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The Forum > General Discussion > Is preferential voting a scam?

Is preferential voting a scam?

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It seems to me that preferential voting is another term for rigged voting. Few people even know where their second and tertiary vote is headed when they go to the polling booth. So how can it be called voluntary or democratic? Most people ofcourse don't even care. They just vote for the least scary looking party machine and hope for the best. How to vote cards are designed by secret handshakes and plots to destroy opposition parties that pose a threat. Often the person or party that receives the biggest primary vote comes last after all the number juggling is finished.

How do we get rid of this abomination of a voting system?
Posted by Parallel Universes, Friday, 20 July 2012 2:37:05 PM
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An interesting thought.
Seems I have seen it some place.
You have won me I agree.
Read upper house thread.
Some interesting thoughts on the issue.
Posted by Belly, Friday, 20 July 2012 4:10:00 PM
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I also agree, the preferential system is designed to assist the two major parties simply because it is one or the other of the majors that end up with your vote.

My little protest is to vote for a minor party or indpendant so as to stop a major from getting the $2+ for the vote. My delimma then is which major to put last.
Posted by Banjo, Friday, 20 July 2012 5:11:21 PM
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Ditto, Banjo, except that I actually vote for a minor party, not just as a protest, and given this unfair mandatory preferential system I have to block my nose and place one of the major parties in the second-to-last place (third-to-last if you include the Greens), just so my vote is not rendered informal.
Posted by Yuyutsu, Friday, 20 July 2012 5:28:12 PM
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I think that it should be the voter that decides where his vote and preference goes, and that he should indicate which. If he puts no preference, then it expires, similarly if he indicates one, two or more, then they should go as he directs and expires otherwise.

Letting a party decide your preferences and essentially voting for you is crazy.
Posted by Shadow Minister, Saturday, 21 July 2012 6:20:08 AM
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Parallel Universes, there are two very different preferential voting systems in use in Australia: CPV and OPV.

They are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Optional preferential voting, which is used in some states, is democratic. It lets the voter declare preferences as they see fit. They may number only one box or all boxes or anything in between. This voting system is entirely in line with democracy.

Compulsory preferential voting, as used in federal elections and in some states, is the most disgusting rort of a voting system that you could ever imagine! You are compelled to number every square or else your vote is void, even if your intention is perfectly clear. If you wish to not vote for either of the two big parties and put them last and second last, your vote will usually end up counting for the one you put second last!

Your vote can get STOLEN and made to count for a candidate / party that you specifically wish to vote against!!

It is amazingly antidemocratic! And I can't for the life of me understand how the Australian people, the minor parties, political analysts and academics, etc, etc, can let it go uncondemned election after election, decade after decade!

As far as preference deals go, they are only a suggestion. For example, if the Greens say they are going to preference Labor, it is just a guide to voters as to how to mark their ballot papers. It is still entirely up to the voter to mark their preferences accordingly or otherwise.
Posted by Ludwig, Saturday, 21 July 2012 8:04:02 AM
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Is preferential voting a scam?
Of course, what else could it be called ?
Posted by individual, Saturday, 21 July 2012 4:42:23 PM
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Indi, optional preferential voting is not a scam. It is the best voting system. Better than a tick-one-box-only no-preferences first-past-the-post system.

And at least a million times better than compulsory-mark-every-box-sequentially-or-else-your-vote-won’t-count disgusting compulsory preferential voting!
Posted by Ludwig, Saturday, 21 July 2012 9:13:29 PM
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It is the best voting system.
Ludwig,
What do you base that assumption on ? Windsor & Oakeshott ? Or how they sacrificed Hanson ? Or how we came to have Gillard as PM ?
Posted by individual, Saturday, 21 July 2012 11:07:17 PM
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http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/Results/StateBy2012resultMelbourneDistrict.html
The link will show figures at close of counting for yesterdays election.
Scam? no I do not see a scam, but questions need considering.
Was it 15 candidates? all got a chance to stand,maybe as it should be, one so far has 60 odd votes.
The number one candidate,who may be a very good person, has clearly got the Donkey vote.
That is those who, not wanting to care/vote for Marjory's just votes one.
At the end what have we got.
Was there ever a Chance one of the majors would not win.
It comes down, with preferences,to two party's.
My thoughts are , in every election, we should have the right to just vote once.
The upper house, if we must have them, should let voters, not party's use preferences.
As in another thread, I think very few mark up to 100 spots, so let us preference across the top line.
By party candidate not vote unknowingly for the unwanted.
Remember, in protecting the right to stand for election, we should, we also should restore understanding for most in to just how needlessly complicated our system is.
Posted by Belly, Sunday, 22 July 2012 5:11:58 AM
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<< What do you base that assumption on ? >>

Indi, I base it on the principle of democracy.

