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The Gross Defects
of Plurality (First-Past-the
Post) Electoral Systems INTRODUCTION: The Plurality Concept: The term plurality is
synonymous with the terms first-past-the-post,
and relative majority. It
refers to the basis on which votes are counted in
order to determine who is elected by those votes.
Such systems can, as shown below, be used for the
filling of a single vacancy,
or the filling of a number of
vacancies as a group. A plurality
electoral system is one where ballots are normally
not valid unless they have been marked by the voter
[traditionally with a cross (X) marked against the
name of each candidate voted for] to indicate the
candidate or candidates that the voter wishes to
have elected, but no more candidates can be
indicated in this way than the number of vacancies
to be filled. Ballots are counted as described under
“Counting of the
Votes” below. The
American term plurality
for this crude and primitive counting system is
preferable to the British synonyms above, as first-past-the-post, which uses a
racing term to beg the question as to what the
“post” is, describes a quite different operation
from judging which single candidate, in the simple
case of a single position to be filled, should most
appropriately represent a large number of voters.
The racing jargon begs the question as to what the
“post” is, by assuming that it is necessarily the
largest number of first preference votes. Proponents
of "first-past-the-post" voting choose to ignore the
fact that a much sounder and much more absolute
“post” is the target of determining, as Australia’s
majority-preferential system used in single-member
electoral districts has reliably done, since 1918,
which of the two remaining candidates polling
highest - after the candidates receiving the fewest
first preferences have been successively excluded
from the count and their ballot-papers transferred
to the remaining candidates - has received an
absolute majority of votes. An absolute majority of
votes is gained when one of the two remaining
candidates gains more ballot-papers than the other.
Relative majority uses the ambiguous term, majority,
to mean what can be a minority of the total first
preference vote if that is only 50%, or less, of the
total vote. The system for marking and counting ballot-papers in polls in Queensland for those of its municipalities, mainly rural shires, that have only a single electoral district - where that multiple plurality counting used for Senate polls in1903-17 still applies - now differs by requiring the voter to mark a sequence of numerals rather than crosses. Many voters there might be misled by that and not realize that their marking of such numerals is not given effect to as a transferable vote, as elsewhere in Australian public polls, but has the effect of allowing the Returning Officer to treat the number of numerals marked on a ballot-paper - up to the number of positions to be filled – each as a separate valid vote, and to disregard further such numerals that might be marked beyond the required number. That change conceals the crude plurality system actually used, by giving it a preferential appearance, but it has removed a longstanding difficulty with multiple plurality systems of voters marking more crosses than there are positions to be filled, which can lead to high rates of invalid ballots. A 2011 referendum
in the United Kingdom allowed voters to choose
between that country’s longstanding plurality system
in single-member electoral districts used to elect
the members of the House of Commons, and the
“Alternative Vote" (AV), which is the system of optional
preferential voting used to elect the
Legislative Assembly of New South Wales. Australia's
House of Representatives abandoned plurality voting
in 1918 and has used the Alternative Vote ever
since, but with full marking of all preferences
being required for a valid vote. Just over
two-thirds of voters agreed with the Conservative
Party Prime Minister, David Cameron, who campaigned,
with his party, to keep the UK’s existing system,
although his Coalition partners, the Liberal
Democrats favoured AV, as did the Labor leader, and
many in his party. The
English common law electoral system is a plurality
system, but it allows ballots to indicate votes for
fewer candidates than the number to be elected if
the voter so chooses, which allows for the
traditional plumping by voters. More recent variants of that
system are: (a) the single
non-transferable vote, which was used
for Japan’s Lower House until it was replaced by a hybrid
party-list PR and single-member system (not
the same as New Zealand’s Mixed Member
Proportional system) at the end of the 20th
Century, (b) the limited vote,
and (c) the now discredited multiple plurality system used
for Australian Senate elections from 1903-17, which
is referred to below and arbitrarily required that a
valid ballot had to show exactly the same number of
votes for candidates as there are vacancies to fill,
which thus prevented plumping. Form
of Ballot-papers: Traditionally, ballot-papers for plurality
elections invite the voter to indicate his or her
votes by means of marking a cross (X) alongside the
name of each of the candidates voted for, but more
recent practice in some jurisdictions, such as
certain Queensland local
government polls and elections in
certain Australian unions,
has allowed the voter to mark his or her preferences
among the candidates in order by marking the numbers
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. against their respective names.
