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The Gross Defects
of Plurality (First-Past-the
Post) Electoral Systems
1.
THE PLURALITY CONCEPT
2. FORM OF BALLOT PAPERS 3. COUNTING THE VOTES 4. PLURALITY VOTING SYSTEMS FOR FILLING A SINGLE VACANCY 5. MULTIPLE
PLURALITY VOTING SYSTEMS
6. THE THREE SYSTEMS USED FOR SENATE POLLS 7. TRANSFERABLE VOTE SYSTEMS PREDOMINATING
1.
THE PLURALITY CONCEPT:
The American term plurality
for this crude and unfair 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 arbitrarily assuming that it is
necessarily the largest number of first preference
votes, rather than an absolute majority, or a
pre-set quota. 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 less than 50% of the
total vote. The system for marking and counting ballot papers in polls for those Queensland municipalities, mainly rural shires, that have only a single electoral district - where that multiple plurality counting used for Senate polls from1903-17 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, which has also applied to electoral system in some trade unions, 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. 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 although, as is
explained below, that is not - unlike transferable
vote systems - a fully reliable system for
translating voters' intentions into electoral
outcomes. 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 proportional representation (PR) and
single-member-electorate 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. 2. FORM
OF BALLOT PAPERS: 3. COUNTING
THE VOTES: Candidates are elected consecutively
according to who receives the largest number of
votes. There is no predetermined 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 transferable
voting, which ensures that a majority, or
quota, as the case may be, of voters decides the
outcome for each vacancy. 4. PLURALITY VOTING
SYSTEMS FOR FILLING A SINGLE VACANCY:
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.
5. MULTIPLE
PLURALITY VOTING SYSTEMS: Under the
common law multiple plurality system, a voter
traditionally marked an "X" against the name of each
candidate voted for, with the consequential proviso
- given the very rudimentary provision for the
expression of a voter's wishes that plurality
systems allow - 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 Australia's
1903-17 Senate elections, arbitrarily specified that
a ballot would be invalid if the number of
candidates voted did not equal 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.
6. THE THREE
SYSTEMS USED FOR SENATE POLLS: ·
from 1903
to 1917, that multiple
plurality system described above,
with plumping prohibited, ·
from 1919
to 1947, a multiple
majority-preferential electoral
system, and ·
from 1948
onwards, the system of proportional
representation using the single transferable
vote (PR-STV). The
unfortunate 1919-47 system was used for certain
municipal polls in New South Wales
and the Northern
Territory until 2012, and Victoria
from 1989 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, as happened when Vida Goldstein
gained 12% of Victoria's Senate vote in 1910, and
thus split
the non-Labor vote. Bizarrely, and alone among
Australian jurisdictions except for rural
Queensland, Western
Australia interrupted ts long usage of
preferential voting in municipal polls, and has
instituted plurality voting. 7. TRANSFERABLE
VOTE SYSTEMS
PREDOMINATING: Provision for
the type of transferable vote 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
electoral districts for its House of Assembly in 1896, and was extended to all
5 Tasmanian Assembly multi-member electoral
districts for the 1909
General Election. The transferable vote in
Tasmania's single-member Legislative Council
electoral districts first became law in 1907 but,
over 110 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 allow 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
Republic Movement (formerly the
Australian Republican Movement), ·
the board of
the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV). 8. FLAGGING
INCUMBENT CANDIDATES: The Royal Automobile Club
of Victoria - like the National Roads
and Motorists Association of New
South Wales before it was privatized - compounds the defects of its multiple
plurality electoral system by having
ballot rules requiring the names of candidates that
are retiring Directors on its Board to be singled
out and highlighted on the ballot papers, and on the
candidate statements, with an asterisk (*),
rather than letting candidates just choose to
include that in their statements of candidature.
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. There are usually never
fewer such candidates, as retiring Directors
normally resign before the poll, so that the
resulting casual vacancy can be filled by the Board,
and the person filling it can stand at the imminent
poll as a retiring Director. In the 2014 RACV poll
for service members, it was stated, on the ballot
papers, that the asterisked candidates were not only
re-contesting Directors, but also that the Board
supported their re-election. 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.
10. DETAILS
OF THE GROSS DEFECTS: Frequent
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 any of their rivals' individual total of votes,
yet that winner's total might be so low as to leave
an absolute majority
of voters completely unrepresented by
any of the various 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 that just exceeds 50%,
must be given effect to. A PR-STV
system (Senate 1948-)
gives effect to well beyond 50% of the votes cast
(to 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:
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.
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-STV
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. 11. 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 proportional representation
using the single transferable vote (PR-STV) – 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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