If we start acomodating our ballot papers and changing the way we live and our voting process for the sake of 5.5% of the population who are morons, then we have let the terrorists win!

We are dealing with people who should be given lethal injections rather than a ballot paper. If someone is that stupid, that they muck up their only chance to choose their government well we don't want those types of people in our country. I don't feel safe sharing a street with them. We decide who is too mentally defective to vote, and the manner in which they should be sterilised. Any relationship to the Mikado is intentional.

In order to make things simpler though we could make candidates for election gather 500 signatures of that electorate before they can run. There was a managerie of morons running for Werriwa and they have the potential to screw up the democratic process because people are confronted with the names of people who have been too lazy to campaign, so the voters have never heard of them. Maybe that's what your refering to with: "candidates they don’t know or don’t care about."

I can only presume this first post is some feeble attempt at humour. I know I wouldn't feel safe sharing the street with this correspondent.

Well I needed to do something to get the ball rolling. From my first post you should be able to tell that I blame the voters rather than the legislators (my feeble attempt at humour), although technically as they cast an informal vote they are not really voters.

I don't believe that a good solution is to adopt an optional preferential system, because I think that it is a less accurate measure of the consensus of the electorate. The reason why preferential voting is so good is that the voters reach a compromise, rather than in a first-past-the-post system. Although you do make the point that the vast majority of seats are won by candidates who were leading in the primary votes after the first count. Never-the-less a vote for a minor party is sadly a wasted vote in the US and Britain, one of which cannot truly be called a democracy.

But I like your solution to have candidate registered tickets, like in the upper houses; this makes sense because most people follow a candidate HTV anyway. Except for me, I draw up my own HTV, after consulting the various party preferences posted on in the internet.

But even if thought my first two paragraphs were too stupid to comment on, what about my third? I have noticed that of the 16 Werriwa candidates, only 3 received less than 500 votes, but if all candidates were required to acquire 500 signatures to run (in either house), then how many candidates do you think would have run in Werriwa? It would certainly have cleared out some of the dead wood and informal voting would go down as a consequence, hopefully.

Another question Antony, could some of the confusion about whether to put just a one or number all boxes be due to the states that have changed there voting regs? So is there a higher rate of informal voting in say Queensland, than in Victoria at the Federal level?

The article is an abbreviated version of a much longer submission, and the full version does deal with the candidate numbers issue.

All elections conducted under compulsory preferential voting show an increase in informal voting as the number of candidates increases. Increased informal voting owes something to the doubling of the number of candidates contesting elections in recent years. This increase is caused by registered party candidates, not independents.

The problem here is registered parties can nominate candidates centrally without getting the signatures of local nominators. Parties are able to nominate candidates in every electorate, even if they have no supporters in the area. I think your 500 nominators might be a bit high, as parties only need 500 members across the country to register. But along with many other aspects of party registration, how central nomination works needs a re-think. A rise in deposit fees may also be an option.

Again, in my submission I provide chapter and verse on informal voting at federal, state and territory elections going back 20 years. The incidence of ticks, crosses and '1' only votes has risen more in NSW and QLD than other states at federal elections. Informal voting is higher than in Victoria, but both states are also seeing many more candidates than Victoria. My conclusion from the incidence of informal voting is that the more candidates that contest a seat, the more numbering errors you get, and the more voters give up and simply use a '1' as in the Senate, or as they have done at state elections. As anyone who has voted below the line in the Senate knows, it is a time consuming task that really only produces joys for the politically masochistic.

There is also apocryphal evidence that the complex how-to-vote cards produced as parties try to put One Nation last have created strange numbering sequences and increased transcription errors on ballot papers.

I agree with Antony that optional preferential would result in more informal votes than compulsory preferential. I live in Queensland, so know what both systems are like.

Under the Queensland system, I am generally able to lodge a formal vote as after I have completed my extensive research on the candidates standing, there is usually one that I am actually prepared to vote for. However, to expect me to rank the rest is almost impossible. In a field of 6 to 10 candidates (which is more often the norm these days), how can I be expected to differentiate between some of them? Some of them have such similar views that it is almost impossible. Some I detest in equal amounts, although for different reasons, and cannot possibility rank one ahead of the other.

