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PROPORTIONAL
REPRESENTATION SOCIETY OF |
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Tel +613
9589 1802 |
Tel +61429176725 |
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BEAUMARIS VIC 3193 |
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2009-11-30 |
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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. |
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Example of GVT Use: Controversy over the
election of Senator Stephen Fielding, of the Family First Party, in Victoria in 2004
with a very small number of 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 the major 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 |
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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. * * * * * * * * |