OPV is simply the voting system that gives the best representation of the voter’s wishes.

CPV is simply an absolutely disgusting rort!

And FPTP is too simplistic. It doesn’t give the voter enough opportunity to express their wishes.
Posted by Ludwig, Sunday, 22 July 2012 6:48:27 AM
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In a country where all pollies are universally despised on an ALMOST equal basis, preferential voting is the only way to go.
I would submit only a minority of voters are unreservedly fans of a party. Most of us vote on the basis of least worst; ie "I hate Gillard, but I despise Abbott even more" and vice versa.
First past the post can only work for a 2 party system. With a number of parties, FPTP could produce a winner with as little as 10% of the vote; or a party 90% of the population didn't want.
With OPV, no winner can be recorded unless they get at least 50% plus one vote, counting preferences.
Thus the party the majority of people dislike least wins.
It is (or should be, as Ludwig points out) up to individual voters to ensure they direct their preferences to the least undesirable party.
What we do desperately need in this country is an extra option on every ballot paper:
"No Candidate is worthy of my vote".
Posted by Grim, Sunday, 22 July 2012 8:57:10 AM
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I base it on the principle of democracy.
Ludwig,
with all due respect, Gillard got in with Windsor & Oakshott's votes i.e. 2 votes against those of half the nation. That is dictatorship not democracy.
I agree that OPV should be the most desirable way but it isn't is it ? Preferences are running around like chooks with their heads cut off & mayhem ensues left right & centre.
Why not have parties put up their hand & the one with the most votes wins. How on Earth can we ever get good, effective Government when we have to constantly wast time, effort & money to pander to those 150 member parties ? First past the posts wins, second becomes opposition, third will have the option to support/oppose whatever the other two dream up. And, just like in sport 4th, 5th etc. don't count. We can't keep going if we let every Tom, Dick or Harry dictate to us from the outer fringe. You can't exercise democracy when you never have a majority.
Posted by individual, Sunday, 22 July 2012 12:02:33 PM
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Individual, with all due respect...
Gillard's 'getting in' had nothing to do with preferential voting.
Under our system, we can only vote for our own representative; ie whomever represents our local area. If there is no clear winner, preferences are counted to see who the voters liked least.
The candidate who gains at least 50% + 1 vote (with preferences) is declared the majority winner.
Once (or before) the representatives are elected, they decide who the leader of their party will be.
The party with the most reps gets to form government. The leader becomes PM.
In a hung parliament, where both major parties are neck and neck, minor parties can form a temporary or permanent coalition with the party which most closely agrees with their position (or is most likely to make concessions and compromises).
Gillard has formed a (very loose) coalition govt with the Greens and the independents.
From the Greens and independents point of view, they made a wise choice. Gillard has demonstrated she is prepared to bend over backwards to appease them. Would Abbott have been as accommodating?
Who knows, but probably, if it was the only way to hang on to power. He ain't no Gorton.
Please note: there have been very very few occasions when the Liberal party was capable of forming a govt federally on their own, without support from the National Party.
Posted by Grim, Sunday, 22 July 2012 2:08:09 PM
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If you want to vote for "none of the above" as was illustrated in the movie 'Brewsters Millions' you can. Its called a Donkey Vote.

I find preferential voting as disgraceful as compulsory voting. Are we living in the 16th century? An interview with Tony Abbott might leave many wondering about that. Much as I hate Gillard the prospect of a bible basher running the country scares me even more. Religious fanatics always strike me as having a very low intelligence. Anyone still brainwashed by supernatural mumbo jumbo at his age clearly hasn't got a clue.

That by-election result in victoria clearly illustrates what a frightful scam preferential voting has become. The econuts won on the primary vote but lost thanks to labor "tactics". As was reported in the newspaper. Isn't there anything we as a people can do? Stage a revolution? Get a petition going? Refuse to vote en-masse? I suppose not. Politicians have all the power and the two major parties will never give up such a useful scam as this.