This is what leads me to vote informal in federal elections. And make no mistake, I know exactly what constitutes a formal and informal vote. I have a degree in politics and government, have researched and written many papers on electoral systems at university, and have even scruitineered at elections. I am not an uneducated moron who cannot get it right, but rather an educated woman who will not be made to vote in a certain manner, and in some instances has resorted to adding an extra box stating "none of the above" and attaching an essay outlining my reasons why. Am I having a "say" by doing this? Not according to voting requirements, but at least I have not voted for someone whom I could not, in all conscience, vote for.

Penekiko,

Make up your mind on the argument - do you want to allow minority parties to be able to run for election or not.

At one point in your post you say that we need minority parties to be real democracy than you say there needs to be 500 signatures for a party to run.

This means that certain candidates would be excluded and the people who would otherwise vote for them would be left without their choice.

Parties such as the Greens would have struggled to get any support early on if these criteria were applied.

I hope you don't feel the same level of intellectual snobbery and contempt towards the many battling Australians who do not fill out their Centrelink forms correctly and end up being screwed by the most incompentent bureaucracy in the country.

t.u.s

Suspect,

It is not a hard thing to do if you are a serious candidate and especially if you have the backing of a minor party to leaflet drop, say 5000 houses in the electorate you intend to be the representative for. Explain who you are and why you are running and ask people that if they think you are worthy for running as a candidate to sign a form and send it back to you, regardless of whether they would vote for you or not. But I do agree with Antony that 500 is much too onerous, so lets make it 200-300, which would mean leafleting 2000 houses maximum.

So minor parties are good, provided that they aren't wasting people's time and provided that they seriously want to win, regardless of how much chance they have. I emailed many candidates of the Werriwa by-election and asked them for a how to vote, well none of them had thought through their politics enough to come out with a proper how to vote card. It was all along the lines of 'vote 1 Joe idiot who has never lived in the electorate and after that donkey vote your way to candidate number 16'. So I hope I have cleared things up there. We can have a democratic system, without the opportunists.

I think a person needs to write an article about Centrelink, will you be that person usual suspect? If Centrelink is what you say it is, and I agree, then the AEC is the opposite, allowing for the fact that it is still a bureaucracy.

I have passed out How-To-Vote cards on election days and the majority of people who refused to take one, looked like it was the first time they were voting ( ie: 18) - 'I'm too cool for that' says their sneer. But what happens in the booth? Do they complete the ballot correctly for their intention. I fear not.
Re Centrelink where I have worked: an enormous amount of money is wasted there. When you read, that the cost to that hallowed 'taxpayer' of a particular benefit is X$billion, please understand that 50% of that amount is admin wastage. Managers from every region being flown to Canberra on a monthly basis, colour TV in lunch rooms, tropical-level heating of offices through winter. I would go on and on except this forum is about electoral process.

I think the issues of tax, welfare and civic duty in mass public involvement in democracy are pretty interconected. And I was also too cool for a HTV, being 18. I did my own research and made my own HTV, but I was too stupid to vote 1 for the senate ballot paper so I asked for a HTV for that. Ironic isn't it.

Brownie, I regard this massive welfare state, where the money is eaten up in Centrelink and recipients are treated like dirt is the single worst aspect of the Howard excesses. I blame him, it suits his purposes of re-election, even though a true Liberal party person would fix up the welfare system. Maybe you should write an article about Centrelink too, I think one is badly needed.

Penekiko comments that optional preferential voting is a less accurate measure of the consensus of the electorate, that compulsory preferential voting is good as voters reach a compromise, rather than in a first-past-the-post system.

For a whole series of technical reasons (try searching on 'Arrows Impossibility Theorem' or 'Paradox of Voting'), that is only true in a system of two dominant parties. In multi-party contests, compulsory preferential voting can become wildly unrepresentative because the final result is badly affected by the order candidates finish and whose preferences are counted.

At its heart, every voter can be assumed to 'rationally' order candidates so that if the prefer A to B, and prefer B to C, they will also prefer A to C. Whatever logical or illogical reason voters use to choose between candidates, this condition will still hold. Technically, it is a condition known as transitivity.

But if an election is the sum of thousands of individual votes, then transitivity can be breached, and a rational ordering of candidates cannot be deduced. Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize for Economics on the subject in relation to consumer behaviour, but the problem applies equally to systems of full preferential voting.

