|
QUOTA
QN2021C September 2021 www.prsa.org.au
Western
Australia's government bill to implement
Expert Committee's report As reported in QN2021B,
Western Australia’s government established
a Ministerial Expert Committee on
Electoral Reform, to consider and report
on reforms of the electoral system to
achieve voter equality for the state’s
Legislative Council. That Committee’s Report
led to the government’s introducing its Constitution and Legislative
Amendment (Electoral Equality) Bill
2021 in the
Legislative Assembly on 16 September 2021
along with an Explanatory Memorandum and
the Attorney-General’s second reading
speech, each of which is accessible at
that hyperlink. As a result of the 2021
elections, each house of the Western
Australian Parliament has - for the first
time - an absolute majority of Labor Party
members, which has facilitated the Labor
Government’s swift introduction of its
electoral reform proposals. As the PRSA had hoped,
the bill seeks to discontinue Group Voting
Tickets for elections to WA’s Legislative
Council, and to redesign the ballot paper so
partial optional preferential marking would
apply below-the-line, but
unfortunately the bill fails to ensure there
will no longer be any above-the-line
contrivance on the ballot paper. The PRSA’s
submission
to the Expert Committee urged the
exclusive use of the simpler, and much
more voter-empowering Hare-Clark
ballot paper, but the Committee’s Report
made no mention at all of any real
consideration of that leading form of PR-STV. A glaring anomaly in the
Report and in the bill was the claim that it
sought “electoral equality” in WA’s entrenched,
constitutionally-mandated direct election
of candidates, yet it introduced an above-the-line
option that significantly privileges
registered groups. Such groups must include
at least five candidates to be eligible to
have their names appear above-the-line
where a voter’s single mark against a group is deemed to
be a transferable vote for that group’s
candidates in a fixed order the group lodged
with the WA Electoral Commission. By
contrast, voters for candidates whose names
can only appear below-the-line have
to correctly mark 20 unique consecutive
preferences in order to cast a valid
ballot. That continuation of the
unjust misuse of the electoral law to
perpetuate two classes of voter, to make the
marking of a ballot paper 20 times as
onerous for one class as the other, to give
a substantial advantage for major party
candidates over independent or minor party
candidates, and to retain the unnecessary
power of party preselectors to stage manage the
election, is greatly at odds with the
professed aim, which is even included in
the title of the bill, of “electoral
equality”.
On
Monday, 20 September 2021, Canada held a
general election for its House of Commons
using its long-standing single-member
electoral district system with plurality (so-called
first-past-the-post) counting, but
Canada’s Senate is unelected. Its 105
senators are appointed by
the Governor-General to represent regions,
and serve till they turn 75. The House of
Commons poll was less than two years into
the five-year term, and was called early by
the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, hoping
to gain a majority for his Liberal Party.
Instead his party suffered a 0.5% vote swing
against it, but gained two seats. Table 1
shows the overall outcome.
