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The Forum > Article Comments > None of the above > Comments

None of the above : Comments

By Alan Tapper, published 18/10/2010

We should include a 'None of the above' option on all election ballot papers.

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1- No, that is unnacceptable and petty. If you are satisfied with people leaving blank ballot boxes, why drag them out of their homes just to put on a charade? As for civic duty- your point? I would rather this duty were performed by people that were actually concerned enough to motivate themselves willingly to vote, and thus more likely to inform themselves of their candidates, than somebody only doing it to avoid a fine and randomly voting on a whim based on whatever they heard on the radio.
Do you seriously believe the politicians actually CARE if people vote NOTA? Let me tell you something- only if they're part of the third most popular option- if they were the second they would love it.

2- You do realize, jorge, that this is exactly what we have right now, do you? The Liberal or Labor coalition governments barely scrape 39% on average each. Usually we are run by a government to which 60% or more of the public voted AGAINST. The fact that we elect electoral representative parliaments to vote in government amongst themselves on our BEHALF means that the overall voting of the nation is skewed to the largest minority per electorate. If 25% voted Liberal in every electorate, 15% Labor, 5% Green and 55% other, we would have all of Parliament staffed entirely with Liberal candidates. Furthermore, we are all prevented from voting for people we might actually support by this system as they are confined to local electorates that might have different priorities.
Yet this does not bother you much more?
Either way, you cannot use this to justify forcing people to PRETEND to vote.
Also, in many other countries, if people voted the way you described, those parties would be automatically formed into a coalition government.

So far my last post still sums up exactly the problem; and I was forced to repeat myself using easier words to understand and try to describe how our system actually works- which seems to be the problem with the NOTA supporters- THEY clearly had an entirely different presumption.
Posted by King Hazza, Wednesday, 20 October 2010 8:18:48 AM
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http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=11107#186556

KH, with respect the only minor parties to preference the ALP were the Red/greens & Socialist Alliance. The "Others" vote, increased quite significantly.

Mark Latham conned 14% of very disgruntled, EX Labour voters in some formerly safe ALP electorates, who also did not want the Red/greens either to leave their ballot papers blank.

There are several minor parties out there whose public declaration of principles is basically, we are what the ALP was 50 or 60 years ago before it was taken over by CARS, Communist, Anarchist, Radical, Socialists & their Fabian friends.

If those voters had been given better leadership they could have voted that way & a huge majority of them would have preferenced the LNP.

I have very little faith in the LNP but at least they are not Paedophiles & the accountants among them can count to 43 Billion.
Posted by Formersnag, Wednesday, 20 October 2010 1:00:48 PM
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King Hazza,

Complete freedom of choice is great, but..

1. Is it really that hard to go out, take a walk/drive to a polling place? You can pre-non-vote if you want too. As for civic duty, very little is asked of us as citizens and it's not as if Australia is a Stalinist state. What do you think about jury duty?

Also, when you say: "...only if they're part of the third most popular option- if they were the second they would love it." I think you mean that if Party B is third after NOTA and Party A, then Party B would care - wouldn't this be good?

2. I was trying to show that without preferential voting then 73% of people had absolutely no say in who won. With preferential voting we can work out which candidate the electorate prefers. So, while a majority of people may preference "1" for the the non-winning candidates, once preferences are distributed we have 50%+1 (often more) of voters choosing the winning candidate in each seat over all others.

On your example, with our current system, is an all-Liberal Parliament even a possibility? It would depend on how the 55% who voted for "others" chose their preferences. And with such low results for Liberal, Labor and Green I'm guessing you are expecting a very large number of minor candidates? Also, in the Federal Election there were plenty of seats decided on preferences and some of them had the leading candidate lose out in the end: http://vtr.aec.gov.au/HouseSeatsDecidedOnPrefs-15508-NAT.htm

You said "we are all prevented from voting for people we might actually support by this system as they are confined to local electorates that might have different priorities." - do you want multi-member electorates like in Tasmania/ACT? If you don't like the local candidates you could either run in an election or organise something.

