Research Paper Index

Research Paper no. 5 2007–08

Australian electoral systems

Scott Bennett and Rob Lundie
Politics and Public Administration Section
21 August 2007

Contents

Executive summary
Introduction
The first Australian elections
Preferential Voting
‘Full’ Preferential Voting

A single count
More than one count

The political impact of ‘full’ Preferential Voting

Favouring the major parties
The ‘wrong’ result
The ‘winner’s bonus’
Three-cornered contests
Controlling the voter—the importance of how-to-vote cards

Optional Preferential Voting

The political impact of Optional Preferential Voting

Fewer votes
Lessening the importance of preferences

Proportional Representation (Single Transferable Vote)
‘Senate’ Model

Electorates
Ballot paper

Lists

Voting

‘Above the line’ votes
‘Below the line’ votes
Vote totals

The Count

Surplus votes
Transfer value
Exclusion of candidates and distribution of their preferences

The political impact of Proportional Representation (‘Senate’ model)

‘Safe’ seats
The minor parties
Control of the Senate

Hare-Clark model

Electorates
Ballot paper
Voting

The quota

The count
The political impact of Proportional Representation (Hare-Clark)

Minority governments
Reduced party control
No seat is safe
Everyone is an opponent

Conclusion—electoral systems that suit Australia
Appendix 1: Other voting systems used in Australia
Appendix 2: Electoral systems in use in Australia

Party abbreviations

Introduction

Australian parliamentary elections have been notable for the extent of electoral system experimentation and change over the years. Some of this change has been aimed at providing the best possible voting system; on the other hand, some of the change has been made with the aim of achieving particular political outcomes.

The Australian experience has focussed on three types of voting system:

Plurality systems are the simplest of systems, where the winner is the candidate with a plurality of votes, though not necessarily an absolute majority of votes. Such systems include First Past the Post and the Block Vote, both of which have been used in Australia.

Majority systems attempt to ensure that a candidate secures an absolute majority of votes. The Second Ballot and the Contingent Vote are examples that have been used in Australia. The best-known and most widely used in this country has been Preferential Voting (known in the UK as the Alternative Vote, and in the USA as Instant Runoff Voting) which is discussed at some length in this paper.

Proportional Representation systems (PR) are designed to allocate parliamentary seats to parties in proportion to their vote. The example in use in Australia is the Single Transferable Vote.

This paper refers to the main variants of Preferential Voting and the Single Transferable Vote that are used today, outlining the way each operates, and discussing briefly the political consequences of their use. Appendix 1 gives examples of some of the Australian systems used over the years. Appendix 2 lists the electoral systems currently in use in Australia.

The first Australian elections

The first Australian parliamentary elections were held in 1843 for the New South Wales Legislative Council, a body whose members had previously all been appointed. The Legislative Council had been enlarged, with 24 of its 36 members to be elected.^[1]The electoral system used was First Past the Post, with the candidates who gained the highest number of votes being elected. The voting in different electorates was held over a few days, with the first being held in the electorate of Sydney—the first parliamentary election held in Australia (Election Result 1).

Election Result 1: Sydney (Legislative Council, NSW) 1843
[Two to be elected]

Source: M. M. H. Thompson, The First Election: The New South Wales Legislative Council Election of 1843, Alpha Desktop Publishing, Mittagong, 1996, p. 142.

In 1851 the first elections were held in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, also for Legislative Councils. Western Australia first held elections for 12 of 18 Legislative Councillors in 1870.

By 1860 the achievement of what became known as ‘responsible government’ had seen elections put in place for lower houses of parliament in New South Wales (1856), Victoria (1856), South Australia (1856), Tasmania (1856) and Queensland (1860). Lower house elections were not held in Western Australia until 1890.

The pre 1856 elections were all conducted by a show of hands, with the candidate with the highest vote winning the contest—a First Past the Post electoral system. The first use of the secret ballot (soon known internationally as the ‘Australian ballot’) occurred in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in 1856, followed soon after by New South Wales in 1858 and Queensland in 1860. It was first used in Western Australia in 1879. Although the first electoral system used in all colonies was First Past the Post, none of the states now use this system for each eventually moved to replace it with some other system. The territories never used it.

