PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA
	www.prsa.org.au	18 Anita Street BEAUMARIS VIC 3193
	info@prsa.org.au	Tel +61429176725 2011-11-30

HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY AND ITS BRANCHES

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INTRODUCTION: The proportional representation movement in Australia began; most strongly in South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria; in the late 1800s, which was the era when the Australian colonies one-by-one finally abolished the hustings (the first was South Australia in 1856 and the last was Western Australia in 1895). Vote counting in public elections then, and up until 1919, was, except for Tasmania, by highly unsatisfactory relative majority (first-past-the-post, or plurality) procedures in single member, two-member or multi-member electoral districts. From 1919 plurality systems were replaced by majority-preferential systems, but Queensland's Legislative Assembly retained a plurality system until the 1940s, and that still applies to some municipalities there. Western Australia has, most unfortunately, revived plurality counting for municipal polls. In the 1930s, South Australia became the last mainland State to discontinue multi-member Assembly districts.

Where there was plurality counting with more than one vacancy per electoral district, plumping (not voting for all vacancies), allowed, in a haphazard way, some minority voice, as it still does in some electorates of the world's oldest continuously operating legislative assembly, the House of Keys on the Isle of Man. Plumping was, however, often arbitrarily prohibited in Australian electoral systems, and it was not allowed at pre-1919 Senate elections. Hoag and Hallett's classic 1926 U.S. book "Proportional Representation" has a good account of the foundation of early PR history in Australia. The earliest precursor date mentioned is the year after Governor Phillip's landing at Sydney Cove. See electoral system categories, and a summary of current systems for public elections in Australia. Australia's electoral history has been generally progressive despite regressive tendencies in ballot-paper design. Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory have been the most progressive and, as shown below, have resisted those regressive tendencies.

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UNITED KINGDOM: Our fellow society in the UK, under its original name of the Proportional Representation Society of Great Britain and Ireland, was founded in 1884. It promoted the ideas of John Stuart Mill, and of Thomas Wright Hill, whose "schoolboy election" in the 1820s is a classic simple demonstration of the principles of the Single Transferable Vote or quota-preferential proportional representation, as it is known in Australia to distinguish it from Australia's use of STV with majority-preferential counting, in both single-member districts, and also multi-member districts as unfortunately used for the Senate from 1919-46, and for a few years after the Liberal Party Government of Victoria revived it in the early 1990s for municipal elections.

It was the PRSGB&I that was the first society in the world to promote the earliest forms of the quota-preferential system of proportional representation allowing direct election of individual candidates, which does not take place under the inferior proportional systems known as party list systems, which have become the predominant electoral systems for lower houses in continental Europe. The first two words in its title changed to 'Electoral Reform' in 1958. It published its history 'The Best System' [1], in 1984. Its distinguished presidents have included the fourth and the fifth Earls Grey (see its 1922 Council), and in the 1980s the Hon. Dr Garret FitzGerald while Prime Minister of Eire. Its president was, until his death in October 2004, Professor the Earl Russell, a great-grandson of the former Whig Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, whose 1832 Reform Bill set the foundation for representation of the general public in the House of Commons and, by example, in other parliaments in the then British Empire. The shameful conduct of UK elections in the century prior to that reform is strikingly depicted in William Hogarth?s four provocative engravings "Chairing the Members".

The UK Parliament had more multi-member constituencies than single-member ones as late as 1880 (London was a four-member constituency). The number of multi-member constituencies was greatly reduced in 1885. Some were university constituencies, for which proportional representation applied from 1918. Multi-member constituencies were discontinued in 1945. A crude modicum of proportionality was achievable in the large number of non-university constituencies, in which PR never applied, by voters plumping; by not voting for two candidates, but only one. Winston Churchill (not a convert to PR) first became an MP in 1900 in Oldham, one of the 23 two-member constituencies then. See the distribution of district magnitudes in various years below:

UK House of Commons: Distribution of District Magnitudes over 130 years
Year	No. of MPs from constituencies with the number of members per constituency shown
	1-member	2-member	3-member	4-member
1880	195	398	30	1
1885	616	27	-	-
1945	601	36	3	-
1950	625	-	-	-
2010	650	-	-	-

The PRSGB&I (later the ERSGB&I) and its members influenced the founding of Australian PR societies and helped them by sending its Secretary, John Humphreys, to Tasmania during World War I where his evidence [1] to a Select Committee of Tasmania's Parliament helped defeat a proposed change from the Hare-Clark system of quota-preferential proportional representation to a party list system, and also led to Tasmania's Electoral Act 1918, which prescribed countback - the filling of casual vacancies in the House of Assembly by the Electoral Office by re-examination of the ballot-papers that formed the vacating member's quota. It ensures that all MPs are directly elected. In 1948 the PRSGB&I advised Australia's Attorney-General on his Bill for proportional representation for elections for the Australian Senate, which began the Senate's still-prevailing PR system. In 1995 a prominent ERS member assisted the PRSA campaign for entrenching Hare-Clark for the Legislative Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory.

