One sitting Liberal and one sitting Labor MLA will be replaced by a candidate of their own party, according to the latest Canberra Times-Datacol poll.
Liberal candidate Brendan Smyth is ahead of both sitting Liberals, Trevor Kaine and Louise Littlewood, in Brindabella. And Labor candidate Jon Stanhope is ahead of sitting MLA Roberta McRae.
The poll asked those people in Brindabella who said they were voting Liberal a subsidiary question. They were asked which individual candidate would get their first preference, and similarly for Labor in Ginninderra. This was to get a feel for how voters were responding to the Hare-Clark system. The table shows the result.
Under the Hare-Clark system, the Ginninderra and Brindabella electorates have five seats each and the major parties stand five candidates in each. (Seven for Molonglo). But the party cannot determine the order of the candidates on the ballot paper. Under the Robson rotation system each candidate in the party column gets a fifth of the ballot papers with his or her name at the top of the column. So one voter might get Berry at the top of the Labor column and the next voter in the queue might get McRae and another Stanhope. Similarly for the Liberal column.
So if everybody voted donkey for Labor, for example, every candidate would get the same number of first preferences.
Nor can the party determine preferences either within the party column or beyond it to other parties and independents as they can in the federal Senate election by lodging a list with the electoral commission. And there are no party boxes.
It is up to the voter to mark preferences, otherwise the ballot paper dies at the last expressed preference. Last election several thousand votes were exhausted this way. They could have had a role in determining the last seat.
The best way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to number every square through to the last candidate and not stop at five (or seven in Molonglo), the minimum for a valid vote.