There have been three basic motivations for making electoral system changes: idealism, the seeking of political advantage, and the need to deal with faulty electoral system arrangements.

From an early date there were some Australians concerned to explore the possibility that a better system than First Past the Post might be devised. Prominent in this were Catherine Helen Spence of South Australia, and the Tasmanian lawyer and politician, Andrew Inglis Clark. Both were impressed by Proportional Representation, devised in Britain by Thomas Hare in the mid-nineteenth century. Spence called Proportional Representation ‘effective voting’, seeing it as guaranteeing that all important minority voices could gain representation in a national or regional legislature.^[2]Clark pushed for the use of Proportional Representation in Tasmania, and the Hare invention was used in the Hobart and Launceston electorates in the 1897 and 1900 elections^[3]After reverting briefly to First Past the Post, in 1907 the Tasmanian Parliament introduced what became known as the ‘Hare-Clark’ system (South Australians called it ‘Hare-Spence’), and it has been used ever since (for Hare-Clark, see pp. 20–5). Spence and Clark’s work has been the major instance of idealism prevailing in the introduction of an electoral system in Australia.

The more usual motivation for electoral system change has been political calculation—which could be motivated by a desire to protect or boost one’s own position, or to inflict damage upon one’s opponents.^[4]Such was the conservative parties’ main reason for introducing Preferential Voting prior to the 1919 Commonwealth election, and ALP governments sponsoring Optional Preferential Voting in New South Wales and Queensland.^[5]

Some electoral changes have been made because of problems with existing systems, something that has occurred twice in relation to Senate elections. The Block Vote used in Senate elections from 1903 to 1919, and Preferential Voting used from 1919 and until 1949, both awarded a disproportionate number of seats to the party that gained a majority of a state’s vote. Both were replaced in an effort to eradicate this problem.

For the current systems in use in Australia, see Appendix 2. These show that four systems are currently in use in Australia. Two are variants of Preferential Voting and two are variants of the Single Transferable Vote example of Proportional Representation, all of which are discussed in the pages that follow.

Preferential Voting

Preferential Voting, the voting system known in the United Kingdom as the ‘Alternative Vote’ and in the USA as ‘Instant Run-off Voting’, is widely used for Australian lower house elections. With Fiji and Papua New Guinea (the latter from 2007), Australia is one of only three nations to use this system for national elections. Some Australian elections use full Preferential Voting, some use optional Preferential Voting.

‘Full’ Preferential Voting

‘Full’ Preferential Voting is used in Australia in single-member electorates. There are slight variations in the rules around the nation. Our example is from House of Representatives elections:

• on the ballot paper candidates’ names are placed in a column, with positions being determined by lot (Ballot Paper 1)
• each line on the ballot paper contains a candidate’s name, together with a box for the registration of the voter’s preferences
• the voter must mark the number ‘1’ in the box against the name of the voter’s preferred candidate and
• numbering (‘preferencing’) must be continued to the point where every box should contain a number.^[6]

Ballot Paper 1

A single count

If a candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the number 1 votes (the ‘first preferences’), that candidate is declared elected. This occurred in the Commonwealth electorate of Bradfield (NSW) in 2004 (Election Result 2).

Election Result 2: Bradfield (House of Representatives) 2004
[One to be elected]

Source: Australian Electoral Commission, http://www.aec.gov.au/ accessed on 8 August 2007

More than one count

However, in many cases no candidate receives more than 50 per cent of first preferences. In 2004, 61 House of Representatives electorates (40.7 per cent) were not decided on the first count. If this occurs in an electorate the following procedure is followed:

• the candidate with fewest votes is excluded from the count
• this candidate’s votes are transferred to other candidates according to the second preferences shown on the excluded candidate’s papers and
• if this still does not produce a candidate with over half of the vote, other candidates are progressively excluded, and second or later preferences distributed until one candidate has more than half of the total number of votes.