In a country like Counting
of the Votes: Where there are multiple vacancies to be
filled, the non-transferable votes on each
ballot-paper are counted as being of equal value to
each other, even though a voter might have a
distinct order of preference among the candidates,
as there is no mechanism for such preferences to be
given effect to. Candidates are elected consecutively
according to who receives the largest number of
votes. There is no pre-determined percentage of the
overall vote required to be gained before a
candidate is elected (hence the description "relative majority"), so a candidate
can be elected with a very much smaller percentage
of the vote than under any other electoral system if
the votes are spread very evenly among the
candidates. In elections to fill a single vacancy or
elections by the plurality bloc
vote referred to below, all the successful
candidates can be elected by the votes of very much
less than 50% of the voters, with well over 50% of
the voters having no effect on the outcome
whatsoever, unlike preferential voting, which
ensures that a majority, or quota, as the case may
be, of voters decides the outcome for each vacancy. Plurality voting systems for filling a
single vacancy: These systems, for parliamentary and
congressional elections, are now largely confined to
parts of the former British Empire such as the
United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada,
India and Pakistan, although Australia, New Zealand,
Eire, South Africa, Malta and Sri Lanka have changed
to other systems. These plurality systems are badly
flawed as they allow members to be
elected in each electorate with well below 50% of
the vote, and allow splitting of the vote among
candidates of similar views to the benefit of more
isolated candidates. Such systems are also used for
electing single office-bearers, such as the President of France. The
non-transferable nature of the votes cast is the
main fault there. Multiple Plurality voting
systems: The PRSA History page
refers to the quite unfair and unreasonable
electoral system used for the election of the
Australian Senate from 1903 to 1917. That system
also applied, by default,
to the first election in South Australia
for members of the House of Representatives in
1901. It is variously called a
multiple "X", a multiple relative majority,
a multiple first-past-the-post, a plurality at large, a
block vote, or a multiple
plurality vote. If an electoral
system is unspecified in a constitution, the
multiple plurality
system is unfortunately the common law default
system. See the example of
the ACF, a major Australian body that
replaced its multiple plurality system with PR in
1974. Under
it a voter traditionally marked an "X" against the
name of each candidate voted for, with the proviso
that the ballot would be invalid if an "X" appeared
against the names of more candidates than there were
vacancies to be filled. A later, even less
democratic variant, used for those 1903-17 Senate
elections, arbitrarily specified that the ballot
would be invalid if the number of candidates voted
for was not equal to the number of vacancies, thus
forestalling the traditional option in plurality
elections of plumping.
The term plurality refers to the largest vote gained
by a candidate or candidate, even if that candidate
or candidates have failed to gain an absolute
majority of votes. An
unsatisfactory and unnecessarily onerous alternative
to marking an “X” against the name of each
candidate, which is still used by some groups, was
the rule, for the first election of
senators for NSW, that voters had to
- in order to cast a valid vote - strike out the
names of all the
candidates they were not
voting for, so that exactly
the number of candidates they were voting for would
remain (this was the only Senate
polling day where the State electoral
rules still applied, so plumping
was not prohibited). There were fifty
candidates for those six positions, so it is not
surprising that 17.5% of the ballots cast were
ruled to be informal (invalid).
The 3 systems used for
Senate polls: For
Australian Senate elections, once a uniform system
applied after the first election of senators, the
three systems used, worked examples of which appear here,
were: ·
from 1903
to 1917, that unsatisfactory multiple
plurality system, ·
from 1919
to 1947, a multiple
majority-preferential electoral
system, and ·
from 1948
onwards, the present
quota-preferential system of
proportional representation (PR). The
unfortunate 1919-47 system was used for certain
municipal polls in New South Wales
and the Northern
Territory until 2012, and in Victoria
until 2003. A routine outcome of the winner-take-all
Senate elections before 1949
was that candidates of a single party, or point of
view, won all of
the vacancies for a State, and regularly, once in
each of the first five decades of the Senate's
existence, for the whole
of Australia, as occurred in 1910,
in 1917,
in 1925,
in 1934
and finally in 1943.
