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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Senate Voting: Another Poor Article By Richard Denniss

It's a shame to have to be distracted from more important things (like counting all the candidate malfunctions this election) in order to deal with an article by Richard Denniss in the Guardian.  I wasn't going to do this, having already done so on Twitter, but unfortunately an email has been seen by me suggesting that a voter took it seriously.  I can scarcely believe this is so, and wonder if I should refer the email to the AFP as a hoax, but the thought of people being Wrong on the Internet about this needs addressing.  Rant warning applies.

To start with, let's declare on Richard's behalf what he failed to admit in his latest article.  Richard Denniss is a former sceptic of Senate voting reform who defended the coercive, corrupted and dangerous Group Ticket Voting system.  In that system, abolished prior to the 2016 election (but still extant in the WA and Victorian upper houses) voters' preferences were being sent they knew not where, and parties could be elected off tiny vote shares based on a weighted lottery of preference deals and effectively random events.  In defence of this old system,  Denniss, of the left-wing Australia Institute, made the ludicrous claim that "the vast majority of Australian voters trust parties to allocate preferences and opt to vote above the line."  Really, Australian voters trust political parties when politicians are among the least trusted occupations?  (OK, the link is only Morgan, but with effect sizes that large, even Morgan can be trusted here!)  We saw exactly how much Australian voters really trusted parties in 2016 when only about 30% of Coalition above-the-line voters, 14% of Labor ATL voters, and 10% of Green ATL voters (and single figures for most minor parties) followed their party's Senate how-to-vote card.  In Tasmania, voters didn't even trust the Labor Party to pick its own candidates properly, and overturned its preselection.

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.

Senate Reform Performance Review Part 1

The results of the Senate election are all in and so it is timely to review how the new Senate system performed in full detail.  No system should be expected to perform flawlessly on its first attempt.  However, the new system has generally exceeded the expectations of its most ardent supporters (save any who supported it for the wrong reasons) and made its opponents' pre-election arguments look very silly indeed.

Two major models of reform were canvassed in the Senate reform debate that ran through the last term of parliament.  The original JSCEM model released in 2014 allowed for fully optional preferencing above the line with semi-optional preferencing (six squares for a half-Senate election, twelve for a double dissolution) below the line.  The revised model released in 2016 initially allowed for semi-optional preferencing (1-6) above the line, but essentially maintained compulsory full preferencing if voting below the line.  After many complaints from the psephosphere (and I especially give credit to Michael Maley and Antony Green here) the final version as amended allowed semi-optional preferencing (1-12) below the line as well.  This change, in the end, allowed Tasmanian voters to overturn the contentious demotion of a sitting high-profile Senator.