An example of a full count was the by-election for the House of Representatives electorate of Corangamite in 1918—this was the first use of this electoral system in Australia (Election Result 3).

Election Result 3: Corangamite, by-election (House of Representatives) 1918
[One to be elected]

Source: Psephos: Adam Carr’s Election Archives, http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/a/australia/1917/1917repsby.txt, accessed on 9 August 2007

Once it was established in the Corangamite count that no candidate had gained over 50 per cent of the vote, the ‘distribution of preferences’ began:

•   in the second count the candidate with the lowest number of first preference votes (Leaper) was eliminated, and his 895 second preferences were distributed to the other candidates
• the third count saw Coldham eliminated, with his 1286 preferences being distributed to the remaining candidates and
• the same occurred in the fourth and final count, when Knox’s 6855 preferences were distributed and Gibson won the seat comfortably, having obtained 97.4 per cent of Knox’s preferences.

Gibson thus received 56.3 per cent of the vote after the distribution of preferences. His votes were made up of his original 6604 first preferences, plus 7492 preferences from excluded candidates.

The political impact of ‘full’ Preferential Voting

Favouring the major parties

To win a House of Representatives seat a candidate needs to gain one vote more than 50 per cent of the vote which can be just first preference votes, or a combination of first preferences and preferences gained from other candidates. Therein lies a major difficulty for the minor parties that is a consequence of the use of Preferential Voting for lower house elections.

Preferential Voting—whether ‘full’ or Optional—gives a disproportionate advantage to the major parties, primarily because of the size of the vote needed to challenge for a seat. A major factor in this has been the ongoing electoral strength of the Coalition parties and the ALP. Occasionally, a prominent minor party candidate may appear to have a chance of winning a seat, but invariably such candidates fail. Former Australian Democrats Senate leader, Janine Haines, was thought to have a good chance of winning Kingston (SA) in 1990. Haines did remarkably well to gain 26.4 per cent of first preferences, but was still excluded on the second-last count. In the 1998 election Pauline Hanson MP, of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, gained 36 per cent of first preferences in Blair (Qld), but still fell short of victory due to no candidate giving her their second preferences. If such well-known candidates fail, lesser-known candidates are unlikely to succeed.

To be a factor in a House of Representatives contest, a minor party needs to be in the final count, but this is very hard to achieve because minor party candidates have difficulty in gaining even one-quarter of first preferences. In its heyday the highest Democratic Labor Party individual vote was only 30.7 per cent (Scullin 1955), whereas the Australian Democrats managed only two general election votes in excess of 20 per cent (Kingston, Mayo 1990). The best Green effort to date has been the 23 per cent in the 2002 Cunningham by-election, a result aided by the Liberal Party not nominating a candidate. In a general election the best Australian Greens result has been 21.6 per cent (Sydney 2004). By contrast, even in the worst post-war effort by the major parties (1998), between them they still managed to secure 79.8 per cent of all first preferences, a figure which did not leave much electoral space for minor parties or independents.

The major parties have thus won 99.4 per cent of all House of Representatives contests held in the 23 Commonwealth elections since 1949. No seat has been won by a minor party candidate, despite three reasonably strong minor parties—the Democratic Labor Party, the Australian Democrats and the Australian Greens—contesting elections. The exceptions have been the occasional popular local independent, such as Peter Andren, MP for Calare from 1996 until 2007. Candidates such as Andren can succeed if the major party vote is modest and if they gain the lion’s share of second preferences from other candidates. In fact, in Andren’s first victory (1996) he won despite gaining only 29.4 per cent of first preferences, but scooping the pool of second preferences.

The ‘wrong’ result

A problem with elections conducted in single-member electorates is that occasionally it is possible for a party to receive a majority of first preferences across all electorates yet fail to win government. A party can have many of its votes ‘locked up’ in safe seats, while its main opponent(s) may have votes spread much more evenly across the electoral map. In 1990 the Labor Government, with only 39.4 per cent of first preferences, retained government despite its vote being 3.8 per cent behind the Coalition parties’ combined vote. Eight years later the story was reversed, with Labor’s vote margin over the Coalition of almost one per cent being insufficient to propel it into government.