The multiple plurality system existing before 1919
had similar effects, as the 1910 and 1917 examples
show, but it also occasionally filled all vacancies
for a State with candidates from the same party that
had collectively failed to gain even 50% of the
votes in that State. Bizzarely, and alone among
Australian jurisdictions except for rural Queensland, Western
Australia has abandoned its long usage of
preferential voting in muncipal polls, and has
instituted plurality voting. Preferential
systems predominating: The Commonwealth
Electoral Bill 1902, as passed
by the House of Representives, proposed the use of majority-preferential
voting in the single-member divisions proposed for
the House of Representatives, and quota-preferential
voting in the States, each of which was to form a
single multi-member electoral district, for the
Senate, but the Senate successfully amended the Bill
to provide for plurality voting in each House.
Preferential voting now applies for elections to all
Australian legislative chambers. Australia's most
recent type of preferential voting in single-member
electoral districts involves optional preferential
voting, as is now prescribed in the NSW Constitution Act
1902. Provision
for the type of preferential system that generally
replaced plurality systems
in Australia, when the Commonwealth and all States
except Queensland made that change around 1920,
first appeared, in Tasmania, in two multi-member
electorates for its House of Assembly in 1896, and was extended to all
5 Tasmanian Assembly multi-member electoral
districts for the 1909
General Election. Preferential voting in
Tasmania's single-member Legislative Council
electoral districts first became law in 1907 but,
over 100 years later, multiple plurality systems
still persist in some Australian non-parliamentary
elections. Preferential systems using the
transferable vote allow voters to indicate their
ranking for all the candidates standing, and for
those indications to be brought into effect in the
final result, whereas plurality systems limit voters
to indicating their support for no more than the
number of positions to be filled, and they do not
alow voters to indicate their priority order among
the candidates. Prominent
examples of plurality systems persisting are
elections for: ·
WA municipal
councils, where plurality systems
have been restored for the second time, ·
local government
in some rural parts of ·
committees
elected by all of ·
the
National Committee of the Australian
Republican Movement, ·
the board of
the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV). Flagging Incumbent
Candidates: The RACV
- as did the National Roads
and Motorists Association of New
South Wales before it was privatized - compounds the defects of the multiple
plurality electoral system it uses by
having ballot rules that require the names of
candidates that are retiring directors to be singled
out and highlighted on the ballot-papers, and on the
candidate statements, with an asterisk (*),
rather than letting such candidates include that
fact in the candidate statements they lodge. That
institutionalized "helping hand" has the effect of
concentrating establishment votes on those
candidates alone, and there are, by definition,
never more of such candidates than the number of
positions to be filled. This
inequitable ballot rule can make it more likely that
votes for other than incumbents will be dispersed,
or split,
among the field of non-incumbent candidates, which
is often larger than the field of incumbent
candidates, as the field of incumbent candidates is obviously
limited to the number of places available, whereas
the others are not. No means are provided for the
voters to have their votes transferred, in
accordance with preferences they indicate, from
poorly-supported candidates to better-supported
candidates of their choosing, in order for their
votes not to be unnecessarily wasted. DETAILS
OF THE GROSS DEFECTS: Failure
to ensure representation of over 50%: The
plurality, relative majority, or "first-past-the-post" idea ignores
the fact that the candidate or candidates with the
largest number of votes does not necessarily gain
the support of any predetermined percentage of the
votes. All that is required is that the winner's
vote total be higher
than the rival totals, yet that total might be so
low as to leave an absolute majority
of voters completely unrepresented by
any of the multiple candidates elected. This
objection applies even when only one vacancy is to
be filled. A
majority-preferential voting system (Senate 1919-48)
requires that the views of an absolute majority of
voters, which is a number exceeding 50%, must be
given effect to. A quota-preferential PR system
(Senate 1948-) gives
effect to well beyond 50% of the votes cast (all but
a small percentage of unusable votes). Splitting the votes of a
group owing to a proliferation of similar extra
candidates: All
plurality systems suffer by leaving voters in a
quandary if there is a relative abundance of
candidates with a particular viewpoint compared with
those of opposing viewpoints. A recent example was
the first round of the 2002 French
presidential election, which
resulted in even the strongest-polling candidate,
the outgoing President, Jacques Chirac, from the
right, gaining less than 20% of the vote. The left
was also split, but slightly more so, with the
result that the second round,
to choose between the two highest-polling
candidates, pitted the right against Jean-Marie Le
Pen, rather than its realistic opponents, the left.
