A great article.

If we had to vote on a solution to this problem then my vote would be to introduce a system that allowed both:-

Optional preferential voting below the line or
Optional preference voting above the line

I agree with all of Antony's criticisms of the Senate voting system. All of the perversions he describes warrant correction.
However, I disagree with the implication that the perversions in Senate elections are worse than the perversions of House of Representatives elections.
Perhaps the worst aspect of PR-STV elections mentioned by Antony is the OCCASIONAL election of micro-party candidates with minuscule primary votes, while other minority parties with much larger primary votes remain unrepresented.
This perversion is far less important than the worst perversion of the TPP [Two-Party-Preferred] system of, e.g., the House of Representatives where 100% power is ALWAYS given to a candidate with nowhere near 100% support, and often considerably less than 50% of the primary vote.
The issue of quotas was not addressed by Antony. The quotas for the Senate are about 14.3% for the States, and 33.3% for the Territories. Both of these are large enough to exclude all minority interests from ever being represented.
Even Hare-Clark with 9 members would have quotas too high to allow minority interests representation. Antony's reference to Hare-Clark as "romantic" suggests to me hostility towards allowing minority interests even a chance of representation, let alone a right to representation.
A fully proportional system - where every formal vote counts - would not only be far better, but also far simpler, completely eliminating any need for 'preferences'.

I can only think of voting as now being like playing a pinball machine. One fires the ball into the machine, and after many rebounds, dings, pings, bells and whistles, a score is achieved. Someone could become more expert and can learn how to direct the ball to where they want it to go, but for most people, the score that is achieved is rather random.

The same with voting, because there are so many preference vote deals being made between the candidates, the voter has very little idea of where their vote is going to go, and what score will be achieved.

The Senate should be particularly important in a democracy, as it should operate as a check and balance on any excesses from the House of Representatives. It should operate as an impartial jury, and it would be best that the members of the Senate are as diverse as possible, so that that the Senate eventually becomes impartial as a whole.

How to achieve that diversity is the question. Eliminating preference deals from the Senate is a possibility, together with having only independents in the Senate. At least there would be less necessity for “How to Vote” cards.

I'd like to see a minimum primary vote required for election to the Senate. Every ticket with a primary vote of less than, say, half or a third of a quota is eliminated in the first round and their preferences go to the next ticket remaining in the race.

I can't see how it is democratic that a party with a senate primary vote of 2.2% (Family First in Victoria) can have a candidate elected ahead of a party with 8% (the Greens). A mininum primary quota will end the byzantine system of preference swapping, as the vast majority of minor parties will be eliminated from the senate race straight away.

The real problem with the Senate is that it is supposed to be a state's house but it has become another house for the major parties - plus a few independents thrown in because of proportional representation.

Falcon - talk of Family First getting two per cent compared to the Greens getting 8 per cent may be some what of an injustice but consider the absolute numbers of votes garnered by Senate candidates.

Stephen Fielding may have polled a quarter of the votes of his Greens counterpart in Victoria - but this was still more votes than Bob Brown polled to get elected as a Tasmanian Senator.

In fact the Greens' candidate in Victoria polled four times as many votes as Bob Brown has in two elections - yet Tasmania's huge bias in terms of Senate voting power has Brown elected.

This would not be so bad if Senators were actually representig their state but Bob Brown is a Green's Senator, not a Tasmanian Senator.

Similarly, other senators act in the interests of their party before their state.

t.u.s

A comment on Falcon's post. If you introduce a threshold level below which all parties will be excluded, then you will cause the larger parties to do even more preference swaps because they will know the deal can never be reversed. It will also encourage even more parties with peculiar attractive names to register in a bid to grab preferences. Don't put it past the major parties to create these front parties.

Micro parties could not be elected EXCEPT for ticket voting. Without ticket voting, preferences could not be swapped tightly.

My argument about restricting the number of preferences on registered tickets will have the same outcome, preventing preference harvesting as a tactic for election by micro parties. Allowing voters to give their own preferences in an easier manner will also help this. Both of these tactics will overcome the need to introduce a threshold quota.

