You are a voter.

You decide to vote for the Australian Labor Party in the House of Representatives.

For your Senate vote, you decide to vote for the World Peace Party. You don’t know who they are and you don’t think they will be elected but you believe that by voting this way you may be able to send a message that world peace is important.

You have checked the Australia Electoral Commission (AEC) website on how to vote for the Senate. The website gives an example ballot paper with five groups A-E and two ungrouped candidates – a total of seventeen candidates. It also gives an explanation of the difference between voting above the line and voting below the line.

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by Stephen Lesslie

The half Senate election to be held in conjunction with the House of Representatives election on 14 September 2013 will be a disaster. It will not be democratic and will not be proportional.
And proportional representation – or specifically, the single transferable vote (STV) currently used in Senate elections – will be blamed.

In an STV system, a member is elected when they receive enough votes to obtain a quota. For half Senate elections the quota is 14.29%. In most States, four or five Senators will be elected because they (or their party) received sufficient first preference votes to reach this quota and be elected in their own right.

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The following article appeared on the Weekly Times which calls itself “the voice of the country since 1869” and is published by News Limited.

NSW Farmers Association voting confusion

READERS might remember in 2007 when federal Labor pollie Barry Jones released his plan for the Knowledge Nation.
It contained a diagram so incomprehensible the media referred to it as “spaghetti and meatballs”.
Well, the NSW Farmers Association has created its own spaghetti-and-meatballs moment with a change in their voting system for office bearers. NSW Farmers Association has gone to a proportional voting system that may need NASA’s computers to process it.
Back Paddock will not attempt to explain it, mainly because we can’t, even after reading one of the explanatory notes (pictured) sent to delegates.
Whatever happened to a show of hands?

Show of hands? Whatever happened to the concept of a secret ballot?

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