The ‘winner’s bonus’

It might be supposed that a 50 per cent national vote won by a party should return it about half of the parliamentary seats being contested. In fact, majority systems used in single-member electorates are likely to award a disproportionate number of parliamentary seats to the largest vote-winner—the so-called ‘winner’s bonus’. In 1996, for example, the Coalition gained two-thirds of the seats, yet its first preference vote was less than 50 per cent. House of Representatives contests quite often illustrate this phenomenon, as can be seen in Table 1.

Table 1: The ‘winner’s bonus’ (%)

Source: Australian Electoral Commission, http://www.aec.gov.au/ accessed on 9 August 2007

Three-cornered contests

In the early years after Federation, when First Past the Post was being used, Labor candidates were sometimes helped to victory by a split non-Labor vote. A by-election for the Commonwealth electorate of Swan in 1918, where a Labor candidate (34.4 per cent) defeated candidates from the Country (31.4 per cent) and Nationalist parties (29.6 per cent), galvanised non-Labor forces in the national parliament. Preferential Voting was introduced for House of Representatives elections in time for a by-election seven weeks after the Swan contest.^[7] In addition, the legislation included a requirement to fill every square on a ballot paper (‘full’ Preferential Voting). This was introduced quite deliberately because it would force voters to allocate second preferences. The anti-Labor forces believed that Nationalist voters were highly likely to give second preferences to the new farmers’ parties—and vice versa. The chances of blocking Labor candidates would thus be greater than if voters were permitted to give as few (or as many) preferences as they chose. This expectation was immediately realised in the Corangamite by-election as we have seen (see pp. 8–9).

In recent years, conservative party three-cornered contests have fallen into disfavour, and are often a sign of the Liberals and Nationals failing to agree on which party should contest a particular electorate. There is no doubt, though, that such contests can occasionally push a seat away from a Labor to either a Liberal or National (Country) candidate, as in the three-cornered contest in Riverina (NSW) in 1977. In this contest the ALP first preference vote of 46.9 per cent was insufficiently high to counter the combined National Country Party (NCP) and Liberal vote of 50 per cent, which produced a 93.1 per cent flow of preferences from the Liberal to the NCP candidate, Noel Hicks. These preferences pushed Hicks over the line (Election Result 4).

Election Result 4: Riverina (House of Representatives) 1977
[One to be elected]

Source: Psephos: Adam Carr’s Election Archives, http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/a/australia/1980/1980repsnsw.txt, accessed 9 February 2007 

Three-cornered contests are traditionally associated with the two major non-Labor parties. In the 1998 election the importance of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party in helping some Coalition candidates win their seats shows that the effect can be seen in other pairings from time to time. ALP and Green votes have also worked in this way as in the electorate of Melbourne Ports in 2004, when the Labor vote (39.3 per cent) and Green vote (14.1 per cent) together pushed Labor’s Michael Danby ahead of the Liberal candidate who had led on first preferences (42.9 per cent).

Controlling the voter—the importance of how-to-vote cards

Political parties seek to exert as much control as they can over voters—in Australia the how-to-vote card is symptomatic of this. The negotiation for, and argument over, preferences prior to polling day is a recognition of the importance parties place in attempting to control the voters’ behaviour. For example, the possibility of a successful three-cornered contest is strengthened not only by the requirement to fill out every square on the ballot paper, but also by the preparedness of many voters to follow their chosen party’s how-to-vote cards. The aim of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in the 1950s and 1960s of keeping the ALP from office was dependent not only on the splinter party gaining a reasonably healthy vote, but also on their voters being prepared to follow their cards which invariably put Labor behind the Coalition.^[8]In the example of the three-cornered contest given above, the National candidate turned the election around on the final count, when he gained 92.8 per cent of the preferences in the Liberal candidate’s pile of 11 307 ballot papers.