My comment about 'romantic' supporters of Hare-Clark refers to the full Hare-Clark system of rotating ballot papers and personal voting. I can't see how this can be made to work in the Senate in large states with huge quotas where all the attention is on lower house candidates

Firstly, thank you Antony for the guide on what the Naturist Lifestyle Party may have to do at the next NSW LC election.

However, once I take off my scarcely visible politician's hat, I have to agree that the whole preference deal thing is offensive. If the NLP is successful, I'd much rather it be because that's what the voters wanted, than because of behind the scenes machinations. Indeed, where a minor party wins a seat on preferences, it rather undermines that party's claim to represent some particular social group.

The main misgiving I have about a system that makes life more difficult for the minor parties is that to some extent, a vote for a minor party is a vote against the majors - a sort of pox on all your houses sentiment. A knowledgeable voter might take the view that they know that voting for a minor party contributes to the success of some minor party candidate, and indeed may not care that much who it is, just as long as it represents a seat denied to the majors.

Perhaps we need to be able to cast negative votes.

Sylvia Else
http://www.naturistlp.org.au

Sorry Sylvia, but my article gives you no help for the NSW Legislative Council. Ticket voting as used in the Senate has been abolished for the NSW LC. Ticket votes in NSW only apply for the single party you vote for. There are no further preferences, baring the death of a candidate when a special provision might apply.

In NSW, voters must fill in preferences for 15 candidates below the line, or at least one square above the line. Voters can number preferences for parties above the line. The only preferences that count are those filled in by voters themselves. There are no party deals as there are no preferences for parties to distribute.

I hope your party is already regsitered. NSW parties must be registered 12 months ahead of the election, which makes the cut-off date March 2006.

Thanks Antony. I got the impression from your article that its effect had been reduced, but if it's gone completely, then that potentially makes the my life a lot simpler.

Not registered yet. We are aware of the time limit, but there's a minor issue of reaching the required number of members. We're still working on that.

Sylvia.

A good article, it was also written more clearly than 'informal voting - don't blame the voters', probably because the subject matter here is clearer. Seems like we have the same problems that you mentioned in the previous article, but by the sounds of things salvation is at hand.

I hope that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters pays alot more attention to your submission(s) then Mr Michael Doyle's.

Good stuff, Antony. Three things:

First, the ability to do cynical or opportunistic preference deals varies from party to party. Every party has an idealistic / morally expressive / ideological element and a pragmatic / instrumentalist / realistic element. The major parties and some minor parties are weighted to the instrumentalists. The Greens are overwhelmingly weighted to the expressives.

This makes it very hard for the Greens to do deals that would enrage their voters and cost them primary votes. The Victorian deal between Labor and Family First may have been cynical but it did not enrage many of the voters of either party. Most did not know about the deal. Most of the rest took the Richo view – “Whatever it takes”.

In short, the game theory that you describe is only available to the pragmatists, not the moralists.

Second, you could have given more information about the defects of optional preferential voting in the NSW upper house. As the count proceeds, the votes of some voters who did not give a full set of preferences are discarded.

As a result, there are not enough votes left for the last few elected candidates to get a full quota. In the 2003 election, 17 of the 21 elected NSW upper house councillors got a full quota. The other 4 got partial quotas. The last elected councillor (a radio announcer and gun advocate) got in with 2% of the vote.

Third, I don’t understand your opposition to a group elimination of candidates and groups that failed to meet a threshhold vote of, say, 4% (with all eliminated votes distributed). Drury and Family First are not owned by the major parties. They are trying to win by preference harvesting. Candidates and groups that fail to get a decent number of first preferences should be booted out.

I note that Penekiko states above that he hopes "that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters pays a lot more attention to your submission(s) then Mr Michael Doyle's. "

Regardless of their final decision, I would be hoping that the Committee pays a (roughly) equal amount of attention to all submissions.

I assume, Antony, that voting would still be compulsory under your 'optional' preferential system? Its just that I cannot see where it is explicitly stated.

http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/em/elect04/subs.htm

It speaks for itself. But I hope they would pay enough attention to realise that it should be ignored.

