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QUOTA Newsletter
of the Proportional Representation Society of QN80 December 1995 www.prsa.org.au
Computerized Senate Scrutinies
Criticism of
quota-preferential proportional
representation for the time it takes to
count could be vanquished at the next Senate
elections by Easycount, the Australian
Electoral Commission's computerized scrutiny
count. Alan Jeffrey, Victorian PRSA member,
reports that once the last postal vote is
received, this computer program can complete
the counting of vote preferences within two
hours instead of the three weeks or more a
manual count takes.
The
Electoral and Referendum Amendment Bill 1995,
which would have required the AEC to use
Easycount at Senate elections, was amended by
the Senate to include truth in political
campaigning proposals that the House of
Representatives failed to accept. That unfortunately
stalled the bill. The Easycount part of the
bill was acceptable to both Houses. The AEC is
still able to use Easycount. Easycount passed its
major test when used for a re-run of the 1993 More Good News from the ACT
In
September, the ACT Electoral Commission upheld
the objections of the PRSA's ACT Branch
and others to the registration as a political
party of the Smokers are Voters
and Civil Rights group. Prior to the
1995 election, this group had submitted a
scrappy single page, purporting to be a
Constitution fulfilling one electoral
legislation requirement for a registered name
to appear on the ballot paper. The
ACT Branch welcomed the protection afforded
voters by the Commission's decision to insist
on evidence of ratification of constitutions
by a general meeting of members, as well as
its setting of minimum content standards in
relation to membership requirements,
particulars of office bearers and their
election, the keeping of accounts, and the
mechanism for changing a constitution. Late in November the
Attorney-General, Mr Gary Humphries, introduced
the Carnell Government's citizen-initiated
referenda legislation, making provision for
specific proposed laws to be referred to the
people if 5% of voters have indicated support
for such a course of action within the period
allowed for the collection of signatures. PRSA Targets Discrimination
Against Below-the-Line Senate Voters
With two electoral
amendment Bills before Parliament, in September
PRSA President Bogey Musidlak and psephologist
Malcolm Mackerras jointly called for an end to
the discriminatory blight that confronts voters
wishing to mark boxes alongside candidates'
names. They pointed out that when the single
transferable vote is used to elect 21
Legislative Councillors in NSW only 15
consecutive numbers are required for a
below-the-line vote to be formal, and that seven
preferences are enough in Letters asking for an
end to the Senate double standard were sent to
the Hon. Frank Walker, Minister for
Administrative Services, and a range of senators
that have taken an active interest in electoral
matters. WA Greens Senator Christabel
Chamarette, who has made clear her support for
optional preferential voting in the report on
the 1993 elections of the Joint Standing
Committee on Electoral Matters, took up the
issue in debate, and intends to continue to
press the matter. This is a matter on which the
Society will actively campaign until relief is
obtained for voters. Western Australian Electoral
Moves
John Taplin,
President of the PRSA's
Western Australian Branch, quickly drew
public attention to gross defects in WA's Local
Government Bill 1995, which proposes first-past-the-post
voting for local government elections. In a letter to The
West Australian, he suggested that instead
thought should be given to computer counting
being adopted for a proportional representation
ballot. It was his understanding that Councils
and Shires mostly advocate proportional
representation in three-member wards, and that
this was the form the original draft Bill took.
In handing down its first major report in
August, the Commission on Government, headed by
a former Auditor-General, Mr Jack Gregor,
recommended that Robson
Rotation be used for Legislative Council
ballot papers to discourage political candidates
from currying favour within their party to gain
top spot on a ticket. The report also advocated
optional
preferential voting for both the Council
and the Assembly, the replacement of the current
vote weighting for Legislative Assembly
electorates with a maximum 15% tolerance in
enrolments, and that politicians retiring early
should be required to fund part of the cost of
the ensuing by-election. Parties Nominating More
Candidates than the Number of Seats they Expect
One
of the invaluable features of the Hare-Clark
electoral system, from the point of view of
the wide choice given to voters, is its
inbuilt incentive for parties to nominate a
number of candidates that is often about twice
the number of the seats they expect to fill. Hare-Clark
achieves that by filling casual vacancies by a
re-examination of the quota of votes that
elected the vacating candidate. By contrast
the more restricted Senate system, where
neither general nor periodic elections are
used to determine which candidate will fill a
casual vacancy, has often had major parties
nominating as few as one more than the bare
majority of the available seats they have
learnt is the best outcome they can expect.
