claims by some "sceptics" of a conspiracy to import fox evidence in order to fabricate fox presence, are convincing.

2012 Ehrlich Award For Wrong Predictions Goes To ...

Introducing the annual Ehrlich Award, which at the start of each year will be given to the "wrongest" published prediction I observe of or relating to the previous calendar year. (Of course, if I make a really stupid prediction of my own pertaining to this or any other year, I will happily self-nominate, and even if necessary self-award. )

There are a few groundrules - for instance the predictions need to be vaguely meaningful (in terms of being able to assess whether they have happened - this year's winner stretches that one sometimes), and secondly predictions that carry a stated assessment of chance of falsehood are not included unless that assessed chance is ludicrously low.  After all, even odds-on favourites do get beaten sometimes. 

The Ehrlich Award is named in (dis)honour of Paul Ehrlich whose lifetime achievements in the field of publishing wrong enviro-scare predictions (oh no, you're an "idiot" if you say they were "predictions"; they were actually only "scenarios") are almost as staggering as the excuses trotted out on behalf of all his false apocalypses.  Apparently, not only is it a hit predictively for Ehrlich fans if something vaguely like the prediction happened, or if it could still happen later, but even if nothing like it happened, that's a hit too, because it means people must have listened to the prophet's warnings and, for that reason alone, averted their ways from their sins.

LegCo Ices Forestry Peace/Surrender Deal - Updated

UPDATE:  This is an old article with a now dated title that has been updated.  For the updates scroll to the bottom.

(Admin notes: 1. Thanks to readers who voted in the jump breaks poll; poll has closed and preferences have been distributed!  2.  On or about 1 January 2013 this site will award the inaugural Ehrlich to the maker of the most wrong prediction in or relating to the year 2012 in any field that interests me.  The winner has been decided already, but nominations are welcome!  3. This article concerns (i) my views of the Tasmanian forest "peace deal" (ii) my comments about the voting behaviour that occurred during the LegCo vote on it and the (iii) possible future electoral and reform impacts.  As there are some out there who may not be interested in (i) and only wish to read (ii) and (iii), I advise them to scroll down to the point marked "It is safe to come out now".)

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In the beginning, there was the Acronym, and the Acronym was HCV.

And HCV stood for "High Conservation Value", and was a term employed to imply that certain forests were objectively so important that it would be unconscionable to log them.

In fact, HCV is a term with no objective scientific standing, since there are many different conservation-related properties that different people think are important, and valuation is a subjective process.  One person might think the forests that are most important are those that are the most scenic, another might most prefer those that shelter rare animals, and still another might prefer those that they believe best capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Any forest might be found very valuable by someone who in some sense cares about "conservation", and of little value by someone else who meets the same description.

The term, however, formally derives from its use by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international forest certification agency.  At the time of writing Wikipedia has what appears to be a sound coverage of this term and if you fancy a detailed look at implementation possibilities the High Conservation Value Forest Toolkit is also worth a look.

Negotiations between environmental groups known collectively as the ENGOs (Wilderness Society, the umbrella group Environment Tasmania and the Australian Conservation Foundation) and industry bodies began in 2010, against a backdrop of the desire by the now under-administration Gunns Limited to get out of native forest logging in order to obtain a social licence for its proposed Bell Bay Pulp Mill, one of an endless series of pie in the sky development proposals for the state, most of which never eventuate.