The UK's ERS works for, as does the PRSA, quota-preferential PR, which they call the Single Transferable Vote. STV now applies in Northern Ireland for its Assembly and for elections to the European Parliament, although sadly, despite strong opposition in the House of Lords, elections in the rest of the United Kingdom to the European Parliament are by a closed party list system. In the mid-1980s, the UK's Social Democrat Party produced an inspirational 10-minute VHS video of John Cleese advocating proportional representation for electing the House of Commons. An unsuccessful referendum to change the House of Commons electoral system from using a plurality vote to an Alternative Vote was held as an outcome of the 2010 UK General Election.

United Kingdom Local Government: From the first establishment of local government in England, when William the Conqueror granted a charter to the City of London in 1075 until the passage of the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which introduced widespread election by ratepayers, English municipal councils were not elected by the citizens, but were self-perpetuating oligarchies with vacancies filled by the council itself. Quota-preferential PR is still not used for local government elections in England and Wales, but is now used in Northern Ireland, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland.

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SOUTH AUSTRALIA: Catherine Helen Spence's 1861 booklet, 'A Plea for Pure Democracy' [2] helped her to form, in 1895, a proportional representation group called the 'Effective Voting League of South Australia'. Miss Catherine Spence was the first female candidate at a public election in the then British Empire when she stood unsuccessfully at the 1897 election (under the unfair first-past-the-post multiple vote) for the 1897Australasian Federal Convention.

A statue in Light Square in Adelaide, unveiled on 10th March 1986 by Her Majesty the Queen, commemorates Miss Spence. The PRSA later launched its reprint of her booklet there. She is remembered by her Autobiography, and was depicted on the Australian $5 banknote issued for the Centenary of Federation, in 2001. Another influential member of the Effective Voting League was its Honorary Secretary, Mrs Jeanne Forster Young O.B.E, who stood as an independent candidate at the 1937 Senate election, winning 6.5% of the first preference vote, but that gave her no hope of election under the since-discredited multiple majority-preferential electoral system then in force. The PRSA's SA Branch (the League's successor, the Electoral Reform Society of South Australia) influenced the replacement of the first party list system used, briefly, for Australian parliamentary elections, introduced by the Dunstan Labor Government in 1973, by direct election using the present quota-preferential form of proportional representation that the SA Electoral Act 1985 prescribes for elections for SA's Legislative Council. The SA Constitution Act 1934 requires a referendum before either House can be abolished, but it does not specify or entrench the electoral system, and that oversight should be remedied.

South Australian Local Government: Catherine Spence recorded, in Chapter III of her Autobiography, her witnessing, by an early form of PR in 1840, Adelaide City Council's first election, as her father was the Town Clerk. It was the world's first public election conducted by PR, and Australia's first public election, and was preceded by the enactment, for the first time in the world, of a law for a PR electoral system, a South Australian Act entitled an Act to Institute a Municipal Corporation for the City of Adelaide. That Act resulted from a recommendation in the Third Annual Report of the Colonization Commissioners for South Australia, 1839 that the election of the soon-to-be-created Adelaide City Council should be by a proportional electoral system. That report was signed by all nine commissioners, but was almost certainly drafted by the Secretary of the Commission, Rowland Hill.

The PRSA's SA Branch successfully helped persuade the Olsen Liberal Government, when it enacted the Local Government (Elections) Act 1999, to make quota-preferential proportional representation the only electoral system to be used in elections for local government in South Australia, by discontinuing the "bottoms up", which appears to have never been used outside South Australia. Unfortunately municipalities can still be divided into single-councillor wards, as in Victoria, in which case the prescribed counting method still applies, but there can be no surplus votes and no proportional representation with only one position to be filled, so the system used in that way gives only a winner-take-all outcome. Only 6 councils in the State have any single-councillor wards.

Unlike arrangements in NSW, there is unfortunately no prohibition of different wards in a given council having different numbers of councillors, or of an even number of councillors per ward. Unlike NSW, but like Victoria, elections in two-councillor wards are counted by PR. Two-councillor wards are rather common, although small rural councils are usually not divided into wards.

