Voice Referendum Ticks And Crosses Beatup

I thought I should make some quick comments on the matter breaking yesterday (following a Sky News interview) regarding the use of ticks and crosses in the Voice referendum.  There was sudden outrage on various right-leaning outlets and from politicians including the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party when it was noticed that the AEC's ballot formality guidelines advise that ticks in referendums are treated as formal votes for Yes while crosses are treated as informal.  This has led to a fairly large outbreak of clueless wheel-reinvention and simple-minded outrage on social media.  It is doubtless worse on talkback.

I should note clearly near the top that the ballot paper will instruct voters to vote "Yes" or "No", and they will also be instructed thusly verbally if they are voting in a booth.  This debate only concerns the tiny minority who fail to follow the instructions.

JSCEM's Recommendation For Optional Preferential Voting

Advance Summary

1. Coalition members of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters have recently recommended Optional Preferential Voting (OPV), but have provided very little discussion of that recommendation.

2. It is likely the government would have the numbers to pass OPV if both Coalition parties wanted to do so, but unclear as yet if they actually want to proceed.

3. Evidence from NSW state elections under OPV strongly suggests that it would significantly to severely disadvantage Labor if adopted federally. Evidence from Queensland is more confused.

4. The level of likely disadvantage to Labor under OPV could often result in a few federal seats having different results, but could be more severe when Labor holds majority government.   

5.Compulsory preferential voting leads to votes being disallowed because of irrelevant errors.  Reform to reduce or remove this problem is necessary.

6. Optional Preferential Voting has been defended on the grounds of allowing greater voter freedom, but it can also result in misleading campaigns to discourage preferencing and in cases where parties are disadvantaged because voters make incorrect assumptions.

7. Having OPV as a savings provision rather than a direct instruction to voters would solve most of the problems that OPV addresses with less disadvantages.

8. Labor's arguments against OPV in the report are weak.  

How Should We Solve The Problem Of Unintended Informal Voting?

Advance Summary

1. In single-seat elections using compulsory preferential voting, high rates of unintended informal voting occur.

2. Informal voting is especially high where there are many candidates, where there is confusion between voting systems, and where electoral and/or English language literacy are low.

3. It is unclear whether unintended informal voting creates a significant two-party preferred advantage for one side of politics, although it appears to deflate Labor's primary vote.

4. There are many ways to reduce the number of votes that are disqualified without having to adopt Optional Preferential Voting.

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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. 

Ways To Improve Tasmanian Council Elections

On Tuesday I voted in the Hobart City Council elections.  (By the way, if you haven't voted yet, you might want to take your vote direct to your local council centre.) After following this election for months, including researching the candidates and writing a guide to the election it still took me 70 minutes to fill out my ballot papers, albeit with a little live tweeting of my thought processes on the way.  I'm not even convinced I did all that good a job of it, and suspect it would have taken me 3-4 hours to come up with a vote that was the best I could possibly do.  If it wasn't for the fact that there are always people who need putting near the bottom, I would have been wondering why I even bothered.

Council Voting - Please Be Careful!

I've already made this point in my Hobart guide but I thought I should make it prominently in a separate post to cover all councils.  Please feel very free to share and spread widely.

A scourge of Tasmanian council elections is the high rate of informal voting.  Informal votes are votes that are returned but cannot be counted as they are not valid votes.  The main reason the informal voting rate is high is that voters make mistakes and the rules concerning this are stupid.  The reason the rules are stupid is that governments have failed to fix them.  The previous Labor/Greens government ignored warnings that bringing in all-in all-out elections would cause a high informal voting rate under the current system. The current Liberal government has so far done nothing to fix it.  The Local Government Act needs to be reformed to provide savings provisions for voters who make honest mistakes.

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.

Senate Reform: JSCEM Submission Take Two

I'm posting links here to my submissions to the warp-speed JSCEM inquiry into the Commonwealth Electoral Amendments Bill (see Senate Reform: It's Finally On! for more comments).  They are also available as a single document on the JSCEM page.

Main submission
Simulation - Half-Senate Elections
Simulation - Double Dissolutions (See correction further down to Vic 2007 double-dissolution simulation)

After spending a lot of time looking at the Bill over the past week my view remains that it is a massive improvement on the broken Senate voting system we currently have.  However it appears to have significant flaws in the treatment of below-the-line votes and these should be either justified or remedied.

What has become apparent in the brief time available for debate about the current Bill is that by encouraging voters to fill more squares above the line (a minimum of six instead of a minimum of one) the Bill makes deciding what to do with below-the-line votes more difficult than in the original JSCEM model.  The original JSCEM model allowed a voter to just vote 1 above the line, or to direct preferences above the line, and it was very safe to conclude (based on the Victorian model) that the rate of below-the-line voting in that system (with a minimum of six boxes) would have been low.