It comes about because all preferences on a ballot paper are treated as equally firmly held when in all liklihood they are not. One solution is optional preferential voting which effectively weights a contest towards the higher preferences, presumably the ones most strongly held.

In 350 words, it is impossible to go further on this arcane bit of political theory. But for those who think it can never happen in real life, have a look at the 1998 Queensland election, when the rise of One Nation produced a result where while Labor ended up forming government, the result came perilously close to being completely indertiminant. Goodness knows what the result would have been with compulsory preferences.

Antony, what are your thoughts on condorcet voting methods?

Some of us vote informal because it is our right to vote informal as much as it is to place a formal vote. It is just here in Oz that we have to attend a boothe to do so. Senate is a bit different but in the lower house nominations if you don't want labor or liberal to become the government and have no other representatives from other parties who do you vote for to voice your dislike? (One nation was the other candidate but we won't go into that)

As for the senate. I am sorry but doing the research required to decide which order to place 60+ candidates, assuming they tell the truth on their websites, is utter rubbish. Realistically I would like to place my preferences along the divisions a through o rather then either a 1 above the line or 60+ numbers below the line.

Parliamentary parties choose their leaders democratically. There is a poll. If no candidate gets an absolute majority, the least favoured candidate is eliminated. Polls continue until there is a winner.

This would be too expensive and time consuming for lower house elections. So we choose from one of four systems. First, there is the UK / USA "first past the post" system. This is easy to understand but is an undemocratic joke. Second, there is compulsory preferential voting. If voters understand the system, it works in the same way as the parliamentary system - the vote in each poll is specified in advance. However, many voters do not understand. Third, there is optional preferential voting. This is nearly as bad as "first past the post". Most voters do not understand that they can disenfranchise themselves by only recording a first vote. Fourth, there is the French system. If no candidate gets an absolute majority, the top two candidates compete again two weeks later. This is not quite the same as the parliamentary system. But it is very close and it is easily understood.

If we want fair lower house elections, we should go French. If we want a fair upper house proportional voting system, we can go whistle. No-one has invented one.

On another point, Antony said that the Greenway informal vote was high because there were 13 candidates. Wrong. In 2001, the informal vote was 6% and the remaining 2PP was 50% Labor, 44% Liberal. In 2004, the informal vote leapt to 11% and the remaining 2PP was 44% Labor and 45% Liberal. The 6% who left Labor went 5% to informal and 1% to Liberal. Five percent of the electorate said, "I'm not voting Liberal and I'm not voting for our (Labor) bloke because he's a (non-practising) Muslim." Their informal votes were prejudiced and deliberate.

It is depressing to read "In the end, neither side is likely to offer voters what they would most want, which is the right not to have to vote for candidates they don’t know or don’t care about."
Maybe you're right, Antony. If so, then democracy is an impossible dream.
For democracy to be possible, voters would want to vote for candidates:
1. they know;
2. they care about;
3. who will certainly be their representative in the parliament; and
4. who will be thoroughly accountable to their constituents all of the time, not just on election days [i.e. less than 0.1% of the time].
Why are the issues of proportional representation and accountability so completely ignored by you and your expert colleagues in the media?
Cheers
aker

Nice theory about the informal vote in Greenway Paul, but it is not based on any evidence. I'm mystified how you can be so positive about why 5% of people changed their vote without access to any research on the ballot papers.

I'm old fashioned and believe in evidence based research on this topic. Wait a week or two and read the report by the AEC, who have gone through all the informal votes in Greenway, and every other electorate, and analysed why they were informal.

The Liberal Party in part blame themselves for an overly complex how to vote card in Greenway, caused by trying to put One Nation last. I understand there has also been some rise in deliberate informals in Greenway, something that might back your theory except there aren't enough deliberates to account for it. There was an increase in deliberate informals in most electorates in 2004.

I understand by far the biggest category in Greenway is votes with a single preferences or with numbering errors. The vast majority of these votes were cast for the major parties, so the idea it was an anti-Liberal or anti-Labor protest doesn't quite stack up. It's hardly a protest against the Labor candidate to vote for him and then muck up your preferences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method thanks Deuc and Antony, this system is really interesting and if you look at the two examples they provide it appears a better system for reaching consensus than preferential voting.

