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”.