ERA News

President’s Report 2015-2016

Stephen Lesslie, President, Electoral Reform Australia

As I write this report, I note that the Prime Minister has been granted a double dissolution by the Governor General. The 150 seats of the House of Representatives will be all single member electorates and, as in the past, most voters will not have any influence on the outcome of the election. Mr Turnbull’s seat of Wentworth and Mr Shorten’s seat of Maribyrnong will both return their sitting member, as will about a hundred other seats in the Australian Parliament. Voters in these ‘safe’ seats may vote with passion or indifference but the result will be the same. Continue reading

Honorary Life Member

Congratulations to John Baglin on becoming an honorary life member of Electoral Reform Australia. John has worked tirelessly for many years promoting and campaigning for the single transferable vote to be adopted for our parliamentary institutions. His support for the cause and our committee has been invaluable.

Grief Syndrome

Stephen Lesslie

[With a Federal election on 2 July 2016 we felt it appropriate to re-run an article that first appeared in the Largest Remainder in April 2011.]

Grief syndrome or bereavement syndrome is a little known hazard for politicians and political candidates.

A political candidate lives in an unreal world. With the pre-selection sometimes over twelve months before the election, a campaign can be long and arduous but it is also an exciting time for a candidate with campaign meetings, pamphlets and press releases to be drafted, letters to be written, doorknocking and public appearances, and the phone never stops. Continue reading

Address to the AGM of the Victorian-Tasmanian Branch

The following is an edited version of the address given to the Annual General Meeting of the Victoria-Tasmanian Branch of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia by Stephen Lesslie, President of Electoral Reform Australia.

Mr President,

We, Electoral Reform Australia, are looking for three things in any reform of an electoral system. They are:

  1. The complete abolition of any form of above the line voting.
  2. The rights of voters to have their vote counted.
  3. Equality for voters.

Continue reading

Dialogue with Simplicio (with apologies to Galileo Galilei)

Simplicio, an Australian voter, is discussing with Electoral Reform Australia (ERA) its single transferable vote (STV) model for the Australian House of Representatives. This model advocates multi-member electorates of at least nine members to be elected without the use of above the line voting or associated group voting tickets. Candidates would be grouped in party columns and the candidates would be rotated within each group to ensure that each candidate had an equal chance of having the top position on the ballot paper. Fully optional preferential voting would apply and the vote would be counted using the Meek method of counting.

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Editorial

There’s no interest like self interest.

It is very disappointing that Senator Nick Xenophon has regressed in his recommendations for Senate electoral reform. His latest suggestion – that the NSW Legislative Council model be adopted but that it also be compulsory for voters mark a minimum of three preferences – is ridiculous.

This proposal will increase the informal vote to levels unseen in Senate elections for over thirty years.

The Senate ballot paper will look identical to those of recent years but any voter who votes with a single [1] above the line, for the party of their choice, will vote informally. There are voters in their fifties who have only ever voted with a single [1] above the line and no amount of voter education will convince them that they will need to change how they vote.

Is this proposal just a device to force Green and other minor party voters to give second preferences to Senator Xenophon’s party? How many voters forced to give second and subsequent preferences will just randomly allocate these votes?

Not that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) recommendation that the NSW Legislative Council model be introduced is much better.

Certainly the informal vote will remain low but the level of exhausted votes will be very high. It would be naive to think that voters will take the opportunity to express further preferences by continuing to number groups above the line. The NSW Legislative Council experience is that a majority of preferences from every group will exhaust when the last candidate from the group is either elected or excluded.

Simplicity is still the best solution for Senate electoral reform.

The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Legislative Assembly model should be adopted. One set of party groups, one set of instructions, no big distracting black line and, consequently, a much smaller and less intimidating ballot paper. Parties will run different numbers of candidates and this will break up the ballot paper and allow voters to more easily find the candidates that they wish to vote for.

The ballot paper should advise the voters how many candidates are to be elected, that they should vote using numbers starting from [1], and that they should vote for as many candidates as they wish in the order of their preference.

The more intelligent parties will not run a full slate of candidates but will trust that their supporters will, when they reach the end of the party list, realise that they can continue onto another party with similar policies. An examination of the votes in ACT Legislative Assembly elections will show that this is exactly what a majority of voters who support unsuccessful groups actually do.

This is instinctive voting behaviour. There is no separate party voting square implying that all that needs to be done is ‘put a [1] here’ and that the rest of the vote will be sorted.

Fully optional preferential voting must be permitted. When the ballot paper is presented in this format, it is very hard for voters to resist voting for all the candidates in the party group. In the 2012 ACT Legislative Assembly election, Katy Gallagher received 23,996 votes and only 124 of these were single [1] votes. These single [1] votes did not exhaust: they remained with the candidate and the surplus was carried by the votes that gave further preferences.

The vote will be easy to count. The vast majority of votes will still be for the lead candidate in every group and because the ballot paper will be smaller and less cluttered, the counter will find the vote more quickly.

Currently, because votes below the line take precedence over votes above the line, every ballot paper has to be checked for votes below the line. Assuming it took just one second to make this determination, then it would take 150 days for one electoral official working eight hours a day just to sort the NSW Senate vote.

The ballot paper in this format will give ownership back to the voter. Whose vote is it anyway?

AGM 2015 – Address by Casey Peters

Casey Peters addressed the 2015 Annual General Meeting of Electoral Reform Australia on the progress of community activism for proportional representation in the USA. His own involvement dated from membership of a study group of the Peace and Freedom Party called People for Proportional Representation (PFPR) which advocates for effective voting.

He spoke about The Initiative by which any California voter can put an initiative or referendum on the ballot by following a defined process. He also spoke of the history of PR in the USA from the 1920s when there was a move by the National Municipal League to promote PR for use in city elections. By the 1950s, it was out of fashion and was abandoned by many cities in order to remove particular groups (e.g. Communists) from their councils.

Continue reading

Annual General Meeting 2015

Our Annual General Meeting will be held on Wednesday, May 6th, 7.30PM at 74 Thompson Street, Drummoyne.

Our Guest Speaker will be Casey Peters, a proportional representation advocate from California.

Everyone is welcome, and we’re looking forward to seeing you there!