So far we have three systems: compulsory preferential, optional preferential (without and without candidate tickets upper house style) and this condorcet method.

So what is your position on this Antony?

Antony, you are right to say that I should have presented evidence about Greenway informal protest votes. The informal vote rose 0.70% in NSW at the 2004 Federal election. In 42 of the 50 seats, the informal vote moved by less than 2%. One seat recorded a fall in the informal vote of more than 2%. The informal vote in Fowler fell by 3.64%, probably as a result of the reduction in the number of candidates from 11 to 5. Seven seats recorded a rise in the informal vote of more than 2%. The informal vote rose by 2.10% in Mitchell (candidates increased from 8 to 9). It rose by 2.29% in Kingsford-Smith (candidates increased from 6 to 9). It rose by 2.32% in Parramatta (8 to 11). It rose by 2.52% in Paterson (8 to 11), by 2.61% in Warringah (7 to 10), by 3.15% in Dobell (7 to 12), and by 5.04% in Greenway (9 to 14).

Some of the informal voters would have been protestors. There would have been protests against the green rocker in Kingsford Smith, the alleged love rat in Parramatta, and the Christian and (non-practising) Muslim in Greenway. However, the numbers suggest that a couple of extra candidates add at least an extra percentage point to the informal vote.

So, I will half take it back. But 5.04% is startling and I still reckon that half of the new informal voters in Greenway meant it.

Glad to hear that electoral reform is slowly moving out of the domain of psepho-nerds like myself and into the public domain, where it belongs.

The fear I have with allowing votes that do not fully express preferences as formal is that it essentially creates the voluntary preferential system by stealth. This is unhealthy for democracy, since it allows for candidates who clearly lack majority support (either through primary votes or the expression of preferences) to be elected. We would be moving toward the deeply problematic first-past-the-post system, which penalises like-minded candidates, throws up counter-intuitive results, and just generally screws around with the voter's intention.

Enough of Greenway.

Electoral systems can be improved by getting tougher on clowns. Candidates are officially clowns if they get less than 4% of the primary vote. Clowns forfeit their deposit and get no electoral funding.

Pauline Hanson is officially not a clown. She got 4.5% at the last Senate election and pocketed nearly 200 grand.

Clowns wreck democracy by causing informal lower house voting and by getting themselves undemocratically elected to the upper house through preference harvesting.

So here are some practical suggestions:
* Increase the clown limit to 5%.
* Make the deposit serious money.
* At the first step in the count (in both lower and upper house elections), conduct a bulk elimination of clowns and distribute their preferences amongst the remaining candidates.
* Have a national voting system. Dopey state parliaments shouldn’t be able to cause informal voting by confusing people with alternating federal compulsory preferential votes and state optional preferential votes.

Very good Paul, much simpler than my 300 signature method and probably more effective. It also wont stifle minor parties, it will just make them pull their weight and not get away with electoral murder facists first. I think it will actually strengthen minor parties that aren't clowns, as opposed to Citizens Electoral council. They went backwards last time, despite bilboard and newspaper advertising, wierd.

A couple of points.

First, on condorcet voting. If your electoral system has degraded to the point where large numbers of seats will be affected by a multiplicity of parties, I think the solution is proportional representation. Never assume that the bi-polar consensus produced by condorcet voting is actually the choice the electorate is making. Condorcet voting is really designed for smaller groups of informed decision makers, not mass electorates.

Second, nomination. The increase in candidates has been caused by registered parties who do not need to get local nominators. All Independents contesting seats must get 50 nominators. If the same test was applied to registered parties, you would substantially decrease the number of candidates. Tougher party registration procedures, like realistic proof of membership, would assist as well.

Third, the informal vote in Greenway. Of the informal votes, 21% were blank, 27% used '1' only, 7% ticks and crosses, 28% non-sequential numbering, 9% incomplete numbering, and the rest slogans and other marks. The category that increased most in Greenway was various numbering errors.

Fourth, optional preferential voting may fail to produce a majority vote. But perhaps there is not a majority. Compulsory preferential voting builds a majority, but is it a real one, or one manipulated by the direction of preferences by parties?

Five, one national electoral system would require a referendum. Won't happen.

Six. Watch On-line opinion this week for my disection of the Senate voting system.