Optional Preferential Voting

For many years the Labor Party thus was disadvantaged by the requirement that voters give a full set of preferences in House of Representatives and various state elections. This was particularly so during the 1950s and 1960s when Labor was hurt by the impact of DLP preferences. The ALP’s response came in two stages. For some time the party’s platform called for the reinstatement of the First Past the Post system that had been used for House of Representatives elections from 1901 until 1918—and in Queensland Legislative Assembly elections as late as 1961. However, this was a legislative change that Labor never introduced. The party later shifted its stance to accept the continuation of ‘full’ Preferential Voting, but pushed for voters to be allowed to allocate as many (or as few) preferences as they liked—what is generally called Optional Preferential Voting. A limited form of Optional Preferential Voting had been used for Tasmanian Legislative Council elections since 1907, and Labor governments introduced an unlimited model of Optional Preferential Voting for elections for the New South Wales (1979) and Queensland (1992) Legislative Assemblies—the model that is discussed in this paper.

In a Tasmanian Legislative Council limited Optional Preferential Voting election:

• if there are 2 or 3 candidates on the ballot paper, preferences must be given to each candidate
• but where there are more than 3 candidates, the voter is free to vote for as many of the remaining candidates as she or he chooses.

By contrast, when voting in a New South Wales or Queensland Legislative Assembly unlimited Optional Preferential Voting election (Ballot paper 2) an elector may:

• vote for just for one candidate, leaving all other squares blank—sometimes called ‘plumping’
• give preferences to some, but not all, candidates or
• give preferences to all candidates, as in full preferential voting.

Ballot Paper 2

The procedure for the distribution of preferences in either unlimited or limited Optional Preferential Voting elections is identical to that used for ‘full’ Preferential Voting. However, when a particular ballot paper has no more preferences to distribute that paper is declared ‘exhausted’, and is removed from the count. In the electorate of Barron River in the 1998 Queensland election, 1901 votes eventually were declared exhausted (Election Result 5).

Election Result 5: Barron River (Queensland, Legislative Assembly) 1998 [One to be elected]

Source: Queensland Electoral Commission, http://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/asp/index.asp, accessed on 9 August 2007

The political impact of Optional Preferential Voting

Fewer votes

Unlike ‘full’ Preferential Voting where the winning candidate will eventually achieve an absolute majority of votes, under Optional Preferential Voting it is possible for a winning candidate to receive fewer than half of the votes left in the count. This is because some votes are ‘exhausted’, with no more preferences to distribute, and are removed from the count. In the example of Barron River given here (Election Result 5), although the winner (Clark) had gained over half of the votes remaining in the count when counting finished (50.6 per cent), she actually had fewer than half of the original total of formal votes, having received 9287 of the total number of 20 245 first preferences (45.9 per cent). It can be argued that Optional Preferential Voting reduces the importance of the majority that is evident in ‘full’ Preferential Voting.

Lessening the importance of preferences

In the Queensland elections of 2004 and 2007 the Labor Party asked its supporters to ‘Just vote 1.’ In other words, Labor voters were asked to give the party their first preference, with no preferences given to any other candidate. In seeking to take advantage of the optional aspect of preference allocation in this way, Labor sought to minimise the impact of an exchange of preferences that might hurt the Beattie Government. As well as attempting to persuade its own voters to act in this way, it hoped that many One Nation voters would allocate just a single preference, because their second preferences were far more likely to be given to a Coalition than to a Labor candidate. The Coalition parties claimed that Labor’s tactic undermined the principle of voters being able to express preferences, but it seemed that many voters were happy to accept the party’s instruction.