A couple of responses to Paul Murphy.

The exhausted vote in the NSW LC is high, but the system basically operates as a form of List PR with highest remainder method of determining the final vacancies. That was how it was before ticket voting was introduced in 1988, and how it worked under the new system in 2003. When electing 21 MLCs, you might as well use systems like D´Hondt rather than quota preferential voting. Sure, the last candidates got less than a quota, but they were the parties with the highest remaining votes. Under the previous ticket system, proportionality was completely distorted by preferences, hence parties elected with originally less than 1%.

I would not recommend the NSW LC system of no inter-party preferences for the Senate because there are only 6 vacancies to fill. Preferences have to play a bigger roll, so a minimum number of preferences are required.

To date, the only arguments put for minimum threshold have called for it to be set at 0.5 or 0.8 of the actual quota. In other words, an attempt to really cut minor parties. Any value set is arbitrary. I doubt these will get up. The National Party would not have won the last Queensland seat under such a system.

Setting a threshold is an arbitrary method stopping preference harvesting. I would go for higher deposit fees, tougher party registration rules and limiting preferences on group tickets as a way of achieving the same goal.

At the risk of sounding like chief trumpet-blower with the Melbourne Symphony, I wrote an article advocating a preference-above-the-line system a fortnight after the Federal election last year. Here's the link, http://home.iprimus.com.au/ltuffin/SHARP.html, and here's the crucial paragraph:

It's time to alter the Senate voting system to give voters more control of their preferences. Instead of the current option of voters simply lodging a single preference above the line, voters should be able to number all boxes above the line, and their preferences should be counted as if they had voted straight down the list of candidates for each party in the number ordered. The below-the-line option would still remain. With a simple change, voters could have much greater control over how they vote and could easily indicate where they wish their preferences to go. This change would minimise the ability of shady backroom deals to undermine the intentions of voters, since there would be no 'preference ticket' lodged with the Electoral Commission. Most importantly, it would go some way to alleviating the anger and disillusionment that many voters are feeling because of the way their preferences are being used to elect candidates with a very different political affiliation to the one they voted for.

There is a great confluence of minds on this one Ari. The system you propose has already been implemented for the NSW Legislative Council, which is why it is the main change being proposed.

But at the NSW Senate election, there were 78 below the line candidates and 29 groups. If compulosy preferential voting still applied, that would be 29 above the line preferences.

Maybe the Parliament will consider completely abolishing ticket voting, in which case allowing above the line preferences is the way to go, but I suspect it would have to be combined with optional preferences.

There are a number of options, some outlined in my article like limiting preferences on tickets.

But the key change that must be made is to provide voters an easy option to fill in their own preferences, an option which they are currently denied.

Elections are about measuring the will of the electorate. The current system fails that as it makes it very difficult for voters to do anything other than use the ticket votes.

Thanks Antony for opening up this important debate. It's tragic that you are now almost the only figure in the country capable of doing this - politicians often won't because they benefit, and those who do are accused of doing it for party gain, and most other figures are seen as so partisan their contributions on an issue like this are also discounted.

A minor point I would like to add was that the whole problem was made worse by the way booklets listing the group voting tickets were not made available at polling booths, at least in Victoria. I received a phone call from someone who had asked to see the booklet at her polling booth and was told by the staff they did not have it. I thought this was an exception, but around 1pm on polling day ran into a friend of mine who was second in charge for the AEC at one of the largest polling booths in the state. He was coming out for his first break since 7am (all of 10 minutes to run across the road and get lunch) and when I told him this he responded that he was pretty sure that they either didn't have the booklets at his booth, or would not be able to find them if asked.

Subsequent inquiries demonstrated that most other booths didn't have the booklets readily available. The AEC seems to have decided that their former role of ensuring the public is properly informed about the mechanisms of democracy is less important than cutting back on costs.

One minor correction - in 1998 Victoria was not the Democrats' highest vote, but their second, after South Australi.