Casual vacancies are filled by-election polls (not countback). The same unweighted inclusive Gregory transfer method used for transferring votes, by averaging, as is used in Senate scrutinies, applies. With partial optional preferential voting applying, voters must mark, for a valid vote, as many preferences as there are vacancies - it is optional after that number. General elections are held every four years, with polls being conducted by postal ballot.

For South Australian municipal elections:

· All regular elections are general elections, held in November every four years after the first such election in 2006.

· There is no requirement for all wards in a particular municipality to have the same number of councillors, so unfortunately election quotas can differ for different wards. The number of councillors in a council, which presently ranges from 7 to 20, is fixed by vice-regal proclamation.

· There is no requirement for the number of positions being filled as a group to be an odd number, which leads to many councils’ unfortunately lacking the maximizing of the fairness of PR systems that use of an odd number entails.

· There is no minimum number of councillors per ward, so councils can unfortunately have one or more winner-take-all single-councillor wards, as 6 councils had in 2010. In those wards, the quota-preferential PR counting system prescribed for all SA council elections reduces to a bare majority-preferential winner-take-all system.

· Partial optional preferential voting applies, so a valid ballot-paper needs as many marked preferences as there are vacancies.

· Casual vacancies are unfortunately filled by a winner-take-all by-election poll, rather than by the fairer countback system.

· Robson Rotation in ballot-paper layout is not provided for, thus unfortunately not forestalling "donkey votes" or organized "how-to-vote" cards, with the order of candidates names being set by lot, with direct election free of Group Voting Tickets.

· Under Section 51 of the Local Government Act 1999, nearly all councils with a Mayor elect him or her at a separate, but concurrent popular election, but unfortunately without Tasmania's requirement for the separately-elected Mayor to also succeed at the election of councillors, thus diminishing overall proportionality because of the increase in all councillors' quotas, and depriving electors of the chance to elect a good, but unsuccessful, candidate for Mayor ahead of a less preferred candidate as a councillor, as mayoral candidates cannot, as they can in Tasmania, stand for both concurrent elections. For councils with a Chairperson rather than a Mayor, the Chairperson is a councillor elected by all councillors.

· Under Section 86 of the Local Government Act 1999, the Mayor, or a councillor substituting for the Mayor as the presiding officer at meetings of a council, has a casting vote only and, where the presiding officer is termed a Chairperson rather than a Mayor, the Chairperson, or a councillor substituting for the Chairperson, has a deliberative vote only. In both cases, tied votes, which are more likely if the total number of councillors is even, are lost, and are not overridden by that officer's being able to undemocratically have a second, or casting vote in addition to his or her deliberative vote, which would be contrary to the Westminster parliamentary usage, and to common law. SA's position on that reduces democratic concerns - which arise in jurisdictions where an additional casting vote is prescribed - about having councils with an even number of members.

· The unfortunate deficiencies mentioned in the above arrangements result in South Australia's 63 councils having 33 different and idiosyncratic electoral combinations, leading to unnecessary institutionalized electoral inequities and injustice.

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TASMANIA: Tasmania's Attorney-General, in the 1890s, Hon. Andrew Inglis Clark, who sat on the four-member committee of the 1891 National Australasian Convention (see P. 588 of debates) [3] that, on the S.S. Lucinda, cruising on the Hawkesbury River, NSW, drafted a Bill to Constitute the Commonwealth of Australia, which was adopted by that Convention, spoke about proportional representation (PR) then. Mr Clark did not stand for election to the 1897 Australasian Federal Convention, but a Tasmanian Delegate, Matthew Clarke MHA, spoke there in support of the Hare system, which Tasmania's Hare-Clark electoral system is based on. Tasmanian proportionalists were members of Tasmania?s former Municipal Reform Group, which was informally associated with the PRSA before the PRSA adopted its constitution in 1982. PRSA members in Tasmania joined with Victorian members in 2000. In 2006 they became members of Proportional Representation Society of Australia (Victoria-Tasmania) Inc.