Table 1:
Votes and seats won in Canada's 2021
election
Even
at first glance, it is clear that this
result represents a distortion of the
voters’ will. The Liberal Party is
over-represented with fewer votes than the
Conservatives, and many more seats. Indeed
the Liberal Party would need only eleven
more seats to obtain an absolute majority of
seats. Eight seats won by
the Conservatives would have fallen to the
Liberals with a swing of 2.5% or less. Three
seats held by the Bloc Québécois over the
Liberals would have been lost with swings of
around 1.5% or less. Thus the Liberals could
have achieved an absolute majority of the
House of Commons seats with around 34.5% of
the vote. Conservative
seats
won by less than five percentage points
over a Liberal candidate ·
Charleswood-St
James-Assiniboia-Headingley, 39%-39% (24
vote lead)
·
Coast of Bays-Central-Nôtre Dame,
47%-46%
·
King-Vaugha,
45%-43% ·
South Surrey-White Rock, 42%-39%
·
Bay
of Quinte, 41%-37% ·
Peterborough-Kawartha,
39%-35% ·
South Shore-St Margarets, 41%-37%
·
Miramichi-Grand Lake, 44%-39%
Bloc
Québécois
seats won by less than three percentage
points over a Liberal candidate: ·
Châteauguay-Lacolle, 37%-36%
·
Longueuil-Saint-Hubert, 41%-38%
·
Trois-Rivières, 30%-29%
The
Liberal Party is clearly over-represented in
the House of Commons, but the more
left-leaning party, the New Democrats, is
clearly under-represented, although its MPs
will hold a ‘balance of power’ on many
issues in the new Parliament. In
the 2019 election, the Liberal Party set a
new record: the lowest share for a party
that would go on to form a one-party
government (33.12% in 2019). It is likely
that this ‘record’ of distortion of
democracy has been broken once more! See
long-term overall results. Two examples of electoral
districts (called ridings in Canada)
with very close results were Trois-Rivières
in Quebec and Nanaimo-Ladysmith in British
Columbia. The Trois-Rivières
riding was
won by the Bloc Québécois
candidate with just 29.5% of the vote:
Table 2: Votes cast in Quebec’s
Trois-Rivières riding Throughout
the
election count some commentators were
pointing out that the right-wing ‘People’s
Party’ was likely to be taking votes away
from the Conservatives and that, without the
People’s Party, a seat like this might have
been won by the Conservatives. From an
Australian perspective, of course, it can be
seen that a result where the top three
candidates are separated by less than 1%,
ranging from 29.5% down to 28.6%, would be
much fairer if voters for defeated
candidates could express their second and
subsequent preferences. Given
that most New Democrat voters would be
likely to put Conservative behind Liberal or
Bloc Québécois if they were allowed
to express more preferences, most likely a
transferable vote count for this seat would
result in either a Liberal or a Bloc
Québécois candidate being elected, with the
Conservative party in second or even third
place. In
the Nanaimo-Ladysmith
riding - which the Greens
won in 2019 - the Conservative candidate was
in second place, and at various points in
the count was leading. That riding is one of
the most left-leaning and pro-environment in
Canada, yet it nearly elected an MP of
opposite opinions – a very good
demonstration of how plurality counting (so-called
‘first-past-the-post’) can fail to
meet democratic requirements so markedly.
Table 3: Votes cast in BC’s
Nanaimo-Ladysmith riding Most
reporting on the election concentrated only
on seats won rather than votes received, and
that concentration of seats led to the
Leader of the Conservative Party being under
pressure after what was described as a
‘dismal performance’ in some media. That
claim was made despite his party winning
more votes than any other party. No
single-member riding can provide any
diversity of representation, but the
distortions created by plurality counting
are most clearly indicated by these figures,
showing that huge numbers of voters are not
represented adequately in the House of
Commons:
(See
a listing of winners in each
province, with the first
preference percentage given for each of the
winning candidates.) The 2021 elections had the
lowest turnout for many years, and in most
provinces ‘Did not vote’
gained a higher percentage than any
candidates!
The
2021 elections to Germany's Bundestag
Soon
after Canada’s elections using its
single-member districts and plurality counts,
the Federal Republic of Germany held elections
with its hybrid Mixed Member Proportional (MMP)
system. German
voters elected candidates of eight different
parties to the Lower House of Germany’s
federal legislature, the Bundestag,
which consists of 299 members elected - like
Canada’s, from single-member districts, using
plurality
(so-called first-past-the-post
counting) - and at least 299 others from a
second, party list vote, with the actual
number depending on complex calculations. The
upper house, the Bundesrat, is
not directly elected. Six
parties received significant support in each
of the 16 German States, so there were 436
top-up seats, elected from party lists, a
number calculated on a State-by-State
basis.
There are thus a total of 735 members in the
2021 Bundestag. The Christian Democrats (CDU)
and Christian Social Union (CSU) are in
coalition. The CSU only stands candidates in
Bavaria, and the CDU only stands candidates in
all the other States. Data
in Tables 4-6 below are from
Wikipedia.
