Oz Federal Election 2013 - Discussion and Comments

[Buzzard]

Well, I know where she is living in Adelaide as she bought an acquaintance's home. Seems a little too quick after any separation though.

....Brighton....

 

[Pushka]

Yes. That's been publically mentioned.

 

[Buzzard]

Yes. That's been publically mentioned.

So much for me being in the know.

Position Vacant.... New Spy. Apply Within.

 

[Pushka]

http://mylusciouslife.com/photos-julia-gillard-buys-new-adelaide-home/

A very reliable source.

 

[JohnK]

Wait, what ? How is that any different from people voting for irrelevant candidate X and thanks to preferences having their votes end up with one of the people you happen to like ?

Totally irrelevant whether I like them or not. I don't know any of them anyway.

Case in point is a person with 1,932 votes looks like getting a Senate seat. Insane! Ludicrous!

That is not a majority no matter which way you want to look at the preference system.

 

[medhead]

Totally irrelevant whether I like them or not. I don't know any of them anyway.

Case in point is a person with 1,932 votes looks like getting a Senate seat. Insane! Ludicrous!

That is not a majority no matter which way you want to look at the preference system.

Trouble is they do have the required number of preferences. That is how it works. Also the senate does NOT require a majority, it requires a quota. No senator gets majority. That is the point about electing multiple people and not just one.

 

[Hvr]

Re: Abbott in Government

So who should we disenfranchise? Enough people have voted for the micro parties to demonstrate a genuine need. A bit like new airlines forming. Some people are happy enough with Qantas and Virgin, others prefer Tiger or a private plane. Basically something for everybody.

Now imagine if Qf and VA conspired to restrict new entrants to the market? The screams would be long and loud and rightfully so.

Why should choosing our political representatives be any different?

 

[Mal]

Re: Abbott in Government

The problem is how above the line voting works... You assign your right to vote to parties basically. Liberal aren't going to put labor second (usually), likewise it is tit for tat. It really is a random draw.

Senate voting needs a big change. Can't see it happening though.

 

[Skyring]

Re: Abbott in Government

So who should we disenfranchise? Enough people have voted for the micro parties to demonstrate a genuine need. A bit like new airlines forming. Some people are happy enough with Qantas and Virgin, others prefer Tiger or a private plane. Basically something for everybody.

Now imagine if Qf and VA conspired to restrict new entrants to the market? The screams would be long and loud and rightfully so.

Why should choosing our political representatives be any different?

Precisely. A lot of the suggestions I've seen revolve around making it more difficult for new parties to be registered or for candidates to have crossed a certain first preference threshold to be elected. I don't think that's the way to go.

 

[nlagalle]

Re: Abbott in Government

So who should we disenfranchise? Enough people have voted for the micro parties to demonstrate a genuine need. A bit like new airlines forming. Some people are happy enough with Qantas and Virgin, others prefer Tiger or a private plane. Basically something for everybody.

Now imagine if Qf and VA conspired to restrict new entrants to the market? The screams would be long and loud and rightfully so.

Why should choosing our political representatives be any different?

The problem with the senate style of voting is where a person in Victoria polled around 1% of the primary vote looks like he will get a senate seat over a party that polled 10% all thanks to preferences. How is that fair?

 

[serfty]

Re: Abbott in Government

... Senate voting needs a big change. Can't see it happening though.

Well, if the AEC would publish all the facts it can be different.

I suspect many voted above the line to ensure their votes counted; with scores of boxes to number the chance of a mistake can be high.

You can vote both below and above the line - a valid below the line vote will take precedence. FWIW, with below the line you can have up to 3 sequencing errors and need to fill out at least 90% of the boxes. (That is still 88 of the 97 on the Victorian ballot paper.)

PolitiFact Australia | Voters can exercise their own preference in the Senate

...
Electors can vote above and below the Senate line. Below line votes will be counted instead of the ‘above line’ unless the ‘below line’ voting is fouled up and does not comply with electoral law.