The result was a sham poll, where Chirac took nearly
all the votes, owing to the lack of a realistic
opponent. Wasting the votes of many of
those voting for very strongly supported
candidates:
Plurality systems being used to fill more than one
vacancy as a group, whether by the multiple
plurality system described above, by cumulative
voting, or by a limited non-transferable vote suffer
the flaw that very strongly supported candidates can
gain far more votes than they need for election,
thus depriving their supporters of the ability to
have the magnitude of their vote translated into an
appropriate number of seats won, leaving many seats
won by very small numbers of votes left after a
single, or a few winners have gained most of the
votes, with no provision for transferring those
votes as happens in the transfer of surplus votes in
a quota-preferential
PR election. Unfairly forcing some voters
to support candidates they oppose: The
non-preferential nature of the multiple plurality
system used in the above examples is grossly unfair
to voters that find the number of candidates they
consider to be acceptable is fewer than the number
of vacancies to be filled. Such voters are required,
in order to cast a valid vote, to mark the balance
of their vote for candidates they oppose. The
multiple plurality system prevents voters indicating
the ranking of their preferences for the individual
candidates, and forces voters to give them all equal
weight. The example in the table below
shows how voters' power to give effect to their
priorities by marking preferences is suppressed. Plumping: The last
flaw above does not apply when only one vacancy is
to be filled, nor does it apply to the traditional,
common law, form of plurality voting, which allows
voters to vote for fewer than the number to be
elected, a practice known as "plumping". Plumping occurs when voters limit their votes to those
candidates they support, rather than being
constrained to also vote for those they oppose, in
cases where those voters support fewer candidates
than the number to be elected, or when they estimate
that they are not supporters of the slate of
candidates that are likely to be supported by the
largest group of voters and that their only hope of
any representation is to limit their vote to
candidates that voters other than the largest single
group of voters supporting a number of candidates
equal to the full number to be elected are expected
to support. Plumping was the subject of a rather
confused Hobart City
Council debate in 1916. That
traditional form was practised in British elections
prior to the general abolition
of two-member geographical electorates
for the UK House of Commons in 1885, as it allowed a
crude form
of representation of minority opinion where such
minorities were large enough. It is a crude form
because there is no predictable quota as in PR
counting so – depending on the size of the vote for
the more strongly supported candidates – a minority
vote can elect one or more candidates with an unduly
low vote, or it can elect one or more candidates but
have a wasted surplus vote that is not large enough
to elect a further candidate. In that latter
alternative those surplus votes are wasted, and the
more strongly supported candidates can be elected
with a lower vote than they otherwise would require,
by the removal of the competition that surplus
should give. HOW AN 80% VOTE WINNER IS DEFEATED BY AN UNFAIR ELECTORAL SYSTEM Multiple plurality systems that prohibit plumping
prevent voters implementing their priorities, by arbitrarily suppressing
notional preference votes. Even where plumping is allowed, voters often
fail to understand its value, as they cannot be sure
– as they could with quota-preferential proportional representation – that their
votes will not be over-concentrated on too few
candidates.
* NOTE: To calculate this line, each of the notional preferences (1-5) above has to be treated as just an "X". |
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