I'm completely over the whole process. From now on I'm voting "DONKEY."
Posted by Parallel Universes, Sunday, 22 July 2012 3:15:24 PM
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Parallel universe sorry to see you voting for Abbott but it is your choice.
Posted by Belly, Sunday, 22 July 2012 4:47:05 PM
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there have been very very few occasions when the Liberal party was capable of forming a govt federally on their own, without support from the National Party.
Grim,
Those two have always worked in tandem hence the Coalition.

As for Gillard's 'getting in' had nothing to do with preferential voting. I don't give a hoot what you want to call it or how artificially complex you want to make something so simple as voting should be. The sad fact is that people who didn't have the numbers got in because they bought others who happen to have no moral right to override so many.
Now those of us who cared have to cop the consequences of their incompetence.
Posted by individual, Sunday, 22 July 2012 5:35:35 PM
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Libs and Nationals haven't always been in tandem, and certainly not in QLD.
It's also interesting to note that the National Party has spawned more independents than any other party, simply because some members don't agree with the many compromises the Nats have had to make to keep the Libs in power; like Windsor and Oakshott, for instance.
In fact, considering Labor's abysmal polling in recent times, federally and state, it isn't hard to imagine Labor and the Greens forming a more permanent coalition, if Labor ever wants to govern again.
Sadly, modern Labor shows more inclination to aline with the conservatives than the progressives, which shows their true colours.
Back to preferential voting, and I really don't see why anyone thinks it's complex.
Imagine 5 candidates running a close race, so the spread is between 24% and 16%.
The most popular candidate was still not wanted by 76% of the voters.
In a FPTP system, those 76% would have their votes discounted.
Hardly majority rule.
In our system, the candidate who only polled 16% is clearly the most unpopular, so he is knocked out. But the 16% who voted for him aren't tossed out with him. Their second preferences are now considered.
Let's say all their prefs. go to the second candidate, giving him say 38%. Still not a majority, so the last candidate is again knocked out and his preferences redistributed, until one candidate has 50% + 1 vote.
That's majority rule.
BTW, donkey voting isn't the same as “no candidate deserves my vote”. A donkey vote will give 1st preferences to the one at the top of the ballot.
NCDMV is a clear statement that all candidates are unacceptable.
A blank sheet could be just laziness.
Posted by Grim, Monday, 23 July 2012 7:10:31 AM
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Everyone seems to be missing my main point regarding optional preferential voting and compulsory preferential voting:

OPV is a true representation of voter’s wishes. CPV simply isn’t, for most voters.

That really should be the end of the matter. CPV should simply be outlawed forthwith!

Within the CPV system the very notion of compulsory preferences is oxymoronical in a democracy. Indeed it runs counter to the very principle of voting.

How we can have a voting system which can take your vote and make it count where you don’t want it to has got to be one of the most amazing and downrightly disgusting flaws in our system of governance.

Of all the foibles in the whole system, this has surely got be the most blatantly WRONG.

So, CPV should really be totally untenable.

That really does only leave OPV.

continued
Posted by Ludwig, Monday, 23 July 2012 8:10:19 AM
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FPTP is no good because as Grim says, it can only really work with a two-party system. We need preferences to give a clear winner of more than 50%, or at least a considerably higher vote on a two-party-preferred basis than FPTP would give if there were three or more candidates.

It is still possible that the winner may get less than 50% with the OPV system. But I can’t see that this would be of a major concern. It is not absolutely necessary for the winner to have more than 50%.

And OPV has been shown to work perfectly well. Qld and NSW have had it for many elections.

Now if we’d had OPV at the last Federal election, I bet we wouldn’t have ended up with a hung parliament. You’ve got to wonder just what portion of the vote each major party attained through preferences that the system forced the voter to allocate. in other words; STOLEN votes!

And when you add this to the fact that a very large portion of voters were voting on the basis of whichever they thought was the slightly less undesirable party, you’ve got an almighty MESS. We’ve definitely got a government that the vast majority of voters didn’t really want to install!

I wonder how different it would have been with OPV?