I must admit the incidence of spoiled votes is a concern.

I would suggest, having spent half my life in a society which did not have this proportional representation or second preference rubbish but relied soley on "first past the post", the solution is as obvious as it is simple.

Make the process simpler, remove all the ranking and other challenges to the dyslexic, drunk and otherwise distracted would-be voters - simple place one X against one name and the result - politicians with a real sense of responsibility to their electorate.

What Col Rouge recommends would only make sense in a system of full proportional representation where every voter ends up represented by the representative he voted for. Otherwise would be first-past-the-post winner-takes-all, even more anti-democratic (marginally) than our present disingenuous 'preferential' system which is also winner-takes-all.

A psephologist worth his salt would question the credentials of such a dishonest system.

Aker – the point with elections is they are an imperfect process. You can have either a complicated process simple to rig and manipulate in which no one can really check the outcome or something easy which everyone understand and which, whilst imperfect can be held up and easily verified. Democracy is likewise an imperfect process of government but less imperfect than any other options that I am aware of.

My opinion is –

an imperfect yet simple process

is better than

an imperfect yet complicated process.

And yes the idea of parliamentary democracy is to keep the “elected representative”, to some degree, the “representative” of the electorate who elected him – mess with that and you destroy a the relationship and accountability of the representative.

I would have thought that ”any psephologist worth his salt” would have understood such a precept.

IF you suggest it is ”undemocratic” I suggest you look at the UK electoral process – it has always been “first past the post” , has never had “proportional representation” and seems to fair with remarkable resilience and democratic vigour despite being, as you claim “a dishonest system”.

Wrong. A complicated voting process makes it harder to vote strategically and Condorcet voting makes it impossible to vote strategically. The opposite of what you said is true. A simple system like First Past the Post means that people need to compromise their principles just to elect their prefered candidate from the two most likely to win, that is strategic voting or 'rigging'. On the other hand, preferential voting and more ideally Condorcet voting allow you to honestly express your preferences for every candidate, regarless of percieved chances of winng.

What I was alluding to in my first post was that we should not sacrifice a good system (preferential) or the chance of a better system (Condorcet) for 5% of the population who forget how to vote or didn't double check to see that they had numbered their preferences wrongly. I believe that such a sacrifice would be to involve any form of optional preferences, which would lead to a cardinal system of voting and thus strategic voting, which is a core criterion that a democratic voting method must prevent.

I'm now posting from London, where I am observing the UK's election, which make my response time a little lagged. Interstingly, the election here does not appear as undemocratic as some in this post suggest.

Now Penekiko, your argument is getting muddled. Optional preferential voting will not necessarily lead to first past the voting. Parties and candidates can still win on preferences, and it will still be in the interests of parties and candidate to encourage voters to give preferences, or not give preferences. It simply provides another otpion.

I get back to my original point. The engineering of results using optional preferential voting is no worse than with compulsory preferential voting. Perhaps Labor has used the system to encourage exhausted preferences at recent Qld elections. But why is that any worse than under compulsory preferences when parties encourage voters to ape their preference tickets and engineer a result.

Optional preferential voting means voters in the end do not have to vote for candidates they do not wish to choose between. I don't see that giving voters the right to vote for the candidates they want and reject shonky candidates is anything other than an improvement to the system.

OK, I am coming around to your way of thinking Antony, it does make sense and I suppose it is only strategic in that people are chasing their honest preferences, which may be no preferences at all for some candidates. I think I have been a little brainwashed by http://www.electionmethods.org/. But I still believe that an optional preferential condorcet voting method would be the best system.

Some questions about this optional system. How would it affect our notion of 'two party prefered', invented by Malcom Mackerras? It would make polling questions more tricky. Would it only require federal government legislation to change? And do you think it will be changed this federal term?

Mr Google reckons that Penekiko has been a Greens candidate. She might be interested to know that optional preference voting would stop Greens getting elected to the lower house (admittedly, Greens rarely are). The Greens would not have won the Cunningham by-election without compulsory preferential voting. In NSW, the majority of voters do not give a full set of preferences when it is optional. Labor would have won the Cunningham by-election easily under optional preferential voting.

Optional preferential voting is a bad undemocratic solution to the problem of unintentional informal voting.

