Every election has its counting quirks, but this one more than most.
Democracy is not in the vote, but in the counting of it. Some of the Senate results seem bizarre and invite both challenge and reform. The donkey vote looks like deciding four or five seats — an election-determining margin. It invites a simple reform. Labor got more two-party preferred vote than the Coalition yet is not in Government. Labor got more first preferences than any other party yet is not in Government. One Nation got far more votes than the Nationals yet will get only one MP compared to 15 or 16, but will still get bucket loads of public electoral funding. Some significant people will miss out or come close to missing out while various hacks and drones have comfortable seats; the nation could be the poorer for it: Warwick Smith, Alexander Downer and Cheryl Kernot.
The donkey vote needs only run at half a per cent to affect a large number of seats in a close election. Some sequential votes down the card are genuine votes, but not many. For example, if there are six candidates there are 720 combinations. You would expect only 0.13 per cent of votes to be sequential, but we find three or four times that in practice, indicating a deliberate donkey vote. Any seat determined by less than 250 votes is likely to determined by donkey votes if the winner appears higher on the ballot paper than the loser.
This time the Liberals will get Eden-Monaro and Hinkler on the strength of the donkey vote and Labor will get Adelaide, Dickson and possibly Kalgoorlie. Poor Warwick Smith lost Bass in 1993 on the donkey vote, but does not pick up quite enough of it this time to win.
The solution is quite simple. Draw the candidate order randomly and print one half of the ballot papers that way and the other half in exactly the reverse order. That way any candidate ahead of any other candidate in half the ballot papers is below that candidate in the other half.
The major parties won’t do it, though, because it complicates their how-to-vote-cards.
In the Senate, the system of allowing political parties to register split tickets to allocate preferences will have bizarre results. The Fred Nile Group in Western Australia put a Labor candidate before the Liberals, presumably on ”moral” grounds. It means that vote will stay in the Labor pool and not go to the Greens, so the Democrat (who is a gay-rights campaigner) is more likely to get the seat over the Greens because of the Nile preference allocation. Ho ho.
The split-ticket system is likely to be challenged if a seat hangs on it because the Constitution demands that senators be chosen “”directly by the people”, presumably not by a party-determined split ticket. A successful challenge would end people’s vote at where the registered ticket splits. Indeed, the Electoral Act itself acknowledges the split ticket is possibly dodgy because it says that if “for any reason” (which can only be constitutional) the vote will be valid to the start of the split.
It is typical of major-party power hunger that when the split ticket was introduced the party machines got the power to allocate preferences above the line, not voters.
Sure, the problem of demanding that voters number accurately and sequentially every increasing numbers of Senate candidates had to be overcome, but there were better ways. Why hand the power of preferences totally to political parties. It would have been better to abandon the present all or nothing system of marking a single 1 above the line or every square below the line. Why not allow voters to vote optional preferential above the line, for example, Liberal 1, Democrat 2, Green 3 and so on, without having to trouble with the order of candidates within the parties?
My guess is that as soon as a Senate seat is decided by a split ticket a court challenge will be on. Challenges are very frequent in Australian elections.
As for public funding, it is just as obscene for One Nation to get $3 million without providing receipts as it is for the major parties to get even more millions for putting on hundreds of non-informative sensational 30-second grabs on television. Must the taxpayer fund this trashy appeal, mostly to people who wouldn’t bother voting if they didn’t have to?
On good people in marginal seats, we could borrow from Germany and have, say, 100 seats determined in electorates as now and 50 determined according to national party vote. This would enable your Smiths and Kernots to get party-list seats if they miss electorate seats. It would also allow parties like the Democrats and One Nation to get lower house representation if they get a significant vote.
The only trouble with this is that we have enough strife with minor parties in the Senate dealing with legislation, let alone having to deal with them on the question of forming government. Though minor parties in the Senate and, for example, in the ACT have led to much more constructive debate than in the federal House of Representatives where all voting is a forgone conclusion and all that Members can hope to achieve is boisterous, cheap point scoring in debate.