Perhaps one of the big advantages of OPV is that voters would feel happier about the party that won government. Because they could see that it would be a whole lot more legitimate. This could have huge ramifications for the peace of governance, the lack of constant vehement criticism and a much better level of acceptance of the projects that the government implements. Maybe?
Posted by Ludwig, Monday, 23 July 2012 8:13:20 AM
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“It is not absolutely necessary for the winner to have more than 50%.”
Sorry Ludwig, not true. It is a legal requirement in Australia that a candidate must have 50% + at least one vote after preferences to be called winner.
The preferential voting system and party politics are 2 totally separate issues.
What is sticking in everyone's craw at the moment is prior knowledge.
When anyone votes for the Nats or Libs in a federal election, they have prior knowledge of the coalition.
No one (including Gillard and Abbott) knew before the election that the Greens and independents would be called upon to add their numbers to form Government.
Remember, Abbott was trying just as hard to court the independents as Gillard was.
This may be an unusual event in Australian politics, but is fairly common in other parliamentary democracies around the world.
Maybe we'll have to get used to it
Posted by Grim, Monday, 23 July 2012 8:47:51 AM
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If you think preferential voting brings problems you need to consider the problems that come with first past the post voting.

Both the USA and the UK are blighted with FPP voting. If you doubt that read Sacks' book, "The Price of Civilization".

Larger electorates with say five members and proportional representation might be worth considering but I for one do not want my preferences not to matter.

I seldom follow a ticket. Several times I have completed all the 70-80 voting spots on a NSW Upper House ballot paper to put Fred Nile last.
Posted by Foyle, Monday, 23 July 2012 9:46:37 AM
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<< It is a legal requirement in Australia that a candidate must have 50% + at least one vote after preferences to be called winner >>

I’ll take your word on that Grim.

Presumably this requirement also exists in places with a FPTP system, as in the UK, in which 50% is not achieved by any candidate quite often. What do they do about it?

I also find it hard to believe that after all the elections in NSW and Qld with OPV that we’ve never had a situation after the allocation of preferences where the winner hasn’t achieved 50+%.

At any rate, as a matter of principle, it shouldn’t be necessary for the winner to have more than 50% of the vote. All they should need is the biggest vote.
Posted by Ludwig, Monday, 23 July 2012 9:47:58 AM
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G'day Ludwig,
I think you must have missed the crucial words in my statement: “After Preferences”.
If you go back to my earlier post describing how our system works, you'll see that by continually eliminating the least successful candidate and redistributing the preferences of those who voted for him, it is almost inevitable that you will eventually achieve a greater than 50% candidate.
And no, I don't believe any such requirement exists, or could exist in FPTP elections.
The majority is only made possible by considering 2nd and even 3rd preferences.
Posted by Grim, Monday, 23 July 2012 11:25:01 AM
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No I didn’t miss those words Grim.

Of course it is the final vote, after the allocation of preferences, that matters.

With OPV you have the choice of not allocating any preferences or allocating as many as you wish. So presumably a fair portion of the voters would allocate no preferences or just one or two.

Then as second and third and fourth preferences are sorted out at the end of the day, until the two-party-preferred vote is determined, we could easily end up with the winner not achieving 50%.

This must surely have happened with OPV in NSW and Qld. But I’ve never heard of the requirement to have a second vote in order to get the winner to have an overall majority of the vote.
Posted by Ludwig, Monday, 23 July 2012 11:54:56 AM
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Good point Ludwig. I can't recall that ever happening either.
As all ballots naming the weakest candidate without any preferences are set aside as 'exhausted', we can only assume:
a) a wide gap in primary votes
b) enough people listed preferences to carry the vote.
Either way, the 50% law still applies.
BTW, remember preferential voting only applies to the lower house, which normally fields a limited no. of candidates.
The Upper House is decided by proportional voting, which is a (crazy) horse of an entirely different colour.
And Qld doesn't have one.
Posted by Grim, Monday, 23 July 2012 12:57:08 PM
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The concept of preferential voting is excellent. The practice and understanding are a bit flawed. If we are unhappy about these systems, given that we are in a democracy, we voters should get together and put a proposal to parliament. We have already been able to change the law on political donations in NSW and more recently we have received an opportunity to vastly increase the community's involvement in planning. The reason that most of these things do not change is that we do not ask, don't ask the right people, don't ask persuasively enough or persistently enough. Democracy allows us to change almost everything that we don't like, instead of complaining about it. We have been doing that since 1986. Community lobbying is very effective. We do not have to put up with hopeless government or hopeless voting systems. Why don't you join us in Voterland?
Posted by Voterland, Tuesday, 24 July 2012 9:20:51 PM
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