Start of Hare-Clark: Andrew Clark achieved legislation for PR elections, with Hare-Clark's Single Transferable Vote, for part of Tasmania's House of Assembly in 1896. Under the Electoral Act 1907 (7 Edw. VII No. 6), Tasmania became Australia's first parliament to use quota-preferential proportional representation to fill all seats in one of its houses, and it has used it continuously since then. See the official report of the first state-wide Hare-Clark election in 1909. That Act also substituted majority-preferential voting for the first-past-the-post voting used until then for the single-member electorates that have always been used for the Legislative Council. Tasmania thus also has the longest record, among Australian parliaments, of continuous use of preferential voting in single-member electorates. Tasmania's Liberal Government in 1985 enacted the first consolidation of Tasmania's electoral laws since the Electoral Act 1907 in the Electoral Act 1985 (No. 46 of 1985) with unanimous parliamentary support. That Act, administered by the Tasmanian Electoral Commission, was replaced, again with unanimous support, by the Electoral Act 2004 (No. 51 of 2004). Section 231 of the Act specifies countback. The centenary of the first Tasmania-wide Hare-Clark election occurred on 2009-04-30. The Commission's excellent website gives access to full reports of that first Hare-Clark election, and to every countback and to every election in both houses from 1909 onwards.

Countback, and the Defence and Spread of Hare-Clark: Hare-Clark, improved by requiring direct election by countback in 1918, for the filling of casual vacancies, after the evidence given by John Humphreys in successfully opposing a retrograde Labor Party proposal to replace Hare-Clark with a party list system, (see "UNITED KINGDOM" section above), is Australia's longest-established electoral system. The first result of a countback in Tasmania's official election reports from 1909 was the 1942 by-election using countback. Hare-Clark so impressed Sir Gerald (later Lord) Strickland, Governor of Tasmania from 1904-09, that he later, as Prime Minister of Malta from 1927-34, successfully promoted it for the election of Malta's MPs. Tasmania, unlike Malta [66(2)], Eire (Article 16.2), and the A.C.T, has unfortunately not yet protected its PR system by constitutional entrenchment.

Recognizing that Number of Vacancies to Fill Should be an Odd Number: In 1958, a Tasmanian political scientist, Dr George Howatt, wrote his classic PR paper "Democratic Representation under the Hare-Clark System - The Need for Seven-Member Electorates", which the Government tabled in the House of Assembly in support of its Bill that succeeded in correcting the flaw in the original Hare-Clark system of having an even number of seats per electorate, rather than an uneven number, to ensure a majority outcome in any electorate where a party gained a majority vote, by changing the number of MHAs per electorate from the original number, six, to the recommended uneven number, seven.

Avoiding Regimentation of Voters: Dr Howatt's 1979 report, similarly tabled, "Voting - By Party Direction or Free Choice" was another PR classic. Fortunately, Tasmania's Parliament heeded its warning against the regimented ballot-paper style that has developed for Senate elections. Tasmania has never had that legislatively-enabled regimentation, and the results of its freedom from that imposition can be seen by comparing the relatively even concentration of first preference votes on individual candidates in Tasmania's Hare-Clark with the stage-managed skewed concentration on a tiny few evident with Senate outcomes. Tasmania's unskewed spread ensures that the larger parties do not unfairly reduce their own electoral prospects, as can be seen for elections, like those for each of Australia's six mainland Upper Houses, where Group Voting Tickets facilitate voters' regimentation. Unlike the Senate system, Tasmanian Hare-Clark has never required voters to mark more preferences than the number of vacancies and, as Dame Enid Lyons pointed out in the 1948 debates on PR for the Senate, that has not resulted in a high or unacceptable incidence of exhausted votes. Group Voting Tickets were introduced for Senate elections ostensibly to reduce the incidence of exhausted votes, but a much more reasonable way to reduce them would be to adopt partial optional preferential voting as Tasmania's record shows.

Tasmania has avoided adopting the Group Voting Tickets that are now used for elections to the Senate, and the SA, NSW, and WA Legislative Councils. That system has managed to persuade a large majority of voters for those houses to take the relatively easy course of abandoning individual consideration of the relative merits of a party's candidates, and instead accepting the preference order for their party's candidates, and all other candidates, decided by their party, which is generally not made very evident to voters, and register an above-the-line vote.

Robson Rotation: A key part of Tasmania's Electoral Act 2004, Robson Rotation, is specified in Sections 97 and 98 and Schedule 3. It requires ballot-papers to be printed in different batches, of equal size, so that candidates' names have an equal incidence of appearance in prescribed positions down the columns. Applying also to polls in the single-member Upper House electorates, it disarms organized 'tickets', and neutralizes the unintended effects of 'donkey voting'. The former Tasmanian MHA, Hon. Neil Robson, now a PRSA Honorary Life Member, was its initiator in 1979. The 1992 Tasmanian book "Hare-Clark in Tasmania", by Terry Newman, describes Robson Rotation well.