Single-member
electoral systems, of course, are able to
offer the least scope to voters, as each party
usually nominates only one candidate.
Nevertheless, when Australia's present system
of preferential voting in single-member
districts began, in the 1920s, some of its
advocates claimed that it would encourage
parties to give voters a choice of candidates
from the same party, and hence widen voters'
choices, even though, unlike proportional
representation, it cannot increase beyond 51%
the percentage of voters that have an
effective vote that actually elects a
candidate. That claim has rarely been repeated
since, as parties have resolutely minimized
voters' choices, by standing only one
candidate per party. Nevertheless,
recent polls for the Northern Territory
Legislative Assembly have reminded people that
the possibility does exist. In each of three
such polls the Territory's home-grown Country
Liberal Party has fielded a pair of
candidates, as the table below shows. No CLP
candidate was elected in these polls, although
the 1995 poll was close. The advantage of the
approach was that CLP voters had a choice,
within the party, denied to other voters,
between aboriginal and non-aboriginal
candidates in the 1990 polls, and a choice
between aboriginals from two different tribal
backgrounds in the 1995 poll.
Preferential voting lets
voters choose which of several candidates of
their party they most prefer on the basis of
the different personal backgrounds of the
candidates. Many voters consider this a useful
choice, as all the candidates in a party
normally follow the same party platform, and
many voters see personal background as their
major field of choice within a party. The
preselectors have usually monopolized that
choice by standing one candidate only per
party.
Recently
the Australian Labor Party has begun to
prescribe, without giving voters a direct
choice, that preselections for winnable
seats must achieve a certain minimum
percentage of ALP MPs of each sex. A new
registered party has as its main aim there
being a mandatorily equal number of male and
female MPs in each Australian Parliament. Hare-Clark
elections with similar numbers of male and
female candidates would be the fairest way of
allowing voters to decide, at each election,
how far they wished to accept those ideas. By
contrast, with single-member electorates each
with a single candidate from each party, these
ideas of the ALP and the new party can only be
implemented by imposing a candidate on voters.
Yet any party can, even without PR, as the CLP
has shown, let its voters choose between its
candidates.
The ALP or other
interested parties could easily stand
a man and a woman in each electoral
district so that all voters at each
election could choose as they saw fit.
That should increase the overall vote
of the party. That may well have been
the motive of the CLP in these cases,
but an important added benefit for
voters is the greater choice offered.
Information
on Proportional Representation
Included are details of
our aims and objects, means of contacting
us, A Brief History of the PRSA, the
National President's address to the 1995
Annual General Meeting of the NSW Branch,
the Queensland Branch Secretary's
university thesis, A
Matter of Preference? Defending the
Single Transferable Vote As a
result of Lee's initiative, the PRSA now
exchanges Quota Notes
for Voice, the newsletter of the Northern
California Citizens for Proportional
Representation, of Two
excellent Tasmanian reports, Report on
Parliamentary Elections 1990 to 1994, and
Local Government Elections, 1994 are
now available free by writing to Mr Andrew
Hawkey, Tasmanian Electoral Office, GPO Box
275C, HOBART TAS 7001. Each report can be
obtained as hard copy or as an Excel spreadsheet
on disc, or both. If requesting a disc, please
indicate the disc size and whether PC or Mac
format. The coherent and informative Assembly
reports have been produced for many years.
The Victorian Branch collection starts at the
Report for elections from 1942 to 1947! The
Tasmanian Electoral Office Reports are probably
the most consistent and illuminating indicators
of how the makeup of a Parliament reflects the
wishes of its voters that can be found anywhere
in the world. Perhaps the ACT may begin to give
them some competition, but it will not have as
long a span of record as
In sad contrast, the
Morling Committee of Inquiry's 1994
recommend-ation, that the Hare-Clark system
in Three Bad
Electoral Systems
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NOTES