Countback

The only direct election alternative to countback is holding by-election polls (for whole multi-member electorates), which is costly for several reasons.

• First, there is the financial cost.
• Second, they can form a major distraction from more important issues of government.
• Third, due to the time needed to conduct them, they can lead to protracted uncertainty about the balance of power. Where countback is used, casual vacancies are filled with a minimum of fuss.

The result of a countback is nearly always that a member of the same political party is elected, preserving the proportionality of the House and assuring stability. By-elections, because of their single-member nature, do not fit well with multi-member systems and can disrupt proportionality due to the wastage of up to half the votes. This and the fact that voters (in the electorate in question) can change their mind between the original election and the by-election leads to greater instability.

A further benefit of countback is that voters generally have an increased choice of candidates. Typically, major parties stand several more candidates than they expect to be elected, even with their most optimistic estimate. The possibility that one or more of their elected candidates will vacate his or her seat means that it is desirable for parties to have additional candidates who may be elected in a countback. This enhances the opportunities for voters to be selective in who they support from a particular party. It moves unwarranted, excessive, and often unfairly used power away from pre-selection panels within party organisations and delivers it to the voters. In the long term, as various Tasmanian premiers have noted, that is really in the parties' best interests.

An example of the way in which the closed shop of pre-selections for single-vacancy elections is widened and democratised was recently reported⁵. In the current pre-selection of Liberal candidates for the Tasmanian state five-member electorate of Denison it appears a clear majority of pre-selectors are opposed to a candidate for pre-selection, Mr Greg Barns, who is President of the Australian Republican movement. However, rather than just preselecting one candidate, they normally preselect five, of whom they can expect only two or three to be elected at the General Election. The remaining candidates will not be elected then, but they might be needed to fill casual vacancies. Just as importantly, they enable the party to test the popularity of their own various candidates with the electors. It is known that republican views are held by a significant number of Liberal voters, but what is not known is how many of those voters would vote for another party if there were not even a single Liberal republican available. The real choice of candidates helps to maximise votes for broad parties, and to avoid arbitrary desertion by voters to other parties over single issues. The outcome of that real choice also reveals for public information the strength of certain factions within parties, particularly when Robson Rotation is used (see Section 3.4).

There are two models of countback used in Australia. The model used in Western Australia since 1987, where all ballots cast in the original election are re-counted, and the Hare-Clark model used in Tasmania⁶ since 1918 and the ACT⁷ since 1995, where only the quota of the vacating candidate is re-counted. Both are acceptable, but the PRSA, and informed opinions of senior electoral officers in Tasmania, the ACT and Western Australia, favour Hare-Clark. Compared to the WA model, which appears in Victoria's Constitution (Proportional Representation) Bill 2000, advantages of Hare-Clark are:

• It is more likely to retain the same party balance,
• it is simpler, quicker and cheaper,
• the voters that effectively lose their representative are those that choose the new representative, and
• there is no need (as there is in the WA model) for a savings clause to be included in the legislation to ensure that no other member is displaced as a result of a countback.