A much better solution is optional preferential voting dressed up as compulsory preferential voting. Under this system, you have laws saying that a valid vote gives a full set of preferences, that how-to-vote cards must show a full set, and that it is an electoral offence to encourage anyone to give less than a full set of preferences. But you also have a law saying that votes are only rejected if absolutely necessary.

If someone just ticks Family First and gives no preferences, then the vote has to be discarded when the Family First preferences are distributed. But if someone just ticks Liberal or Labor and they are the last two candidates left in the contest, there is no reason to reject the vote. This system would massively reduce the informal vote without introducing a capriciously undemocratic optional system that takes us half way to first past the post.

That Blair is a bastard. He could have waited two months so that visiting psephologists could have had a bit of warmth and some Wimbledon strawbs.

With both optional and compulsory preferential voting, approximately 50% of voters end up represented by someone they voted AGAINST.
Such systems are 'representative' in name only.
To be genuinely representative, voters must be represented by someone they voted FOR. Only full proportional representation can meet that criterion.
Of course, full proportional representation is not sufficient for a democratic outcome. The Dutch lower house demonstrates that.
For a democratic outcome, there must also be ongoing accountability of representatives to their constituents.
The idea that genuine democracy can be easy or simple is an illusion.
The acceptance of minority interests never being directly represented in parliament is profoundly anti-democratic.
Why do psephologists in the public media persistently ignore these issues?

Penekiko In any democratic system a degree of compromise with others is unavoidable. Presenting what is the “obviously insurmountable” as a justification for proportional representation is to presume the degree of compromise is diminished under proportional representation. When it is clear compromise will not be diminished you still end up with a number of elected individuals under a complicated and questionable quagmire versus a clean and clear FPP process.

The difference between first past post versus proportional representation is

FPP = the representative is responsible to a defined electorate who can then hold their representative to some degree of accountability

Prop Rep = the representative is responsible to some party machine who first selects and decides who will be offered for public consumption, after due process and appropriate branch stacking has intervened to ensure the interests of the party machine is entrenched in any future decisions the representative may need to consider.

Similar to Antony Green, I have participated in the UK FPP and consider it, after comparison to the three ring circus of second preference deals and skulduggery, to be a superior process simply because it is simple, understandable and unambiguous.

To quote dear Baroness Thatcher regarding ‘consensus’ and applying it to its electoral voting equivalent, “proportional representation” –
“To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.” – such is the outcome of proportional representation – the representative who seems least objectionable – not the best person for the job

Aker – for reasons of the above, regardless of your pursuit for the perfect, it will not and should never happen – since your desired outcome would result in the elected representative being divorced and devoid of all responsibility or accountability to any electorate.

To put it simply - we are all minorities of one - so why should some "minority interests" be accommodated at the obvious expense of the "majority interests"?

Greens candidate eh? Mr Google eh? Maybe in an Indonesian court.

Well let’s see what Mr Google really has to say about Penekiko:
For more information contact Kaye Mackay (03) 5*85 6773
... Hot Topic, penis size, penekiko, 4, 239. 02-12-05 12:01 PM. Hot Topic,Fantasies w/ Interracial sex partner, 247brother, 4, 385. 02-12-05 02:55 AM ...Find your name in Hawaiian....English to Hawaiian name translations!... Benedict - Penekiko Benetta - Peneka Benigno - Penikeno Benilde - PenileBenisse - Penike Benita - Penika Benjamin - Peniamina Benjie - Peni'i ...

That’s right, I’m a female interracial sex partner by the name of Benedict with a hot topic penis size and who has fantasies for standing as a candidate for the greens and if you want more information please contact kaye mackay.

As a lecturer at the social work department of the University of Western Australia, couldn’t your research be better? Which begs the question: “and what does the elusive ‘Mr Google’ have to say about Paul Murphy?” http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=paul+murphy&type=1

So does OptionalPV really turn into a quasi FPP model? Or is it more democratic than CompulsoryPV as Antony says? I am really confused. I need an anchor in this relativistic world.

Col, Where habe Ich advocated proportional representation? Ich think our 150 lowerhouse electorates ist gut, mit Condorcet voting mit eine schulze methodolgie, ja?

Given your opinions aker, I think you need to go to http://www.electionmethods.org/ and become a schulze subscriber with our current single member electorates.

