Next Saturday, voters will be armed with Act Electoral Commission advice that they must mark preferences for at least the number of seats (five or seven) that there are in their electorate. After that you can mark as many or as few as you want.
This week’s Canberra-Times-Datacol polling indicates that it is critical for voters to number right through to the end. It is quite likely that the last two seats will be determined by preferences expressed well down from the first five or seven and that many votes of those who restrict themselves to the minimum number of preferences will exhaust and they will lose the right to have a say in which minor party or independent will get the last seat.
An ACT Hare-Clark election is a very different beast from a Federal House of Representatives election. In the House of Representatives election the way the preferences or the minor parties are distributed to the major parties is critical. And preferences from the major parties to the minor parties do not matter a toss because the two major party candidates are in almost all cases the last two standing in the count and so their preferences never get distributed.
In the ACT Hare-Clark system, the reverse is true, particularly in the five-seat electorates of Ginninderra (based on Belconnen) and Brindabella (based on Tuggeranong). In those electorates the major parties invariably win two seats each, but they never get exactly two quotas. There is always some votes left over, the preferences of which (if any spill down) to decide which of the minor parties or independents gets the last seat.
We can take an example from the polling. Bear in mind that a lot of people are still undecided, but history shows that distributing the undecided along the lines of the decided vote gives a reasonably accurate picture.
Ginninderra has five seats, so a candidate needs one sixth of the vote plus one to get elected – 16.6 per cent. Labor is running at 38 per cent, enough to put two candidates – presumably Jon Stanhope and Wayne Berry — over the line. But it would have used up only 16.6 times two or 33 percentage points of its 38 per cent to do that. That leaves 5 percentage points over to spill down to decide which of the minor parties or independents gets elected. But it will only spill down if a significant number of Labor voters mark preferences beyond the five Labor candidates.
On this week’s polling the Liberal Party has 30 per cent. With just a few preferences from oddball candidates it will give them two quotas with nothing left over.
It means that Labor voters in Ginninderra have it within their power to decide whether the last seat in Ginninderra goes to the Greens, Democrats or Independent Dave Rugendyke. That might be critical to whether Stanhope becomes Chief Minister. The position is very similar in Brindabella with the Greens, Democrats and Independent Paul Osborne.
In 1998, the Liberals had the over quota and their voters gave enough preferences to Rugendyke to put him over the line ahead of the Greens because not enough Democrats expressed preferences beyond the five Democrat candidates.
This time the Greens and Democrats are standing fewer than five candidates so their voters will express at least some preference for other parties to fulfill the requirement to mark at least five preferences.
Realistically a major party can only win seven seats, so needs the support of two independent or minor party candidates to govern. That being the case, a smart major party would be out there encouraging its supporters to express preferences after the first five for the minor parties or independents which might support it – in Labor’s case the Greens and Democrats, in the Liberals’ case the Osborne independents.
There is another reason (from the perspective of the major party) to do this: minor-party candidates who have won on the basis of major party preferences will be less likely to rebel through fear of having those preferences directed away from them next election.