Proportional Representation (Single Transferable Vote)

Proportional Representation systems were devised to produce ‘proportional’ election results—parties should win parliamentary seats roughly in proportion to the size of their vote. Ideally, 50 per cent of the vote should win about 50 per cent of the seats. Proportional Representation is not a single method of election, for there are a number of variations in use, including the Single Transferable Vote, two variants of which are used in Australia. One is used in Senate elections, and the Hare-Clark version, referred to earlier, is used for elections to the Tasmanian House of Assembly and the ACT Legislative Assembly. The discussion below deals with each, illustrated by the 2004 Australian Senate election in Victoria (Election Result 6), and the 2006 Tasmanian House of Assembly election in the electorate of Denison (Election Result 7). The counting procedure for Proportional Representation is very complex—only an outline is given here. For a fuller description, see the paper written by Greg Gardiner of the Victorian Parliamentary Library.^[9]

‘Senate’ Model

Electorates

Each state and territory acts as a single, multi-member electorate in Senate elections. In half-Senate elections six senators are elected from each state, and two from each territory. In full Senate elections, which follow a dissolution of both houses of the Parliament, 12 senators are elected from each state and two from each territory.

Ballot paper

A divided paper

A heavy horizontal line runs across the ballot paper (Ballot Paper 3). Above that line is a single row of boxes, each above the name (if given) of a party or group, though not for the list of ‘Ungrouped’ candidates. The position on the ballot paper of each party or group list is determined by lot.

Ballot Paper 3

Lists

Below the line parties and groups list their candidates in separate vertical lists, headed by the party or group name—though here also a name is not required. Independent candidates are placed in an ‘Ungrouped’ list on the extreme right of the paper.

Voting

An elector is required to vote either above or below the line.

‘Above the line’ votes

If an elector chooses to vote above the line, the number ‘1’ must be placed in one of the boxes—all other boxes above the line must remain blank. Parties may submit a preferred order of voting (a Group Voting Ticket) to the Australian Electoral Commission which is displayed at all polling places. An above the line vote is dealt with by polling officials as if the voter had voted in the order of names on a Group Voting Ticket(s) issued by the party of their choice.^[10]During the count, preferences are allocated according to the order of names expressed by the party on a Group Voting Ticket.

 ‘Below the line’ votes

The elector can choose to vote below the horizontal line. If that option is taken the voter must fill out every square, with numbers running from 1 to the number equal to the total number of candidates on the ballot paper. Electors choosing to vote for an ungrouped candidate can vote only below the line.

Vote totals

Fifty-seven candidates in a total of 19 groups and eight ungrouped candidates were on the Victorian 2004 Senate election ballot paper. A total of 2 996 594 votes were cast. The party votes were as follows:

Source: Australian Electoral Commission, http://www.aec.gov.au/ accessed on 9 August 2007

The number of votes needed for a candidate to be elected (quota)

Senate candidates must secure a certain number of votes to be elected—a quota. To calculate the quota for a particular election, the total number of formal votes cast is divided by the number of candidates to be elected plus 1, and 1 is added to the result.

In our Victorian example 2 996 594 formal ballot papers were cast, from which six senators were to be elected:

In this example, where six Senators were to be elected, the quota of 428 085 votes could be achieved by six candidates only.

The percentage of the vote needed to win a Senate seat varies according to the number of senators to be elected (Table 2).

Table 2: Quotas

The Count [11]

After the counting of first preference votes, any candidate who has achieved a quota is declared elected. In elections for state senators the first candidates on each of the Liberal/Coalition and the Labor lists are invariably declared elected after this first count—these candidates are then removed from the count. In the Victoria 2004 example, Michael Ronaldson (Lib) and Kim Carr (ALP) both exceeded the quota after the count of first preferences and were declared elected (Election Result 6, Count 1).

