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Proportional
Representation Society of Australia |
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Tel +61429176725 |
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First
Preference Votes |
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Absolute
Entitlement: A
quota or more of first preference votes
under quota-preferential
PR provides a
properly-qualified candidate receiving
them with a simple absolute entitlement to
be elected. If some candidates receive
well over a quota of first preference
votes, there will not be enough first
preference votes left for all the other
successful candidates to obtain a quota of
first preference votes, so their
legitimate quotas will have to include
first preference votes for other
candidates that have had to be transferred
to them in accordance with the voters’
order of preference, either as surplus
votes or as votes of an excluded
candidate. |
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Legitimate
Election without Any First Preferences: It
is possible and legitimate for a candidate
gaining no first preference votes at all
to receive a quota of votes, and be
elected, by surplus transfers from one or
more candidates that have, among them,
gained two or more quotas of first
preference votes. Such election is fair
and reasonable if voters have explicitly
voted that way, but it is not so fair and
reasonable if it has arisen from the use
of Group Voting Tickets, which can mislead
voters that are busy, distracted or less
that fully aware of their being
manipulated by such Tickets. |
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Group
Voting Tickets: If
a party’s voters have decided, or have
been persuaded or conditioned - as has
happened with Group Voting Tickets
since they began in Australia in 1983 - to
vote for the first-listed in a single
order of party candidates put forward at
an election, it is usual for that
first-listed candidate to receive nearly
all the first preference votes for that
party, leaving every other candidate of
that party with only a tiny number of
first preference votes. That regimentation
of the vote existed before Group Voting
Tickets, but they have facilitated the
regimentation much further. The use of
Group Voting Tickets for Senate elections
was discontinued in March 2016. |
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Example
of GVT Use:
Controversy over the 2004 election of
Senator Stephen Fielding, of the Family
First Party, in Victoria
with very few first preference votes has
led to ill-informed critics casting doubt
on the system that allowed him to be
elected a senator for that reason, but
such critics are silent about the even
smaller number of first preference votes
that nearly all larger party senators
received. Like Senator Fielding, those
senators assembled most of their quotas
with preference votes transferred as
surpluses from elected candidates, or as
full value transfers from excluded
candidates, but those transfers were
mandated not mainly by the voters
explicitly, as with Tasmania’s Hare-Clark system
and its Robson
Rotation, but by very
dubiously-contrived Group Voting Tickets
that were not widely examined by voters. |
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Misguided
Criticisms:
Complaints about Senator Fielding’s
election based on his small personal vote,
rather than on the grave defects of Group
Voting Tickets, were well refuted in a 2008
letter to The
Sunday Age by Chris Curtis (see
2nd letter listed) . |
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Casual
Vacancies: When
PR casual vacancies are properly filled
using countback,
the first preference votes cast for the
successful replacement candidate are not
relevant to that candidate’s election, as
the replacement candidate is decided by
the Returning Officer re-examining the
ballot-papers that made up the quota of
votes cast by the voters for the vacating
candidate in order to determine which
candidate unelected at the original poll
has received, after any distribution of
preferences that might be needed, an
absolute majority of the next available
preferences, none of which will obviously
be first preferences. An example
of a municipal countback
election explains that. * *
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