In that event, the ‘above line’ vote is valid so long as it’s completed properly - one box only to be marked - and will be counted.


As for below line voting, not all squares must be completed and up to three sequencing errors are permitted. But at least 90 per cent of squares must be completed for the vote to be valid. ...

 

[medhead]

To expand on my comments about the senate vote. If we take NSW as an example. The real minor parties, so not including DLP, greens, pup, one nation, democrats, family first and Fred Nile, got 252805 votes or 0.55 of a quota.

A threshold of 4% has been mentioned. The parties getting less that 4% had a total vote of 536388 or 1.17 quotas. It gets a bit more complex if we add in the liberal democrats bringing the total to 1.79 quotas.

I think it would be extremely unfair to disenfranchise more than a quota of voters from having the right to be represented by someone other than the lnp, alp or greens.

 

[rogerkambah]

Having been a scrutineer I can tell you there are many who cannot number a senate paper beyond 1 to 20. Do not over estimate the voters.

That's scary.

 

[doctau]

Re: Abbott in Government

The problem with the senate style of voting is where a person in Victoria polled around 1% of the primary vote looks like he will get a senate seat over a party that polled 10% all thanks to preferences. How is that fair?

Without knowing everyone's preferences, we can't say whether it's fair or not. Consider an extension of that where one person got 1% of the primary vote and the other 99% put him at number 2, and the other guy got 10% of the primary vote but the other 90% put him dead last. Who should win?


I studied voting systems in one of my classes at uni, and it's quite simple: they all suck, and you just get to chose how they suck. There are a number obviously desired properties of a voting system, and Arrow's Impossibility Theorem proves that it is impossible for ANY voting system to satisfy all of them if there are more than two candidates:
* Everyone's vote counts equally (non-dictatorship)
* Ranking a candidate higher on your preferences should not make them less likely to be elected
* It is deterministic, and chance does not play a part in the process of turning votes into results
* Irrelevant alternatives do not have an effect on the outcome

The last is somewhat technical, but it is the one that lets you have micro parties which people can vote for without affecting the outcome too much. In US presidential elections for example (ignore the Electoral College thing), people who like third-party candidates only have two choices, not voting for the person they prefer or "wasting" their vote and not being able to specify their Republican-Democrat preference.


The voting method for the Senate is actually a reasonable one, although it does have a few problems. The bigger problem is how it is used in Senate voting. The first problem is that with a moderate number of candidates (which the Senate has well passed), it is difficult for voters to correctly make the ballot paper express their preferences. Above the line voting is an attempt to solve that problem which would be reasonable if how that turned into preferences reflected the common political leanings and ideology of the groups, but instead it is currently used to do deals and exchange preferences with parties of opposite ideologies to gain political advantage.

The second problem with the Senate election has nothing to do with the voting mechanism itself. There are simply too many candidates for the majority of voters to be able to gain an understanding of their position and make a reasoned judgment on who they want to vote for. The only way to solve this is to either cut down on the number of candidates or increase voter awareness. The former means that small parties which may have non-trivial support can't be elected, and the latter is hard because too many people don't have time to spend tens of hours researching minor parties.

I consider myself a reasonably political aware person, but of the ~35 groups on my senate ballot, I had a good understanding of the policies of 4, vague understanding of 3, could guess about 8 from the name (but no knowledge of actual policies), knew enough to hate 4 of the groups, and no idea at all about the 15 or so. Unless we spend days researching minor parties who have almost no chance of being elected, how can we really know what they stand for?

 

[medhead]

Re: Abbott in Government

The problem with the senate style of voting is where a person in Victoria polled around 1% of the primary vote looks like he will get a senate seat over a party that polled 10% all thanks to preferences. How is that fair?