The percentage vote shown in red below are
of votes, some of which were wasted as MMP has
no transferable voting, and some of which
would be below the quota in a
Table 4: CONSTITUENCY
votes for the Bundestag, 2021
Table 5: PARTY LIST votes for the
Bundestag, 2021
Table
6: TOTAL votes for the Bundestag, 2021 (*
Mean vote % is the mean of Constituency and
Party List % votes) Notes:
(1) The Left party did not reach the 5%
threshold that normally allows a party to
obtain party list MPs. However, a proviso
of the law is that no threshold applies to
a party if its candidates are elected in
at least three constituencies. Candidates
of The Left party did win three
constituencies, but if they had won fewer,
its candidates would have not gained the
36 party list MPs it won with the benefit
of that arbitrary proviso. See also
similar QN2013C election comments; (2)
A minority party representing the Danish and
Frisian ethnic minorities in the State of
Schleswig-Holstein won a seat because the
threshold does not apply to ethnic minority
groups. With the 55,330
votes they received in the party
list votes, they obtained one MP. As
yet another demonstration of how appallingly
unrepresentative the plurality
(first-past-the-post)
system is, candidates of the Christian Social
Union (CSU) (part of the Conservative
alliance with the Christian Democrats)
won - in the State of Bavaria - 36.9% of the
votes overall in 36 constituency seats, but
they won 45 of the 46 constituencies, although
they won all of them in 2017. Bavaria’s
70 top-up seats were allocated as below: 23
Social Democrats 17
Greens 14
Free Democrats 12
Alternative for Germany 4
The Left Because
the proportional seat tally of successful
candidates of the Christian Social Union in
Bavaria was much higher than the proportion it
received in its ‘second’ or ‘party list’ vote,
the CDU had none of its candidates elected
from the party list in
that State, as it was part of an alliance with
the CSU. At
one point during the count for the election,
the possibility was raised that the Christian
Democrats (CDU) leader, Armin Laschet - the
successor to Angela Merkel, the outgoing
Chancellor, as its leader - might not obtain a
seat in the Bundestag. That
was because even though Mr Laschet headed the
party list for the CDU in Nordrhein-Westfalen
State, the number of constituencies candidates
of the CDU won, and their low party list vote,
might mean that the CDU would not win seats
beyond those elected in single-member
constituencies. Mr
Laschet’s was elected to the Bundestag,
however - not because the CDU party list vote
in the State rose - but rather the vote for
CDU candidates fell in enough of the
constituencies to mean that the constituencies
that the CDU previously held were lost, and
therefore the party list did ‘top-up’ the CDU
elected candidates. That
is an example of one of the most significant
problems with MMP: the elaborate calculations
- which ensure the parties are represented in
the Bundestag at close to the level of the
party list votes receive - do not give voters
control of who is elected from party lists;
and it is something of a matter of luck as to
who gets elected. That
said, the overall levels of representation of
voters in party terms in Germany’s
Bundestag does more closely correspond to
voters’ indications than it does in Canada’s
House of Commons. Perhaps
because
under MMP the votes of nearly every elector do
count in party terms (unlike in Canada), the
German election had a much higher turnout
(76.6%) than in Canada (62.3%). The
challenge for supporters of PR-STV
electoral systems is to more clearly explain
the problem raised in the previous paragraphs
to show that although MMP meets two of the
requirements of a good electoral system: ·
that
parties are represented by candidates at the
percentages that people vote for ·
that
the ballots of a greater percentage of the
voters also count towards
Call for
Nominations for Elections of the four PRSA
Office-bearers for 2022-23 The
Returning Officer is Ms Marian Lesslie of
the PRSA's
New South Wales Branch. Under the PRSA Constitution, the Returning
Officer rotates among the Branch
Secretaries. The order, by precedent, is
NSW, SA, WA, the ACT, and VIC-TAS. Nominations
- for President,
Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer - need be signed by
the candidate only, as consent to
nomination, and must be with Ms Lesslie,
at 74 Thompson Street, DRUMMOYNE NSW 2047,
or at nretoff@prsa.org.au by Friday, 05
November 2021. Nominations should be
viewable on the PRSA Elections
page.
© 2021
Proportional Representation Society of Australia National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