Prior to the 1976 Assembly election, the order of candidates' surnames in party columns on the ballot-paper was alphabetical. Tasmania's high incidence of MPs with surnames like Abbott, Adams, Agnew, Amos, Anderson, Batt etc. had started to remind Tasmanians of the ALP's notorious four A's ploy in the 1937 Senate election in NSW, which led to the Menzies Government in 1940 retaliating by introducing the present listing of Senate candidates' names by mutual consent (effectively by party decision). Tasmania's first change from an alphabetical list of candidates' names in the party columns was fortunately not to adopt that party machine concession, but rather to make the order set by lot, but that was in force for the 1976 and 1979 elections only, as circumstances resulted in the adoption of Robson Rotation in 1979.

Unlike the mainland States, where electors in State lower house elections had only one candidate from each party to choose from, the existence of multi-member electorates, with casual vacancies filled by countback since 1918, meant that parties normally stood more candidates than the number of seats they expected to win, thus giving Tasmania's voters a wide choice of candidates within each party. How-to-vote cards that list a party's candidates in a particular recommended order were not used in Tasmanian Assembly elections, and attempts to introduce them were nullified by the introduction of Robson Rotation.

Constitutional Entrenchment by Referendum Needed: Tasmania's Constitution Act 1934 does not prescribe a method for counting votes, or require a referendum or special majority to alter it, or the electoral system; or even to abolish either House. Hare-Clark, although very popular, could be abolished by ordinary legislation. Tasmania's Constitution Act 1934 ought to specify key Hare-Clark features and entrench them, so that they can only be removed after a referendum.

Tasmanian Local Government: The Groom Liberal Government's Local Government Act 1993 introduced Hare-Clark proportional representation (Section 299 invokes Part 3 of Schedule 7) for all Tasmanian municipalities (PR had previously applied just to Hobart City Council), with Section 25 invoking Schedule 3, which specifies the number of councillors in each of Tasmania's 29 municipalities, and the number of subdivisions in each municipality if there are to be any (Schedule 3 has to date shown no municipalities as being subdivided, but its details may be varied by the Governor on the Minister's recommendation), and with vacancies filled (Section 307), Assembly-style, by countback, for all municipal polls. The Act provided that councillors' terms be for four years, with the term of as near to practicable half the councillors ending every two years. The Tasmanian Electoral Commission website commendably shows the complete and detailed results of municipal elections and countbacks since 1994, when Hare-Clark first applied to all elections of municipal councillors.

For Tasmanian State and municipal polls, partial optional preferential voting applies. As a result of requests from MHAs that had been municipal councillors, ballot-papers for election of councillors have, since 2002, been required to be printed using Robson Rotation by Section 288(2) of the Act, which refers to a prescribed order, and that appears in Schedule 1 of the Local Government (General) Regulations 2005.

For Tasmanian municipal elections:

· All councillors are regularly elected, by quota-preferential proportional representation, for four-year terms at periodic elections with, as near as practicable, half the positions being filled in October in every even-numbered year, which unnecessarily increases the election quota, and with the total number of councillors per municipality in 2010 being either 7, 9, 10 or 12, and with no wards in any municipality - as governed by Schedule 3 above, which is alterable by vice-regal proclamation - the only councils that normally do not have elections to fill an even number of places are the three 10-member councils, so the fairness of PR polls that results when the number vacancies is an odd number is somewhat absent.

· Partial optional preferential voting applies, so a valid ballot-paper needs as many marked preferences as there are vacancies.

· Casual vacancies are filled by the very fair and direct countback system.

· Robson Rotation applies for ballot-papers, which fortunately forestalls "donkey votes" and organized "how-to-vote" cards.

· The presiding officer at meetings of Tasmania's 29 councils or their committees has a deliberative vote only, so tied votes, which are more likely if the total number of councillors is even, are lost, and are not overridden by that officer's being able to undemocratically have, contrary to the Westminster parliamentary usage, and to common law, a second, or casting vote in addition to his or her deliberative vote. Tasmania's position on that reduces democratic concerns about having councils with an even number of members.

· In all Tasmanian municipalities, the Mayor and Deputy Mayor are elected separately for a two-year term, at each biennial election of councillors, by direct, popular election, but there is a requirement, unfortunately not yet found elsewhere in Australia for other elections of the Mayor or Deputy Mayor by popular vote, for the separately-elected Mayor and Deputy to also stand and succeed at the concurrent election of councillors. Candidates for those offices cannot stand for both those offices concurrently, and they must have been a councillor in Tasmania for at least 12 months.