Found this, though about 20 years old...I guess by not voting, as you say, it means you are pretty satisfied: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,970156-1,00.html
I would agree but for the interest groups that wrest favours from politicians...but I guess then everyone is happy.

http://currentglobalperceptions.blogspot.com/
Posted by jorge, Wednesday, 20 October 2010 1:22:50 PM
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Thanks for all the comments. I won't discuss optional preferential, as that was not my main topic, and I gave my viewpoint on that in the essay. And, yes, I too would like to bring back bonfire night, as we called it in my part of the world.

My aim was to propose a small improvement that might have some slight effect. The problem with bigger proposals is that the party stranglehold will simply strangle them at birth.

So my suggestion is to some degree just symbolic. But it could have some effect in letting us know how many voters are looking for something different from the current political menu. In another recent essay on OLO, Ian Marsh suggests that many voters are in this category. Quote:

"The community is now much more differentiated and pluralised. Australians exhibit a much wider spectrum of attachments and attitudes. Relatively small numbers of voters remain rusted on loyalists of the major parties. For their part, party organisations have virtually collapsed. They play almost no role in policy development or in activist mobilisation. Membership is insignificant. Power has flowed from the organisation and the members to party leaders. Party organisations have a minimal role in linking the community to politics."

NOTA might free up the ballot, so that this mismatch between free-thinking voters and dinosaur parties becomes more clearly visible in the voting figures. At present people are voting under duress.

The criticisms of the NOTA proposal may be taking a too short-sighted view. For example, Otokonoko says: "If an MP can get in despite being the second most popular option (the most popular being NOTA), then what does s/he care about the NOTA vote?" True enough. But come the next election, parties and candidates will be trying to win the vote of those who voted NOTA last time. That's where a difference might be made. They will know that they ran the wrong campaign last time.

Better still, new parties and candidates may see an opportunity, on the assumption that they can capture the NOTA numbers.
Posted by Alan Tapper, Wednesday, 20 October 2010 7:04:23 PM
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Formersnag- again, no 'leadership' required or warranted, the best chance of improving the chances of a more informed vote would be to let people who clearly don't care stay home. Otherwise, nobody else deserves any say in who votes or not, and how.

Jorge- you again, keep missing the points.

1- It doesn't matter why people don't want to vote, my point is we are NOT doing our country any favors by making them attend the polling booth- we are in fact increasing the ratio of apathy and donkey votes at the expense of anyone who actually WOULD have wanted to make a serious vote.
And seeing as Germany abolished Jury Duty without a hitch, and seeing that Australia judges reserves immense amount of power to abort a case or override the jury at his own discretion, I do in fact consider Jury duty to be a complete wank.
Another unreasonable violation of people's rights for the purpose of playing pretend symbolism.
Which is the problem- too many people believe symbolism actually makes a difference in practice- it doesnt- and we're paying for it.

2- I am FOR voter preferencing, so long as I am allowed to stop preferencing when I run out of parties I would actually want to vote for. If some reds-under-the-bed fruitloop doesn't like it because he's convinced the next most popular parties are marxists going to implement a nazi state without forcing me to vote for a party he likes instead, tough- my rights shouldn't be held down low enough to give peace of mind to a complete nutjob.

And I would indeed endorse a different electoral structure, though I have already expressed these many times elsewhere.

And Alan- most of the other parties WOULD already be targeting as many people as possible.
Posted by King Hazza, Thursday, 21 October 2010 9:44:19 AM
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I entirely agree that voters should be able to make a NOTA vote. The only change I would make to the proposal is that the NOTA vote should have the capacity to change an election result. I would like to add the following provisions: first, 'NOTA' should be treated as being a name for a party so that a NOTA vote is regarded as being equivalent to a vote for a party, and it becomes possible to speak of 'the NOTA winning'; second, if the NOTA wins the election then another election must be held within a certain time, say three months, and that this procedure be carried on until the NOTA loses, if need be, indefinitely. I believe that these provisions would *make* the main parties tailor their policies to an interested electorate, and in so doing would *really* make them answerable to the people. Unfortunately however, I think that it would be impossible to introduce a NOTA vote of any kind, since it would require that politicians introduce it, and introducing it is not in their interests. The last thing politicians as a collective want is to be *genuinely* answerable to the collective that they nominally represent.
Posted by Wallaby, Friday, 22 October 2010 8:19:21 AM
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