Gday Forrest

Formalising the donkey vote would indeed be interesting when it comes to public funding for political parties. And I’m sure we can all appreciate that this point alone will be enough reason for it never to be implemented, despite the fact that it could be done within our constitution.

Matt@righthinker,

Formalising the donkey vote would take care of your concern about politicians having to fight for our vote.

Sharkfin,

“The people should never surrender that power by not voting.”

Agreed. But they should most definitely have the power to formally vote for no candidate if they feel that none deserves their vote.

This is the biggest problem with compulsory voting as it is now – compelling people to lodge a vote for one of the candidates, when many people would feel that none of the candidates deserve their vote. It gives us an awfully false indication of support.

I feel the need to express complete outrage over the compulsory preferential voting system, again, as I have done numerous times on this forum.

I find it really quite amazing that practically no one else appreciates the grave nature of this disgusting aspect of our governmental system.

Compulsory preferential voting has surely got to be an even bigger concern than compulsory voting or not being able to formally vote for the donkey.

This system steels your vote!!

If you wish to not vote for one of the two biggest candidates / parties, then tough luck, you can’t!! Even if you put them last and second last, your vote will filter down and end up counting for whichever you put second last.

Thus, Banjo’s dilemma; “My biggest decision is what major party to put last.”, really does become the most important thing for those who wish to vote against the big parties.

It is just horrible, totally antidemocratic, a complete rort of the system, a highly false indication of support, a violation of any trust that the people have in our decision-makers and in the system…. and it is totally unnecessary, when we have a perfectly good method with the optional preferential system.

Being compelled to mark every box on your ballot form has GOT TO STOP. We need to make that conversion at the federal level and in some states off the compulsory preferential system and onto the optional preferential system, as Queensland did under Goss in about 1992.

It is of course possible that the electoral rolls were 'padded' significantly in 1903, and continued in that state to some extent until 1922. The trend of steady increase in voter turnout from 1903 to 1919 may have been due to the superimposition of a carefully staged amount of fraudulent vote claiming over the top of a fairly steady level of genuine voter turnout of, say, around 55 to 65 per cent. But what explains the sudden return to a level of 58 per cent voter turnout in 1922? The absolute number of enrolments certainly did not decline between 1919 and 1922. And it does not seem to make sense that with rolls presumably padded to some extent that use would suddenly not have been made of such postulated 'padding' in 1922.

What might explain a sudden abandonment of at least the continued emplacement of electoral roll 'padding' is fear that its existing extent may render the rort liable to detection. Perhaps the electoral process was coming under closer scrutiny after the intense political fervour that accompanied the conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917. What could have made the postulated rort vulnerable?

The answer may lie in the source Professor Sawer has used to quote the 96 per cent enrolment level achieved in 1903. It was a 1904 Report of a Conference of Commonwealth Electoral Officers that contained this claim. If it was used as a baseline indicator to derive the proportion of the population eligible to enroll at any given later date, and officially recorded increases in net levels of enrolment by around April 1917 are taken into account, it would have appeared that the enrolment level as a percentage of the eligible had reached around 110 per cent by that date! That may have raised a lot of unanswerable questions. Better back off on the 'padding' rort. By 1922 the enrolment level had declined to 93 per cent.

It seems nobody, including Professor Sawer, realized the 1904 Report was wrong! The correct level in 1903 was around 86 per cent enrolment, and in 1917, only 101 per cent!

Ludwig,

I would love to respond to some of your points with respect to preferential voting, but I am trying to offer a somewhat quantified explanation, albeit an heretical one, for the adoption of compulsion in respect to voting and enrolment. If this explanation stands up, it may put many of the contentions relating to the present voting system into a different perspective. If once it can be shown that the reason behind the adoption of compulsion may have been to provide cover for ongoing fraudulence and electoral impropriety, then I think many of the reasons for keeping voting compulsory may have to be re-evaluated. In turn, voting systems may be seen in a different light: many undesirable effects may come to be seen as being a consequence of fraudulent distortions, rather than arising from the system of voting.

To return to the argument.

With enrolment in reality at a level of 'only' 101 per cent as at April 1917, rorters may have seen a need to back off substantially in emplacing names on the rolls. After all, there would have to be room left for the net growth from genuine new enrolments expected between 1917 and 1919 when the next elections were due. By the 1919 elections, the enrolment level had dropped in reality to around 96 per cent. Probably around 85 per cent of the genuinely eligible were enrolled, much the same percentage as has been researched do so today. The rorters would have known that as well.

But if the postulated rorters had failed to notice the error in the 1904 report of 96 per cent in 1903 as did Professor Sawer, then they may have continued to refrain from 'padding' in the belief that there were still 'too many' names on the rolls. They may also have refrained from using any 'padding' left at elections for exactly the same reasons. The postulated abstention from rorting at the 1922 elections may have resulted in a residual genuine turnout of 58 per cent (the international norm in non-compulsory voting regimes) of electors enrolled.

Forest,
I do not quite follow what you are getting at,so perhaps I will have another look in the morning. Did not The present Qld Government have an inquiry, called the Sheperdson inquiry, which was suspended after it began to find some very interesting matters. such as someone's cat being registered and some in the local cemertary also on the roll. This occured in recent years.

If I can use my bank account 1000kls from home, I do not see why a better neans of registration and roll checking cannot be devised. Each voter now has a tax file number, a good place to start.

Ludwig,
I agree with you abbsolutly about compulsory preferential voting, but I am afraid we are stuck with it as long as we have the two major parties deciding on voting proceedures. The simple fact is that they benefit, so why should they change it?

So you are not the only one that thinks CPV is completely rotten.
This plus the number to members needed to register means any new party is unlikely to get established. So the two party system remains.

One example of how principled our poiticians are. Heather Hill was elected into the Senate, a One Nation candidate to represent Qld. Heather was taken to court and prevented from taking her seat because she had duel citizenship. Now about 20-30 other Federal Parliamentarians were also duel citizens. But did any resign, as a precedence had been established, not on your sweet Nellie.

The younguns wonder why i am so cynical.

Banjo,

My posts on this thread constitute an heretical postulated history of the electoral process since federation. The numbers and percentages are all recounted or derivable from the official public records of election results and population in the relevant Year Books. Unlike most inquiry into anomalies and improprieties, this heretical history applies the advantage of hindsight in offerring explanations for apparent anomalies and the disconnection from the political process felt by so many people today, with the ship of state on so many occasions seemingly not answering the helm. I seek to show that the equivalent to a large unlawful disposable proxy vote may have been present in most elections over more than a century, and that policy may have been formed consistently contrary to the wishes of an otherwise genuine majority of electors with its aid. In doing this I am not pursuing identification and conviction of perpetrators of electoral fraud, but attempting to show how electoral results may be bent.

To return to the argument, with the 1922 elections out of the way, the postulated rorters, now knowing the real propensity of the genuinely eligible to enroll and vote, and having unnecessarily withdrawn or not exercised the use of roll 'padding' at that election, needed an explanation that would cover a high level of voting in future elections. The adoption of compulsory voting would provide the perfect cover.

By not exceeding the theoretical limit of enrolments imposed by the population statistics, and with a ready explanation for a high apparent voter turnout, the 'proxy' vote potentially available with little likelihood of detection was perhaps 15 percent of the theoretical maximum number of enrolments possible. This remained the probable ceiling until around the late 1940s, when, with the commencement of large scale immigration, the clear picture as to the maximum possible number of enrolments became increasingly blurry due to the effects of non-British citizenship on the equation.

That should be enough for the night.