· That superior approach gives maximum flexibility and choice to both candidates and voters. It fully maintains overall proportionality. It gives electors the chance to elect, as a councillor, a good, but unsuccessful, candidate for Mayor or Deputy ahead of a less preferred candidate standing for a councillor's position only. If a candidate at an election for Mayor or Deputy fails to win a quota in the concurrent election of councillors, each voter's vote for that candidate at the election for Mayor or Deputy is transferred to the voter's next preference.

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VICTORIA: As named on an early letterhead, the Proportional Representation League of Victoria's Secretary, from the late 1800s, was Edward Nanson, the University of Melbourne's Professor of Mathematics from 1875 to 1922. He persuaded the university to adopt quota-preferential proportional representation for polls for its Senate, of which he was a member. Quota-preferential proportional representation was used for that body, later renamed the Committee of Convocation, until it was replaced in 2011 by an Alumni Council, where Clause 3(d) of Regulation 3.1.R1 regrettably requires its elected members to be elected using the crude and unfair plurality system. Also named is that league's President, Sir James Barrett, who was Vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne from 1931-34 and Chancellor from 1935-39.

The League's successor, in 1943, was the Proportional Representation Society of Victoria [renamed Proportional Representation Society of Australia (Victoria-Tasmania) in 2000, and incorporated as Proportional Representation Society of Australia (Victoria-Tasmania) Inc. in 2006]. It has successfully promoted proportional representation for elections for the Australian Conservation Foundation, the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne, the ALP Victorian Branch and other bodies. See details here of some of PRSAV-T Inc's present and former members, and here for some AGM Guest Speakers.

150 Years of Winner-take-all Periodic Upper House Polls Ended in 2006:
Alfred Deakin, a Victorian MP, later Australia's second Prime Minister, worked for PR in Victoria's Colonial Parliament, but failed. The PRSA Election Analysis of the last, in 2002, of Victoria's winner-take-all periodic polls for the retiring half of its Legislative Council shows the unsatisfactory nature of that system. Victoria led the world when it introduced the secret ballot in 1856, which was also the year its Legislative Assembly, which has always been a fully-elected House, was established, and the year its Legislative Council:

• first became a fully-elected House,
• first occupied its present meeting chamber,
• first became the Upper House of the present bicameral legislature, and
• had its first - and until 25th November 2006 - only general election.

The count for that first general election used a multiple, or bloc, first-past-the-post method, with subsequent elections being the filling of single vacancies by a first-past-the-post (plurality) method until that was changed to a preferential method in 1921. Victoria's was the last Australian bicameral parliament to have neither House elected by proportional representation. The ornate Legislative Council chamber was used by the Senate from 1901 until the Federal Parliament was relocated to Canberra in 1927.

Efforts for Hare-Clark in Victoria: The PRSAV held a public meeting in 1999 to draw attention to the Victorian Government's plan to apply PR to Upper House polls. The Constitution (Proportional Representation) Bill 2000 was improved after countback amendments by Independent Gippsland East MLA, Craig Ingram, for direct election of all MPs, were accepted by the Bracks ALP Government, but it still lacked proper Hare-Clark features such as Robson Rotation and absence of Group Voting Tickets. That apparent acceptance of countback then appeared to be a deceptive feint, as the eventual amendment of the Constitution Act 1975 now in force provides, in its Section 27A, for filling of casual vacancies by a joint sitting of the Parliament by a candidate that is a member of the vacating member's party. Except for special provisions for replacing independent MLCs - if any ever get elected - that amounts to party appointment, as Section 27A(4) states that the joint sitting "must choose a member of the registered political party referred to in subsection (3) nominated by that registered political party if the registered political party nominates a member of the registered political party for the vacancy who would otherwise be qualified to be elected a member of the Council." The Section 27A(4) words "must choose" are an obvious oxymoron, given that parties only ever nominate one person. Mr Ingram, consistently with his position above, succeeded in having his dissent recorded in relation to the process for filling the vacancy at the first such joint sitting, in 2009 (See P. 70). See also the problems with the Senate casual vacancy provision that the Victorian system has followed rather than adopting countback.

Victoria's Constitutional Commission: The PRSAV-T made a submission to the Constitution Commission of Victoria set up to report on the Bill. In 2001 the PRSAV-T brought Hon. Neil Robson, a former Tasmanian minister administering Tasmania's Electoral Act, and also the instigator of Tasmania's excellent Robson Rotation system, to Melbourne for a meeting the three Commissioners agreed to have with him, and for a public meeting. Section 11 of the Commission's Report foreshadowed future benefit in instituting Robson Rotation for Legislative Council elections and also for dispensing with above-the-line voting. In 2002 the Bracks ALP Government constructively transferred legislative detail on its electoral systems from the obscurely-named The Constitution Act Amendment Act 1958 to the new Electoral Act 2002.