There are lots of Paul Murphys, and there may be many Penekikos. I'm not a WA Uni lecturer. I'm a Sydney actuary.

One of the (doubtless numerous) Penekikos had a home page at the site of the Victorian Greens. It has disappeared in the last 24 hours. The home page led to info about one of the Greens Senate candidates with a surname similar to Penekiko.

Candidate Penekiko is connected with the Two Bays branch. So is Kaye Mackay, who is mentioned in this forum’s Penekiko’s latest missive along with most of her phone number.

So there is an opportunity for the forum Penekiko and the candidate Penekiko to connect and form a Penekiko club.

Mysterious, it is unforunate that the website was taken down in the last 24 hours. There was a link to the greens website with a google search on penekiko, but only a kaye phone number, no penekiko coming-out-of-the-closet-society. Anyone wanting to interrogate kaye (myslef included) will have to try 10 different numbers, or do a google search. So I must apologise Paul, your Google search was indeed very revealing and sophisticated, the internet is not all that annoymous.

My real, just as obscure name was related to a federal candidate for the south australian senate, who was arrested for sabotaging a shipment of live sheep.

You may now officially address me as Pope Benedict XV.

OK, Penekiko, your real name is connected to a South Australian vegan Senate candidate. The SA vegan candidates were Ralph Hahnheuser and Benno Lang. I would like to think that you are related to Chuck Hahn. He makes great beer.

Getting back to the actual forum, Antony's topic is optional preferences but a lot of the discussion has concerned proportional voting. Some posters have assumed that this is self evidently more democratic than single member seats and have asked why psephologists do not say so.

I'm not a pseph, but I konw that democracy works when it gives effect to the voters intent.

Most Australians accept that our lower house vote is a "winner take all" vote on who wins government and that our upper house vote is a vote on the proportionate shares in the house of review. More than 80% of us vote for a major party in the lower house.

The majority of us accept that we are playing winner take all in the lower house. Sometimes we lose and sometimes we win. But we get a government that can govern. Usually it is constrained by the upper house.

People who want proportional voting in the lower house and consequent ineffectual government are in the minority. It is not democratic to give them their voting system.

I am flabbergasted that FPP [first-past-the-post] can be considered more amenable to accountable representation than PR [proportional representation].
This reverses reality. FPP actually renders accountability impossible.
Accountability only makes sense when the representative is a member of the constituency he represents - based on a coherent set of views, values and intentions.
The notion that a representative can actually represent people who hold views, values and intentions that disagree with his own, is absurd.
All existing electorates - based on place of residence - include a bewildering array of views, values and intentions - many of which are seriously opposed to others. There is no way a single representative can either represent or be accountable to such a diverse constituency.
In contrast, PR would make genuine representation and accountability possible.
But PR itself would not be possible without a complete rebuilding of the electoral system.
If such reforms are utopian, then democracy is utopian, and perhaps we would all be better off if we stopped pretending that our society is democratic.
Wise government requires consideration of the widest possible range of views and evidence - diversity. FPP suppresses diversity. Likewise for WTA elections generally - winner-takes-all. PR would allow diversity.
Existing electoral systems are a monstrous confidence trick whereby all power ends up in few hands.

Aker – if you think the idea of multiple subgroups of politicians all with the conflicting agendas from their diversity of views works better than the Westminster system – I suggest you study Italian politics of the post WWII years – the problem ends up of deals within deals and wheels within deals which keeps the electorate busy in a cycle of eternal re-election – result – governmental paralysis and instability.

I am sorry that you seem not to “get it” but reality is “FPP”, with the elected representative directly identifiable and accountable to a given “electorate” IS A MORE EFFECTIVE AND DEMOCRATIC PROCESS than the arms-length type of relationship which exists between the electorate and some “proportionally determined” representative(s), where buck passing becomes endemic. Regardless of the theory – it is the practice which matters and FPP tops PR any and every day.

As I said somewhere up the page, Democratic process are not perfect and some will always find fault with them. However, they are just so much "better" than any of the alternatives

Col, are you talking about the difference between single member electorates (HoR) and multiple member electorates (Senate) or the difference between PR and FPP in general?

What you say only makes sense if you're talking about the former. In single member electorates FPP is atrocious because it often results in someone being elected even though the majority of the electorate prefers a different person. It is a little better for multiple member electorates, but there is another problem in that any extra votes for elected candidates are discarded.