Election Result 6: Victoria (Senate) 2004 [Six to be elected]

Source: Australian Electoral Commission, http://www.aec.gov.au/ accessed on 9 August 2007

Surplus votes

Elected candidates who gain more votes than the quota are said to have a ‘surplus’ number of votes. The surplus of each successful candidate’s votes is transferred, according to the second preferences shown on the ballot papers, to continuing candidates. In the Victoria 2004 example, Ronaldson gained 1 381 539 votes. His surplus was the total of his first preferences minus the quota: 1 318 539  –  428 085  =  890 454 surplus votes

Transfer value

Which of Ronaldson’s votes were transferred? Because it is impossible to specify which votes actually elected Ronaldson, and which were surplus to that outcome, some distribution method is needed. Senate electoral arrangements originally had a random transfer of ‘surplus’ votes. In the 2004 Victoria example, a random sample of 890 454 of the 1 318 539 ballot papers would have been made. However, it was eventually realised that a potential problem was the fact that in a close election different random selections could produce different results. It has been claimed that the election of Neville Bonner (Lib) as a Queensland senator ahead of Mal Colston (ALP) in 1974 was the result of random sampling, which might have produced a Colston success had a different sample been selected.^[12]

A simpler, fairer and uncontroversial method is to look at the second preferences of all of Ronaldson’s 1 318 539 papers, count the number of second preferences given to each candidate, and give the candidates 890 454 / 1 318 539 of the second preference votes allocated to each. The fraction enables those counting the vote to ascertain what is called the ‘transfer value’:

The result is taken to the eighth decimal point, without rounding.

The transfer value of Ronaldson’s preferences therefore was established by dividing his surplus by the total of his first preferences:

890 454
1 318 539 = 0.67533383

In the Victorian contest, therefore, 890 454 ‘surplus’ Ronaldson votes were distributed by a series of such calculations. Because so many voters followed the Coalition Group Voting Ticket the second candidate on the ticket, Julian McGauran, secured 889 465 surplus votes and the remaining Coalition candidates shared another 748. In addition, 22 surplus votes went to Labor candidates, 40 to the Greens, 43 to the Family First Party and 114 were scattered among the other candidates. There were also some votes omitted from the count through ‘exhaustion’^[13]or ‘loss by fraction’.^[14]In gaining most of Ronaldson’s surplus, McGauran was pushed above the quota and was declared elected (Election Result 6, Count 2).

Successive counts saw Carr’s surplus votes distributed, electing Conroy (Election Result 6, Count 3), and McGauran’s surplus distributed, bringing about the election of Troeth (Election Result 6, Count 4).

Note that when each successful candidate was elected with surplus votes, a new transfer value was established and used to calculate to which candidates the relevant surplus votes were to be transferred.

Exclusion of candidates and distribution of their preferences

The process of transferring surplus votes from successful candidates proceeds either until all positions are filled—at which point the counting ceases—or until there are no more surplus votes to distribute. In a typical Senate election for state senators the combination of first preference plus surplus votes is very likely to see the election of five senators quite early in the count. As we have seen, in the 2004 Victoria example three Coalition senators (Ronaldson, McGauran, Troeth) and two ALP senators (Carr, Conroy) had been elected by the end of the fourth count.

When no more surplus votes remain to be distributed, but a seat (or seats) remains to be filled, the process takes on the appearance of a preferential voting distribution. Candidates with the fewest votes are gradually excluded from the count, and their preferences are distributed to remaining candidates, either until another candidate is elected—with surplus votes then needing to be distributed—or the final candidate is elected. If the latter, the counting is concluded.

The preferences of excluded candidates are transferred at full value, unlike ‘surplus’ transfers. As most of the excluded candidates will have very small total votes, many counts may be necessary before the process ends. In Victoria 2004 it was only on the 285^th count that the final ALP candidate, Jacinta Collins, was excluded, and 230 995 of her
240 992 votes went to Steve Fielding (Family First) who was elected as the sixth Victorian senator. Of the 59 candidates who failed to gain election, only Eric Risstrom (Green) remained in the count.

The political impact of Proportional Representation (‘Senate’ model)

‘Safe’ seats

In the 2004 Senate election, 95.9 per cent of all Australian voters cast an ‘above-the-line’ vote and, hence, relied on a party Group Voting Ticket for the ordering of their preferences. In our example of Victoria 2004, 97.7 per cent voted above the line. With 28.6 per cent guaranteeing two seats for a party, the top two candidates in each of a Coalition and an ALP ticket are certain of election. As each party’s order of candidates’ names remains fixed, there is therefore no chance of either of these four candidates failing to be elected.