The problem (well maybe not a problem but an issue) is that, for example, in NSW; Those parties getting less than 4% of the vote, one threshold that's been mentioned, had a combined 1.17 quota between them. So more than one quota of voters have registered a first preference for someone other that lnp, alp or greens. I'm ignoring the liberal democrats as an anomaly in that statement.

Looking more broadly at the issue. It has been suggested that above the line voting is a problem. Why? because the minor parties have worked out the numbers and made a deal. Doesn't that mean deals are a problem? Should the major parties be stopped from making deals?

On balance surely the problem is either a lack of information about the parties preferences or disinterest by voters to care about that preference ticket. Having said that I think it's pretty insulting to suggest that voters who have ticked 1 for a minor party haven't decided that they want any minor party representative to succeed. I know I had a major problem with electing only from the Lnp, alp or greens. Of course that was tempered by reservations about nutbags, but I am more than happy to have one nutbag elected out of 6 positions. It means that tinnie and roo poo man is going to bring more reality into Canberra than the major parties combined.

 

[medhead]

Re: Abbott in Government

Oh and again if open preference predictions are a problem surely the easy answer is to use the Hare-Clark system for the Australian senate.

 

[medhead]

Re: Abbott in Government

The second problem with the Senate election has nothing to do with the voting mechanism itself. There are simply too many candidates for the majority of voters to be able to gain an understanding of their position and make a reasoned judgment on who they want to vote for. The only way to solve this is to either cut down on the number of candidates or increase voter awareness. The former means that small parties which may have non-trivial support can't be elected, and the latter is hard because too many people don't have time to spend tens of hours researching minor parties.

I consider myself a reasonably political aware person, but of the ~35 groups on my senate ballot, I had a good understanding of the policies of 4, vague understanding of 3, could guess about 8 from the name (but no knowledge of actual policies), knew enough to hate 4 of the groups, and no idea at all about the 15 or so. Unless we spend days researching minor parties who have almost no chance of being elected, how can we really know what they stand for?

I have to challenge your assumption that voters are required to have full, in-depth knowledge of all parties policies. Voters are responsible for expressing their choice when voting. There is absolutely no limit on how they have to determine that choice. Anyone has the right to say "I like fishing, therefore I'm voting for the fishing party". They would have made a choice that makes them happy. Who are you or I or the LNP/ALP or journalist to force such a person to research all the parties policies.

Sure make all parties publish their full senate ticket. But people are allowed to decide their vote in private using their own methodology.

 

[moa999]

To expand on my comments about the senate vote. If we take NSW as an example. The real minor parties, so not including DLP, greens, pup, one nation, democrats, family first and Fred Nile, got 252805 votes or 0.55 of a quota.
A threshold of 4% has been mentioned. The parties getting less that 4% had a total vote of 536388 or 1.17 quotas. It gets a bit more complex if we add in the liberal democrats bringing the total to 1.79 quotas.
I think it would be extremely unfair to disenfranchise more than a quota of voters from having the right to be represented by someone other than the lnp, alp or greens.

Agree - have issues where a person's vote doesn't count, just because other chose not to vote as well.

Interesting article here suggesting the new likely NSW Senator from the Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm, is also a registered officer of the Outdoor Recreation Party (Stop the Greens) and reportedly controlled the preferences of another two ''micro'' parties
Too many free-riders - bring in optional preferential voting

 

[moa999]

Re: Abbott in Government

Oh and again if open preference predictions are a problem surely the easy answer is to use the Hare-Clark system for the Australian senate.

Hare-Clark is still a single transferrable vote system - basically a randomised below the line as per Tasmania.
Single transferable vote - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Remember the NSW paper had 45 columns and 110 individual names.
To validly vote below the line you had to get 107 numbers+ correct.

 

[serfty]

Re: Abbott in Government

...

Remember the NSW paper had 45 columns and 110 individual names.
To validly vote below the line you had to get 107 numbers+ correct.

No, just the first 99 with up to 3 errors.