Whoops I confused proportional representation with preferential voting there.

Anyways, count me on the side of those who support proportional representation - for the reasons Aker outlined. Our current system may be more stable but it isn't more democratic.

Deuc and Aker, I am with Col and Paul on the craziness of Proportional representation for the lower house. Comrades, if you want democracy (irony intended) in the house of reps, look no further then Condorcet.

I think Proportional representation would and does work well in the senate though. In my model the senate would no longer be the states house, which is in name only, but would become the house of the diverse society and a proper check against the government of the day.

There should 38 members including the speaker in the senate, 19 of which are chosen at a time, with the whole of Australia as the electorate. Candidates would be elected with a quota of 5%. Voting would be as outlined in Antony Green's latest article on OLO.

Thanks Deuc and Penekiko. It's comforting that I'm not completely alone re electoral democracy.
Penekiko, the Condorcet method seems to be perhaps the most effective way to run a preferential voting system. Well and good; but this would still produce a single representative for a greatly diverse constituency. By definition, such an outcome would leave many constituents represented by someone who disagrees with them. In other words, Condorcet, like all WTA systems leaves many citizens without genuine representation. Such an outcome is the antithesis of democracy.
Penekiko's comments about reforming the Senate are interesting. First the concession that "Proportional representation would and does work well in the senate". Would you also concede that contentious issues are subjected to more democratic consideration in the partly proportional Senate than in the WTA Reps? That, of course, will change when the Government 'has the numbers' in the Senate.
If so, then why not leave the Senate alone, and reform the Reps into a single national electorate?
An important point is that PR would require more elected representatives, not less.
The nearest to full PR that I know of is the Dutch lower house - a single national electorate with 150 members, giving a quota of c0.67%.
In fact, there need not be a numerical quota. Very small interest groups who meet criteria of needing representation could be accommodated if proportional parliamentary votes were allowed. This would allow very small bona fide interest groups representation.
Scoffers please note that very small interest groups can be quite large: 1% of the national electorate would now be more than 130,000 voters; 0.5%, more than 65,000 voters.
Any representative system which bars such numbers of its citizens the right of ever being represented is NOT representative - fails to meet its mandate.
Our electoral system - which claims to be a representative democracy - fails to meet its mandate - by a long way. A more accurate name for our system might be a pseudo-democratic oligarchy.

I'm not sure if your plan is the best way Penekiko. The Senate at the moment cannot propose money bills and has less consideration for double dissolution tiebreakers, so the lower house is more powerful. Why should the less democratic of the two houses have the advantage? (Admittedly the senate rotations makes this less true.) If the problem is that no majority may exist to form a government, then take away that question from the Parliament and put it to the people.

Fully separating the legislative and executive branches could encourage members not to vote simply along party lines. And the proportional voting method could be designed to further encourage it, but this may bring in other problems. (I haven't fully thought this through) I also think the principle that a majority of people in the states must consent to a law is a good one, but it is becoming less important.

Aker, I think a condorcet candidate would be pretty much representative of everyone in the electorate, as close as possible. But it isn't the same as PR. I am writing an article for OLO on Condorcet voting as a better system for single member electorates, but I don't take up the winner-take-all vs PR argument. There are many ways you could design either government with various possible and unintentional outcomes, that will take a fair bit of thinking.

So if we did introduce PR for the HoR is suspect it would be in our interests to have a close examination of the constitution as well. So I haven't completely made up my mind, but if we're going to have single member electorates, then condorcet is the way.

Thanks Deuc and Penekiko. I am all for "a close examination" of our electoral systems and the Constitution. It really bothers me that the status quo is accepted as democratic by most people - who do not, and never have, closely examined the ways our society works.

Most of all, it really bothers me that the experts - who should lead the way in such close examination - never question the bases of the status quo. This is true with regard to psephologists about electoral issues, and economists about economic issues.

Experts in the media occupy a position of public trust. They should live up to that responsibility.

Yeah,

I think the media plays a big part in the maintenence of the status quo particuarly the print and television media. They choose the issues to run and not to run and they are captive to profit and not the truth. We wouldn't be so complacent about our democracy being the best in the world if the media scrutinised like it is supposed to.