Last time we stopped with a question — how come there is such a big discrepancy between actual voter support and representation in the Lower House in Victoria?
To take the above question one step further — how come the Liberal and Nationals Coalition (the Coalition) received almost half a million more votes than the Australian Labor Party (ALP) but won 19 seats less in the Federal Parliament of Australia in the 2022 election???
Some would say “hold on, the math doesn’t end up”, but it does not matter when you use Preferential Voting system!
So, what’s a Preferential Voting system?
In Australia we do not vote as a country per se, but rather as districts (or sometimes referred as divisions) whereby each district has its own candidate from each major party as well as independents. Before the election we are bombarded with media and advertisement about how important (and compulsory) the voting is and that we have only one vote and we should not waste it.
I mean, yes, in representative democracy we are always taught that we have only one vote, but with preferential voting system our one vote is actually five votes, or eight votes or even 12 votes depending on the number of candidates in your electoral districts (when used in the context of the Victorian Lower House elections of 2022 it was 8 votes for my district). What this means in practical terms is that you need to allocate a preference to every candidate in the ballot in order of your preference, with ‘1’ representing your main preference and ‘8’ your least preferred candidate (if there are total of 8 candidates in your district).
This system is designed to eliminate any run-offs/second rounds by providing for ‘multiple counts of ballot papers to occur to determine who has acquired an absolute majority of the total votes (more than 50% of formal votes)’[1].
To understand better how the system works in Lower House elections you can watch the video below from the Australian Electoral Commission
[1] https://www.aec.gov.au/learn/preferential-voting.htm
Looks efficient right?
On it’s face the preferential voting system looks efficient, on both financial and time-consuming aspects due to there being only one election, no extra run-off expenses and everything being virtually decided in one day (OK few days that we allow for vote count and re-count where needed). This should make the preferential voting system quite attractive for adoption given how we all love efficiency! Indeed it is used in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Ireland (a modified version, that arguably should not even be in this list) and great US state of Maine (better known for the fact that it is the only US state with only one syllable rather than voting system different from the rest of the country). It is also de-facto used for presidential elections in Sri-Lanka, but preference count was never needed since its introduction in 1980. Yep, you heard it right, just three countries use this system, out of 195, for parliamentary elections.
There are countries with much worse track record of representative democracy than Australia that use more democratic systems that allow for allocation of parliamentary seats proportional to the total votes the party receives at election. Even worse, Australia is part of the Commonwealth, i.e. former British Empire which is the birthplace of Westminster system that is regarded by some as the pinnacle of representative democracy. Despite this Australia is the only, I mean THE ONLY country in Commonwealth that has adopted preferential voting system for all its elections. Why is that you’d ask? Well…
Critique of Preferential Voting system
1. Popular vote discrepancy AKA no proportionality between actual votes received and seats won
First thing that draws attention is that the preferential voting system enables the party that lost the popular vote (this is the vote based on overall primary vote count) to win the majority in the Lower House. A country-wide example is the results of Australian Federal elections summarised in the table below (for two major parties only):[1]
[1] Data from https://results.aec.gov.au/27966/Website/HouseStateFirstPrefsByParty-27966-NAT.htm
Similarly, we discussed (in our previous post),[1] how disproportionate the ALP control of the Victorian Lower House is when compared to the total votes they received, i.e. 63.6% control vs 37% of primary votes received.
This is all due to the fact how the preferential voting system works in practice. To illustrate this, I’ll use an example of small electoral district of Hasting in Victoria. This is one of the 88 districts in Victoria that vary in size from approximately 45K to 55K, Hastings in particular is a mid-size district with 48.6K people registered to vote.
Despite voting being compulsory in Australia (fines apply if you fail to vote, but how often these fines are waived is another topic altogether) there were only 41,232 formal votes received in 2022 Victorian Lower House elections. This represents 84.7% of the district voters, and this is how they voted:[2]
[1] https://medium.com/p/844c589a8c52
[2] Data from https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/hastings-district-results
Effectively, despite 23% of Hasting district votes being for other parties they nevertheless got counted only for the two major parties in the end of the day. For example the 10% of people who voted for Australian Greens (which is close to the 11.5% of total primary votes being for Australia Greens across Victoria) did not get their first preference reflected at all.
Ultimately the system operates in a way that largely disregards the popular vote skewing the system further to a two-party system, directly benefiting the two major parties in Australia. This is why the Australian Greens are calling the results of this election a ‘green-slide’ as they won a whooping 4 seats in the Victorian Lower House, which could’ve been 10 seats if the seats where allocated based on popular/primary votes rather than preferential voting. Alas this is not the case and as we’ve discussed in our previous post roughly 30% of voter preferences do not see proportionate, if any at all, representation in the Lower House. So much so that it was a topic of satire during the last federal election.