Institution of PR for the Legislative Council: Proclamation of the Royal Assent to the Constitution (Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003, which enabled alteration of Victoria's Constitution Act 1975 and its Electoral Act 2002 to require quota-preferential proportional representation elections for the Legislative Council, appeared in Special Government Gazette S57 of 8th April 2003. Victoria's PR system has impressively reversed a retrograde trend in Australia, which the Commonwealth began in 1919, to move towards a requirement that a preference must be indicated for every candidate in a multi-member electorate in order for a vote to be deemed valid. Tasmania's Hare-Clark system has always had partial optional preferential voting. On the day the Legislative Assembly that was elected in 2002 was dissolved, Part 3 of Division 2 of the Constitution (Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003 became operative and implemented other provisions needed for the change to PR that also became operative then and have amended the Constitution Act 1975 and the Electoral Act 2002 to institute PR for the Legislative Council.

Section 36 of the Constitution (Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003, on that day, operated to insert a Section 93A into the Electoral Act 2002, which reversed the retrograde trend mentioned above, and cause Victoria's rule on below-the-line voting to differ markedly from the Senate below-the-line rule, by deeming a ballot-paper to be valid provided that the number of preferences indicated is at least equal to the number of candidates to be elected. Likewise, Section 42 of that Constitution (Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003, on that day, operated to insert Schedules 1A and 1B into the Electoral Act 2002, which provides for the new form of ballot-paper and introduces, in its Section 74(3B)(b), a novel aspect to the Legislative Council ballot-papers that was specifically recommended by the Constitution Commission above, viz. the printing, to the right of each candidate's name on the ballot-paper, after the name of that candidate's party (if any), the name of the suburb or locality at which that candidate is enrolled.

Three major changes made by the Constitution (Parliamentary Reform) Act 2003 were:

· the insertion of a Section 114A into Victoria's Electoral Act 2002, which provided for quota-preferential proportional representation counting for Legislative Council polls,

· changes to Section 27 of Victoria's Constitution Act 1975 to provide for 8 electoral regions each electing 5 MLCs, and

· changes to Section 28 of Victoria's Constitution Act 1975 to provide for the dissolution of the Legislative Council at the same time as the Legislative Assembly.

Most importantly, changes to Section 18 of Victoria's Constitution Act 1975 entrenched the above Sections 27 and 28 (in Subdivision 1 of Division 5 of Part II of that Act) by requiring any alteration to them, or other sections in that Subdivision, or to Section 18 itself, to be approved by a referendum before they can take effect. This was the first time a requirement for a referendum appeared in Victoria's Constitution.

The PRSAV-T wrote to all MLAs and MLCs advocating countback, the Robson Rotation, and the omission of the unfortunate Group Voting Tickets provision, but those aspects did not form part of the Act. The Minister that introduced the Act into the Upper House, the Hon. John Lenders MLC, had met a deputation from the PRSAV-T to discuss those aspects, and the Upper House Opposition Leader acknowledged the PRSAV-T's advocacy to him in his speech (Hansard Page 437) in the House.

Other PRSAV-T Inc. Work: Evidence of PRSA permission to incorporate the Rules for conducting elections by the quota-preferential method from the Society's PR Manual in Schedule 1 of the Health Services (Community Health Centre Elections ) Regulations 2001 appeared as Endnote 1 to those regulations, until those PRSA rules were superseded by a reference to the proportional representation rules in Victoria's Local Government Act 1989.

The PRSAV-T Inc. provides a vote-counting service for organizations, which particularly assists those that conduct proportional representation polls.

Victoria's Local Government: The then Victorian Branch of the PRSA put the case for PR in a 1978 submission to a Victorian Government Board of Review. As proportional representation elections had not been prescribed for public elections in Victoria even a decade later, the forerunners of the Victorian Electoral Commission had no experience with counting quota-preferential proportional representation elections then, so the PRSA's Victorian Branch assisted the officials counting Victoria 's fortuitous (no explicit statute) first PR municipal elections for the then City of Richmond in 1988. When the ALP Government introduced the consolidated Local Government Act 1989, it continued the traditional 3-year term for all councillors, but added the option of triennial general elections to the only option that had previously existed in Victoria, which was periodic elections, where the longest-serving third of the councillors retired annually.

