Do Greens Do Badly At By-Elections When Both Major Parties Run?

(This article has been graded Wonk Factor 3/5.  It contains plenty of number-crunching and the odd statistical concept.)

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Today's article is a test of a hypothesis I thought was worth looking at.  In the recent Fadden federal by-election, the Greens were among the obvious losers, copping a 4.56% swing against them and falling to fifth on primaries behind Legalise Cannabis.  Then came the Rockingham state by-election in which the Greens were again smoked by the dope party despite having outpolled them at the previous upper house contest for the seat. The Greens did pick up a swing there (currently standing at 1.7%) but that was nothing but crumbs given that Mark McGowan's departure left a 33.4% swing for other parties to feast on.  On the other hand, there was a significant local-government based independent, Hayley Edwards, running.

Social media has been awash with Labor stans and the occasional op ed or media hack claiming that one poor result and one ambiguous result are clearly all about the party's stance on the Housing Australia Future Fund bill and are a portent of incandescent doom for the Greens at the next Senate election!  Given the variability of by-election outcomes and the fact that the Green vote is stable at its election level in national polling, those involved could as always improve the standard of Twitter psephology by desisting from this untestable game and deleting their accounts.   

On the other hand, I have seen a theory that the Greens will often do badly in by-elections because their by-election campaigns tend to be token attempts in seats they can't win and without the accompanying upper-house focused campaigns to drive up the vote.  So is there any truth in this overall, or is it really just the case that the Greens vote easily goes soft when there is even modest new competition?

Could Just 2000 Shifting Votes Swing The ACT Election?

 Advance Summary

No.

(This article is rated 5/5 on the Wonk Factor scale.  It is extremely mathsy and technical.)

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Yesterday the ABC published an article that claimed that the Liberals could win the 2020 ACT election if just 2,000 ACT voters switched their vote compared to how they voted in 2016.  The article is still up and the author continued to defend it after both Tim Colebatch and I independently pointed out on Twitter why it was incorrect, so here is an article to explain in detail why this claim is not correct.  In the process I hope to highlight that interpreting Hare-Clark spreadsheets really is rocket science and that a simple question like "how close was the election?" can have a very complex answer.  

Wonk Central: The Hare-Clark Recount Bug and the Wangaratta Case

Welcome back to Wonk Central, this site's sporadic series of articles that have been deemed too mathsy, too quirky or too niche for remotely normal human consumption.  In this case, it's clearly all three.

In this episode we take a very close look at the Hare-Clark Recount Bug (which could also be called the Hare-Clark Countback Bug, but "recount" is the term confusingly used for countbacks in Tasmanian law). What is it, why don't we kill it, and is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?  The impetus for this article is a recent court case in Victoria, in which a candidate disadvantaged by the bug in a Wangaratta Council countback in 2017 took legal action but lost.  Among other tries, the plaintiff (a local doctor, former soldier and Australian Country Party candidate in last year's state election) claimed that the use of a countback method that disadvantaged him deprived him of the human right to take part in public life.  

For various reasons, the judgement didn't get into the weeds of whether the countback system in use was fair or whether there was any better alternative.  Therefore, let's go there here.

Tasmania 2018: How Woodruff Won Franklin

It's been a hideous few weeks for the Greens - they lost votes and a seat in Tasmania, were thumped in the Batman by-election and were remarkably anonymous in South Australia.  The party is now facing serious internal recriminations over these poor results.

However there was one rather nifty save amid all this, and before I move on to the other house of the Tasmanian parliament (there are two Upper House seat contests coming up in May) I want to post the instructive Hare-Clark details of how Rosalie Woodruff (Green) managed to retain her seat in a very close contest with Nic Street (Liberal).  This article is naturally rather mathsy and has been rated Wonk Factor 4/5.

Wonk Central: Why We Don't Use The Hare Quota In Hare-Clark (Or The Senate)

For this exciting episode of Wonk Central I turn to the question of the Hare Quota, and why it is deservedly extinct in Single Transferable Vote multi-member electoral systems like the ACT and Tasmanian parliaments, and also the federal Senate and various state upper houses.  A warning that as usual for Wonk Central articles, this piece is especially mathsy.  A more important warning: I strongly advise readers with the slightest interest in the merits of different quotas for STV to stay well away from Wikipedia coverage of the matter.  It is so bad that I can't work out where to start in attempting to improve it.

How To Best Use Your Vote In The New Senate System

This piece is written to provide advice on the best way voters can use their vote effectively in the new Senate system.  Many regular readers of the site will already be aware of many of the points below.  I hope the main part of the post will also be useful, however, for those who want to know what advice to give less politically engaged (or more easily confused) voters.  I will vote below the line and number every square under the new system, and I'm sure many other readers will too (at least in the smaller states!), but not everyone is up for that.

Under the old Senate system, you had a very simple choice.  You could vote for a party above the line and your vote would be distributed according to your party's registered ticket, or you could vote for candidates below the line, in which case you knew you had to number nearly all the squares or your vote would not be counted.

That old system has been scrapped.  Voting all the way below the line for sometimes 100+ candidates was too difficult, confusing or time consuming for most voters, and above-the-line voting was being gamed by micro-party preference deals that meant most voters would have no idea what their vote would actually do.  Not only that, but problems with this system meant that the loss of a small number of votes in WA caused the whole WA Senate election to have to be re-run at massive cost.

Wonk Central: Reverse Engineering Special Newspolls

Welcome back to Wonk Central, the occasional series of excursions into psephological arcanity that ... well, if you got past those big words and have some sort of head for maths, you'll probably be right at home here.  This one's not as hard as some, probably just a Wonk Factor 4/5.

Today saw the release of extensive results of a special Newspoll on various national security issues. These included:

* support for ground troops to fight the so-called Islamic so-called State
* how many Syrian refugees Australia should be taking
* whether priority should be given to Christian refugees over others
* the chance the so-called Islamic so-called State will carry out a large scale terror attack in Australia
* whether the Muslim community in Australia is doing enough to condemn attacks like the Paris attacks
* whether Muslims living in Australia are doing enough to integrate into something Newspoll calls "the Australian community"

I will comment on the results in the next Poll Roundup.  What I want to discuss now is whether or not we can use the results to guess at the voting intentions in this Newspoll.  My working will likely assist anyone seeking to do so in similar cases in the future.

Wonk Central: The Track Record Of Last-Election Preferences

NOTE: Updates for elections from 2016 on appear at the bottom of this article

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Advance Summary

1. This article uses historic data to examine how good preference flows from the previous election are at predicting preference flows at any given federal election.

2. Last-election preferences have been an industry standard following various failures by and problems with the respondent-preference method, especially its total failure at the 2004 election.

3. Using a model of minor-party breakdowns similar to that used by most pollsters, this article looks at expected versus actual preference flows at all federal elections since 1955.

4. The quality of data available on preference flows is better for elections from 1983 onwards.

5.  Since 1983, last-election preferences have predicted preference flows remarkably well at most elections.

6. However, last-election preferences substantially understated the flow to Labor at two elections in this time: 1990 and 2013.

7. The historical record of last-election federal preferences is so strong that claims that last-election preferences in polling are wrong should generally be treated with great caution (including now).

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.

Wonk Central: Morgan's Tasmanian State And Federal Sampling

Advance Summary:

1. Roy Morgan Research has issued five recent Tasmanian SMS state polls with small but usable sample sizes in which the Labor Opposition has small primary-vote leads over the Hodgman Liberal Government.

2. Both state and federal evidence suggests these samples have house effects in favour of Labor and the Greens and against the Liberal Party and that Labor's "lead" is therefore probably not real.

3. While pro-ALP house effects are seen in Morgan's federal polling (which partly uses a face-to-face component known to skew to Labor), they are not clearly apparent in Morgan's state SMS samples in other states.

4. Morgan's release of a two-party preferred estimate for Tasmania is misleading, since most Green preferences are never distributed in the state, and even if they were they would not flow as strongly as Morgan's model suggests.

5. If Morgan's recent state samples were actually repeated at an election, the result would be not an easy Labor win as Morgan says, but a hung parliament in which the Greens would determine who governed.

6. Given the dissenting stance of current Greens leader Kim Booth during the previous Labor/Green coalition government, it is not clear who would govern in the event of another hung parliament.

7. An aggregate of all recent Tasmanian state polling does not currently point to a hung parliament if an election was held "right now", but is extremely close to doing so.

(Warning: This piece is very "numbery" and is rated Wonk Factor 4/5.)

Wonk Central: What Do We Do With The Poll Rounding Problem?

This supplement to this week's Poll Roundup concerns recent results comparisons between my poll aggregate and BludgerTrack, and explains a small methods change I've brought in to my aggregate this week, and also how the hell Newspoll might have got a 51 to Labor 2PP off this week's primaries.  I was firmly expecting this to be the least read article on this site all year (but 24 hours after release it is beating the main roundup), and it's the only one I've ever published with a jump break included from the start. Click on the "Read more>>" below the warning sign (if you didn't arrive here via a direct link) to read on if you dare.

(Image lambied from a widespread internet meme of unknown (to me) origin, example here)