Australia’s senate voting reforms are the first step to designing back democracy.

***At the last federal election I wrote a post about why the senate ballot in Australia is broken. I’ve re-mixed it here to provide comment on the recent reforms to the senate voting system.***

I have a friend who’s vegan. It’s no surprise that she was intrigued to see Animal Justice Party on the Australian Senate ballot for the 2013 federal election. Like most vegans she’s pretty passionate about her beliefs, but wanted to do some research to see who might be getting her vote. A quick google lead her to find the party was formed in 2011, since the last election, with a manifesto:

“…to focus public attention and bring about change to the way humans at large treat other animal species as a result of political decision making.”

This is basically her #1 core belief. Armed with this knowledge she voted ‘above the line’ for them in the Australian senate. Without knowing it this left-leaning animal lover had the potential to have her vote counted in electing a senator from

• Anti-immigration nationalists (One Nation),
• Conservative Christians (Family First)
• Anti-environmentalists (no carbon tax climate skeptics)

These where all before her vote reached her actual second preference – The Greens – who wants to establish an independent office of animal welfare.

In the end her vote actually went to Ricky Muir of the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts. A tiny party she’d have never heard of, let alone agree with their quest to:

“…preserve traditional Australian family values and the Motoring Enthusiast lifestyle”.

See how different that party’s goal is from the Animal Justice Party. Ricky got 0.51% of first preference votes. When it was all said and done he had reached the 14.3% quota of votes and took his seat as an Australian Senator.

How did this happen? It’s all because of the design of a voting system – the single transferable vote – along with a system that hides transparency.

Nerdy Background on Voting in Australia.

For those not in Australia, we have two houses of parliament; the house of representatives and the senate.

In both houses we have preferential voting – otherwise known as ranked voting – where voters rank an order of preference for the various parties or candidates. Their vote transferred to their next preference when their preferred candidate is eliminated.

In the lower house we have what is called instant runoff voting where the order of preference is explicitly stated by the voter.

The senate is different. There is a literal line on the ballot paper and voters have the preference of voting ‘above the line’ or ‘below the line’.

Australian’s can vote two different ways. Firstly, we can vote below the line and nominate individual senators in an order of preference. This is somewhat helped by the fact that the parties are in columns.

Secondly, and what happens in the vast majority of votes, Australian’s can vote above the line. This is what is known as a single transferable vote.

In this instance the voter is not only voting for their first preference party. They also delegate the right for the party to allocate their vote in a preference order they give to the Australian Electoral Commission prior to polling day. As this form of voting is easier it’s not really a surprise that 95% of people vote above the line.

The Ballot is Broken

Here is the catch with above the line voting; the preferences are essentially invisible. You can see the parties preferences on some websites but I doubt few look and less remember. At the polling booth they’re nowhere to be seen. It’s all memory.

Historically, this wasn’t really a problem. The number of parties was low and it was pretty obvious how a preference would flow. But in recent years things have changed. Australia still has 2 major parties and a small handful of second tier players. But there has been a major proliferation of so-called “micro parties”. The ballot has progressively got longer. In 2013 my senate ballot was over a meter long:

As the senate ballot papers have gotten longer so have the number of votes not counted because the ballot was filled out incorrectly. It was nearly 1 in 20 people in 2013. Certainly much of this has to be errors due to the complexity of the ballot.

Designing an election victory

Invisible preference flows are a much bigger problem than voter error. To a voter it is no-longer obvious where preferences go, largely caused by the micro-parties making preference deals. These are all about staying in the race long enough to grab a senate seat with a tiny number of first preference votes. Political scientist John Wanna puts it well:

“What’s happened is, once we’ve gone over the line, the micro-parties have realised, as a result of things like the New South Wales Legislative Council elections, that they can piece together these deals, which are basically anti-democratic deals really. They’re trying to shift your vote to somewhere else. And they’ve had a couple of decades now to work out how to game the system. And they’ve learnt how to game the system.”

The term for this is pretty sinister sounding; vote harvesting. It leads to some seriously bizarre preference flows, like the one mentioned about my about my vegan friend at the top of this post.

For example in the last election, which was held in 2013, the Australian Sex Party (a self described civil libertarian alternative) made some odd deals that could have had some crazy results.

In Victoria they had a deal with One Nation (ultra-conservative populists). Fiona Pattern of the Australian Sex party was one of the last candidates eliminated in 2010. In 2013 these preferences gave her a very good chance of being elected.

In NSW the reverse was possible. The infamous Pauline Hanson had a preference deal with the Sex Party. Before the election it was thought she stood a chance partially based on the Australian Sex party preference flows.

To use hyper-sterotypes, this means gay, pot-smoking, immigrant strippers could end up voting with white, anti-immigrant nationalists to elect two very different senators.

Voters have a problem

Voters were left with a problem. They can vote below the line and fill out nearly 100 boxes, where they cannot possibly know the information to preference correctly if they manage to do it at all. Alternatively the can vote above the line and hope the preference ends up working to their wishes. To summarise generally:

Voting below the line = Pain + Control

Voting above the line = Speed + Hope

Election Day — A Broken Service

A traditional method used in service design, my profession, is that of the customer journey map. The point is to take the customers, or voters, through a service to both empathise with their situation and identify ‘touchpoints’ for future design. (Touchpoint is essentially jargon for an encounter that can be altered.).