The minor parties

To win a Senate seat in a half-Senate election for state senators requires far fewer votes than in Preferential Voting elections—14.7 per cent of the vote, rather than 50 per cent (plus one vote). This is of great significance to the stronger minor parties. Since the first use of Proportional Representation in the 1949 Senate election, 77 of 937 Senate contests (8.2 per cent) have been won by non-major party candidates—during the Howard years (1996–2004) the figure has been 21 of 160 contests, or 13.1 per cent. Not surprisingly, this has ensured that a greater range of views has been heard in the upper house than in the lower. Since the election of the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) Senator, Frank McManus, in 1955 the minor party and independent senators have included the anti-death duties campaigner Syd Negus (WA, 1971–74), the long-term Tasmanian independent, Brian Harradine (Tas, 1975–2005), the Australian Democrat founder, Don Chipp (Vic, 1978–86), Robert Wood of the Nuclear Disarmament Party (NSW, 1987–8) and One Nation’s Len Harris (Qld, 1999–2005.

The way in which Proportional Representation makes a parliamentary chamber more of a mirror of voters’ preferences can be seen in four elections held between 1949 and 1996 that gave large House of Representatives majorities to the winning party/ies—1949, 1975, 1983, 1996. In each year the Senate result was far more proportional to voter support than was the House of Representatives result (Table 3). This can be seen particularly clearly in 1975, when the Gough Whitlam-led ALP secured more than 40 per cent of the vote, winning 42.2 per cent of Senate seats, but only 28.3 per cent of seats in the House of Representatives.

Table 3: Representation—preferential voting and Proportional Representation

Percentage of seats won (vote in parenthesis)

Source: Australian Electoral Commission

Minor parties are advantaged even more in double dissolution Senate elections when the vote needed in a state to win a seat is just 7.7 per cent.

Control of the Senate

The most obvious consequence of minor party electoral success has been the difficulty for the major parties in gaining control of the Senate. Since 1949, the government of the day has controlled the Senate only during the years 1951–56, 1959–62, 1975–81 and since July 2005. When a government does not control the Senate, it soon realises that in such a scenario the Australian Senate joins the US Senate as one of the most powerful of the world’s upper houses. When a government does control the Senate, however, observers are reminded that the Senate power is a matter of potential rather than reality.^[15]

Hare-Clark model

The Hare-Clark method is used for House of Assembly elections in Tasmania and for the ACT Legislative Assembly. We have seen that it has been used in Tasmania since the election of 1909, giving it the longest continuous history of any parliamentary electoral system used in Australia.

Electorates

Tasmania has always had five House of Assembly electorates under the Hare-Clark system. Five MPs are elected from each. The ACT has one seven-member electorate and two five-member electorates.

Ballot paper

The Hare-Clark ballot paper does not have the horizontal line seen on the Senate ballot paper (Ballot papers 4a, 4b). Party candidates are placed in separate vertical groups, with ungrouped candidates included in a column to the right of the party groups.

A 1979 addition to the Tasmanian arrangements provided for the position of the names within each group to be altered by provisions of so-called ‘Robson rotation’ in which the names in each group are re-ordered from paper to paper, so as to reduce the impact of any advantageous ballot positions. Two examples from the 2004 election are shown, illustrating the shift of candidates’ names on the ballot paper.^[16]

Ballot Paper 4 (a)

Ballot Paper (4b)

Voting

In Tasmania a voter must mark preferences against at least five candidates, but may vote for more than five. Tasmanian electoral law forbids anyone from canvassing for votes, soliciting the vote of an elector, or attempting ‘to induce an elector not to vote for a particular candidate or particular candidates’ within 100 metres of a polling place.^[17]The consequence is that how-to-vote cards are nowhere to be seen on polling day for the Tasmanian House of Assembly.

The quota

The quota is calculated in the same way as for Senate elections. In Denison 2006 the calculation was as follows: