Categories
of Electoral Systems ELECTORAL
SYSTEMS: The
definition of the word election
involves a choice of a person for a political
office or other position by voting, and is
based on the Latin “eligere”,
meaning to pick out. The appointment of a
person to a position by a resolution, even
though voting is also used, is different from
an election because an election allows the
filling of a defined number of positions from
a larger number of candidates, whereas votes
for appointment by resolution are either YES
or NO to each of a number of single candidates
conducted seriatim,
or to a single slate of candidates. Australia’s
first Federal Parliament in 1901 chose to make
a significant change from the British
Parliament’s practice. It inaugurated its
present practice when the Senate resolved to
elect its first President (see Parliamentary Debates Page 9,
on 9th May 1901) by a
preferential secret ballot from the three
candidates that stood. The House of Commons in
the UK has since followed that lead for the
election of its Speaker, but in 2001, a
century later, Australia’s Corporations Act 2001
still provides that company directors can be
appointed by sequential resolutions,
rather than being elected from multiple
candidates being compared against each other
in one decision. Alternatives to that
provision are now allowed, but no election
process is made mandatory. 1. DIRECT ELECTION OF
CANDIDATES versus INDIRECT ELECTION OF
CANDIDATES This
major and fundamental distinction between
electoral systems can be seen by clicking here.
2.
SINGLE VACANCIES versus MULTIPLE VACANCIES: The
use of vote-counting systems to fill a single
vacancy, such as the president of an
organization, is a simpler operation than
their use to fill the multiple vacancies
required to be filled when the members of a
representative body are to be elected, as
there are fewer possibilities, and usually
fewer candidates. Similar general approaches
can be applied to both situations, but there
are obviously more variations possible with
the multiple vacancy situation. Proportional
representation is only
applicable to the election of a representative
body, and provides full and accurate
representation of as many voters as possible.
It requires multi-member electorates for it to
operate. Single-member electorate systems,
which are necessarily and inherently winner-take-all
systems, do not soundly elect representative
bodies, as they collectively represent barely
half of all voters, and leave the remaining
voters totally unrepresented. 3.
TRANSFERABLE VOTE SYSTEMS versus
NON-TRANSFERABLE VOTE SYSTEMS A
useful resource for details of many of these
systems is the Wikipedia page on
Voting Systems. Single Vacancies:
The earliest and simplest voting took place
for single positions, such as the chairperson
or presiding officer of an organization. When
there were only two candidates for such a
single position it was obvious that the
candidate with most of the votes was the
candidate that should be elected. When there
were more than two candidates the assumption
was made that the same "first-past-the-post"
rule should apply there also, and that was
widely done as it was not a difficult
operation. Widespread
long term use of such systems has led to their
replacement in countries such as the UK and
USA being resisted, although it was soon
recognized that having three or more
candidates could result in the candidate with
the most votes of any candidate nevertheless
not receiving most of the votes cast overall.
A working solution to that anomaly arrived in
the form of the single transferable vote in
the 19th Century, which is the system now used
in all the Lower Houses of Australia's Federal
and mainland State Parliaments, but that was
not adopted until 1919, when the Commonwealth Electoral
Act 1918 - the present
principal Act - was first used. That system,
called the Alternative Vote, Transferable
Vote, or preferential
system as it is usually known in
Australia, ensures that the votes for the less
strongly-supported candidates are successively
transferred to the next most-preferred
candidate until a candidate gains more votes
than the remaining votes combined, whereupon
that candidate is declared elected. The
Alternative Vote for a
single-member electorate is easy to explain by
showing how it can fill a single vacancy such
as that for a single spokesperson to
represent, on behalf of a public meeting - particularly
if it was not significantly party-political
and thus perhaps likely to require a secret
ballot - what was decided at that
meeting by way of successful resolutions. The
meeting might decide to do that, for
convenience, by assembling in groups next to
the various candidates according to their
support for them. The chairperson of the
meeting would arrange for a count of each
group, and exclude the candidate with the
fewest supporters with a request that they
either move to a continuing candidate's group
or to a group for those with no further
preference. Done successively in Thomas
Hill's "schoolboy election" style
- but for a single vacancy only - that would
be a procedure that few at an actual meeting
of reasonable, orderly people could
successfully contest the logic of, as
ultimately it would be obvious to all present
that the person elected had received the vote
of an absolute majority of those voting. By
contrast such an election by a first-past-the-post
system could well result in the person elected
being strongly opposed by an absolute majority
of those that did not vote for him or her, in
the only vote that the system allowed. The
original bill
for the Commonwealth
Electoral Act 1902 provided
for the single transferable vote (preferential
voting) for both houses of the Australian
Parliament with marking of second and later
preferences being fully optional, as is the optional preferential
system for the Legislative Assembly of New
South Wales, but that 1902
Bill, which was introduced by the Barton
Government and passed by the House of
Representatives, was amended in the Senate to
remove the transferable element, leaving a "first-past-the-post"
non-transferable vote for the electors for
both houses. The House of Representatives
passed the amended bill, which became
Australia's first federal electoral law. Multiple Vacancies:
With
multiple vacancies both transferable and
non-transferable vote systems exist. The
non-transferable systems can be either
proportional or winner-take-all (majoritarian), as can
the transferable systems. For example the first
and the second
federally-enacted vote-counting systems at
Australian Senate elections were both
winner-take-all systems:
That
second system was in turn was replaced in 1948
by the present quota-preferential
system of proportional representation,
which is a transferable proportional system.