Whilst a real journey map would be more detailed, a brief look at users on voting day reveals it’s obvious why people tend to only vote above the line. By the time you’re inside that small, cramped booth, where the massive senate ballot paper can’t even be held flat, you’ve already been through a rough time. Perhaps:

• You only remembered late in the day that you had to squeeze in voting.
• You’ve driven around the block 5 times looking for a park.
• There’s bored kids running amuck around the polling place.
• An at-the-time-delicious sausage in bread is now rumbling in your guts.
• You can’t find a loo because you’ll lose your place in line.
• You’ve now waited half an hour in a line, only to be placed in another line because you are in the wrong electorate.

You notice nowhere along the journey is a voter actually exposed to the preferences of their chosen candidates. Political Antony Pink says:

“It becomes almost an impossible nightmare for all but the most prepared to show their preferences on the largest possible Senate ballot with the smallest possible fonts.

It’s easy to see why voters, even if they are sure of some preferences, just say ‘stuff it mate’ and place a 1 above the line. They might head out hoping their vote gets allocated the way they want, but probably don’t think about it at all.

Fixing the Service of Voting

***Of course this post is about to make some comments on the recent Australian Senate reforms on how to vote. But in the previous post that this is re-mixed from I listed a number of ideas. I was planning on leaving them out. But I thought it more interesting to list them in order to note that the reforms taken were not the only way to address the problem. In fact, a number of interventions are probably necessary and other issues remain. Simply put the senate reforms only partially solve the problem***

People tend to think of voting systems as fixed designs. But that is simply not true. Over time the design of voting has evolved to make voting easier and less error prone. For example, in 1856 Australia was the first country to include the candidates names on the ballots. In fact, above the line voting itself has only existed since 1984. Anything can be designed.

There are many issues in voting that could be fixed with better design. My personal favourite the simple inability to actually remember the political stance of all parties. However, it’s the lack of transparency of preferences that is at the heart of the problem. The point of doing a customer journey is so that you know where the opportunities might lie. There are basically 5 main opportunities to improve transparency:

1. Fix the Transparency

Identify opportunities in the ballot booth or on the ballot paper that clearly show preference flows of above the line voting. Having the preference flows clearly visible in polling booths would ensure people have access to some information on the day so they can use what prior knowledge the have and make an informed vote.

2. Utilise the Voter’s Journey

The process of polling day does tend to involve some degree of waiting. It also involves passing through places getting how to vote cards. There are numerous opportunities to allow voters to discover preferences as they enter. Maybe it’s volunteer organisations showing people ipads where they can check preference flows. Maybe it’s handing people bound books whilst they are in-line. Maybe it’s simply showing them on large walls.

3. Change the Channel

Channel is service design jargon for a conduit for delivering goods, services or information. Department stores have their physical space as one channel, and their webstore as another. Voting already has other channels, most notably the postal vote. We have already written about how this changes the voting experience, most notably removing time pressure and allowing access to wider information. For example, voters could utalise tools such as below the line and research who you’re ranking thoroughly as you do it.

4. Create a Channel

Why not create a whole new way to vote? Australia brought in electronic voting at polling booths for persons with a disability in 2007. This fundamentally opens up the possibility of making invisible preferences visible. But why stop there? Surely online voting can’t be far away. Transparency would be there with the click of a button.

5. Change the voting system

You could change the rules about how to vote above and below the line. This is, in fact, what Australia has just done after a potentially filibustering 26 hour debate the reforms were passed on Friday. Australians will now be able to vote above the line numbering as many or as little boxes as they like (technically it’s “6” but if voters fill out less their votes will still count, which I find but odd. Why say 6).

If voters choose to go below the line they must number at least 12 candidates but can stop any time after that.

Additionally, parties now no longer submit their preference flows and the preferences only flow based on what was explicitly stated by a voter. If a preference cannot be found then the vote will not count.

Not the end

The recent changes are obviously positive. Anthony Green, Australia’s most well known and respected electoral commentator, took aim at the electoral system before the last election stating:

“Conducting an election under such circumstances is a farce that Australians, and the politicians responsible for not acting ahead of time to fix the system, should be embarrassed by.”

In short, don’t hate the player. Hate the game. Today I’m glad to see the country I love has taken a major step forwards in the game.

But the war for democracy, like the design of services, is never done. The senate reforms mostly solve the problems of transparency of where your preference will flow.

But there is potentially a bigger problem. We have a many parties, a largely disengaged public and a swathe of issues. Therefore many – in my opinion most - people don’t actually know the positions and policies of the parties they are voting for.

So we’ve solved the who. People now know who they are voting for. The next challenge is the why. Can we help voters decide why they’d vote for parties based on their position and related policies?

So, we’re not done. Let’s use this momentum and take the next step in Designing Australian Democracy.