In the end of the day though the main questions I want to ask you are the following — how fair is it not to win the popular/primary vote, but at the same time secure parliamentary majority necessary to unilaterally change majority of laws? How representative is democracy that fails to represent 30% of its population in the parliament?
2. General ethics and Political engineering concerns
Ethics and information overload
One thing that you would note when going to vote in any Australian Lower House election is the line of party representatives at the entry to the polling centre. Despite different, and sometimes conflicting, political views they all have one thing in common. Not only they want to have your “one” vote, but they also want to divert your “preference votes” from their main opposition. To achieve this, they heckle you while you walk to the polling centre and should you react, they will give you a completed ‘how to vote’ card detailing how your preferences should go from 1 to however many candidates there are in your district, for example see below picture from the Federal Election in 2022:
This is a questionable approach in terms of ethics as no one should be dictating you how to vote and in reality, people are not obliged in any way of form to vote exactly how they are told to. But neither should we be told that we need to allocated 8 preferences when we realistically only have one and do not whish to give our vote to other parties at all. Nevertheless, amount of voting content in all forms of media during the election is staggering with some major parties resorting to blatant spam correspondence, which, conveniently, is exempt from general spam rules and laws during the election.[1] It would be fine if this communication would’ve been about content of ideas (as democracy should be), but more often than not is ‘don’t vote for Billy coss he’s bad’ type of communication supported by a thoughtfully placed ‘how to vote’ card example.
General ethics of such communication and unsolicited bombardment with brochures, emails and text messages is of questionable ethical standard. In a representative democracy I expect the candidate to tell me why I should vote for them and what will they do to promote my interests in the parliament, not why I should not vote for someone else and how exactly should I place my preferences to avoid a minority government in which the parties will need to engage in sacrilegious practice of negotiation and debate. Indeed, the level of engagement and sheer volume of information pressure is so significant that I sometimes wonder where is all this engagement with constituents in the years prior to election??? I digress.
Political engineering
There are also concerns that changes made to districts can impact the results of the election. If you have good knowledge of voting demographics and have ‘influence’ over the electoral commission in your state than you can change the district boundaries. This happened recently in Victoria where the Victorian Electoral Commission removed 9 districts, added 9 new ones and changed some boundaries in the process.[2] Before the redraft ALP held 6 and Coalition held 3 districts, out of 9 new districts 7 new districts had an overwhelming support for ALP, one district had a very close vote, and only one was won by Coalition.
With all due honesty however, I cannot say that this was a deliberate manipulation of the system simply because I do not have all the data available to me with respect to demographics in those areas. Nevertheless, with enough information this can work quite well.
For example, if ALP is in control of the government and they realise that the bordering parts of three districts are predominately in support of Coalition they can attempt to redraft the district map to ‘trap’ as many Coalition supporters as they can in one district and reduce the Coalition vote from two other neighbouring districts, for example like this (with red representing ALP support and blue representing Coalition support):
[1] See e.g. https://www.acma.gov.au/political-text-messages
[2] Data from https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/electoral-boundaries/state-boundary-reviews
This, of course is problematic, but nevertheless possible (and my drawing does not do it any justice) with sufficient data and targeted campaigning to ensure that you maximise your votes. There is an old maxim that ‘Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them’ and it is quite true because when you are the government inevitably you have more information and control mechanism. Most importantly it is not because of corruption (however the Victorian anti-corruption body investigation of politicians was in the news in the last year more than it has been in last 10), but from a sheer desire to please your boss and advance your career.
Summary
In the end of the day, the preferential voting system favours the major parties almost to a degree of exclusion of others, making it a David v Goliath battle for them to win any seats. Most importantly though it is going against the principles of representative democracy as it fails to represent minor parties that still do have a significant support. Think about it this way, average district consists of 45–55K, the party scoring 51% majority wins a seat, meaning that 25–30K people get a representative in the lower house. Family First Victoria party received almost 4x more votes than that,[1] but yet got absolutely no representation in Victorian Lower House, is this fair, is this really representative of substantial political views in Victoria? Yeah Nah!
To be continued
But hey, you’d ask, ‘you’ve been ranting about the system this whole article, but haven’t said anything about how this can be improved!’ You are absolutely right! That’s why my next post will be about alternatives to the preferential voting system and how our current system can be improved.
[1] Data from https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/2022-state-election-results/results-summary/lower-house-overall-results