Since 1948, no single party has won all the
seats, Australia-wide, at a periodic Senate
election, as happened in 1910, 1917,
1925, 1934 and 1943. Both Eire
and Malta
use quota-preferential PR for elections to
their national parliaments. Interest in PR is
growing in the USA
and Canada. By
contrast the majority of countries on the
continent of Europe use proportional systems
that involve non-transferable votes, usually
called party list systems. Many new
introductions of electoral systems involve the
use of such systems ostensibly because of the
ease of use for voters, despite (or because
of) that ease of use leading to the voters
having no real control over the actual persons
being elected, as the voters are only
permitted to vote for parties. Examples of
such systems are those now used in South
Africa, Sri Lanka and Iraq. New Zealand
uses a hybrid MMP system, like Germany, where
one part is winner-take-all
(majoritarian) and
the other part is an attempt at a proportional
correction, in party terms, of the distortions
of that majoritarian
component. Fortunately the use of party list
systems, which do not directly elect MPs,
would appear to be unconstitutional (see next
paragraph) for electing either MHRs or
senators to Australia's Federal Parliament and
– alone among the Australian States – 4.
MULTIPLE VACANCY SPECTRUM: PROPORTIONAL
REPRESENTATION to WINNER-TAKE-ALL The Proportional
Representation End: At
the proportional representation end of this
spectrum are those systems, whether
transferable vote or non-transferable vote
systems that provide, in electoral districts
electing five or more candidates as a group,
for the election of candidates with a
significant degree of diversity able to
represent, collectively, some five-sixths of
the total number of voters. This end of the
spectrum includes
The Winner-take-all
End: At
the Winner-take-all
end of the spectrum are those systems, mostly
like the two different majoritorian
systems above used for Australian Senate
elections from 1902-46
where, like the multiple plurality
system (1902-17), the candidates that gained
the largest single group of votes filled all
the available positions, or the multiple
majority-preferential system
(1919-47), where the candidates that gained a
bare absolute majority of votes filled all the
available positions. At five separate periodic
Senate elections, a single party won all
available seats Australia-wide! As stated in Section
2 above, single-vacancy systems
are inherently winner-take-all
systems. Intermediate
Positions:
Between those two ends of the spectrum of
proportionality are systems that give a degree
of proportionality, but tend to have some bias
towards larger groups. Examples are
quota-preferential systems where the number of
persons to be elected is fewer than five, and
non-preferential non-proportional systems that
nevertheless enable some minority
representation, such as the limited vote or
the cumulative vote.
The
requirement of transferable vote electoral
systems relating to the marking of preferences
has extended from a requirement to mark all
preferences consecutively without error or any
omission or duplication of numbers to the
complete removal of any requirement to mark
any preferences other than a unique first
preference. In all quota-preferential systems
a ballot-paper is informal if it has no unique
first preference marked on it.
The
Hare-Clark
system of proportional representation
used in By
contrast, electoral systems in other parts of
Australia and elsewhere have been overlaid
with aspects that operate against voters being
the real arbiters of whom is elected. Examples
of such aspects include a degree of stage management
where political parties are allowed to decide
the order of candidates on ballot-papers, and
the Group Voting Tickets
used for other parliamentary PR polls in
Australia. Those aspects allow voters to be
readily persuaded to adopt a specific choice
of candidates from a ticket lodged by their
party of choice, and to not bother
distinguishing between the particular
candidates, even though, unlike the case with
party list systems, which are indirect
electoral systems, there is provision for them
to do so, although that is made harder for
them than the easy method of donkey voting or
ticking a Group Voting Ticket box. Representative
bodies elected from single-member electorates
weaken voter control in the sense that, unlike
proportional representation systems, nearly
half the voters in each electorate, and hence
overall, are unrepresented by the final
outcome. 7.
DESCRIPTIONS OF A WIDE RANGE OF
VOTE-COUNTING SYSTEMS
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