Unfortunately, owing to Coalition amendment in the Legislative Council, the ALP's PR option was omitted, so where a municipality used the general election model, with all three seats in each ward being filled as a group, they were filled by the winner-take-all multiple majority-preferential method that had previously been used only by certain municipalities that had chosen not to be divided into wards. That method had been discredited and superseded for Senate elections in 1948 by quota-preferential proportional representation. The method still applies in some municipal elections in New South Wales and the Northern Territory.

Victorian Liberal MPs have been slower to support PR than their counterparts in other States and the ACT, but in 1995 the Kennett Liberal Government amended the Local Government Act 1989 to prescribe quota-preferential PR election at large for 5 of the 9 seats on Melbourne City Council, which were filled in 1996. PR in the City of Melbourne has since regressed, as the Bracks Labor Government introduced Senate-style Group Voting Tickets there, although PR casual vacancies are now filled by countback. The Kennett Government amended Victoria's Local Government Act 1989 in 1997 to allow some or all councillors in a declared municipality to be elected by PR. The Minister for Local Government was empowered to apply the Melbourne model, or PR for all vacancies, to any other Council. For a time that model was used for the Greater Geelong and Nillumbik Councils.

The PRSAV-T wrote to all of Victoria's Councils in 2003 advocating Hare-Clark features for the PR system that is now mandatory for all multi-vacancy polls, as, by the Local Government (Democratic Reform) Act 2003, the Bracks Labor Government amended the Local Government Act 1989 resulting in its Section 42, which invokes Schedule 3, Part 4A of which provides, for any poll where more than one councillor is to be elected for a ward or electorate, that quota-preferential proportional representation shall apply, thus fortunately discontinuing the previous multiple majority-preferential method (identical to the 1919-46 Senate system), which had lingered until its last use at the 2003 municipal elections, for the 21 municipalities still encumbered with it.

See the example of the 2000 Strathbogie Shire elections in the last year in which that now discredited multiple majority-preferential method was used there, where the candidate with the second highest number of first preference votes was not one of the five candidates elected, but where the candidate with the fewest first preference votes - who would have lost his deposit for failing to obtain at least 4% of first preference votes had he not been elected - was the last candidate elected from the nine standing. By the 2003 elections, Strathbogie Shire had been reconfigured to consist of seven single-councillor wards, but by the 2005 elections two of those wards had been joined to form a sole two-councillor ward, which gave some local indication of the benefits of PR. At the electoral representation review of Strathbogie Shire in 2011, the former Deputy Premier and Nationals leader when the now-abolished former system had been left as the only alternative to a single-councillor ward system made a submission advocating proportional representation in a single undivided electoral district for the Shire, and criticizing the single-councillor ward system.

Countback provisions arise from Section 37A of the Local Government Act 1989, which invokes Schedule 3A, under which countback is to be used to fill casual vacancies following PR polls. Unlike the Tasmanian Electoral Commission website, that for the Victorian Electoral Commission regrettably fails to give more than first preference and final total votes for general elections and, until PRSAV-T Inc. asked for the July 2011countback for Melbourne City Council to be detailed on the VEC website, it revealed no details of votes at all for countback elections.

Single-councillor wards, which can only give winner-take-all results, have not applied in any Australian jurisdiction, except Queensland, until the Kennett Government introduced them for Victoria. Their use in a given municipality is now decided by an utterly ad hoc and rather opaque periodic Representation Review conducted under Sections 219A-219G of the Local Government Act 1989, and requires formal ratification by the Minister for Local Government before it can take effect, but a system like the NSW Constitutional Referendum would be much sounder. The Act regrettably does not require such elementary conditions for electoral parity as each ward being required to have an odd number of councillors, and each ward being required to have the same number of councillors.

The PRSAV-T Inc. has made submissions to most of those reviews. Of Victoria's 79 councils, 18 still have winner-take-all single-councillor wards only, but 40 councils (51%) now use PR in all polls, and the remaining 21 councils have some PR wards. It would be far sounder if a system, for each municipality, of multi-councillor electoral districts, each with an uneven number of councillors and the same number of councillors per electoral district (for parity of the quota throughout the municipality), were made standard, without the implausible hotchpotch of inequitable, confusing and shifting arrangements for municipal elections that are now allowed. See the 2010 PRSAV-T Inc. submission to Local Government Victoria on Victoria's present system of Representation Reviews.

A submission by PRSAV-T supported a draft of what are now Victoria's Local Government (Electoral) Regulations 2005 which, had it been adopted, would have discontinued the circulation, with postal ballot-papers, of indications of candidates' preferences. That circulation, at public expense, encourages in Victoria's municipal elections a confusing proliferation of 'dummy candidates', who are people nominated simply to appeal to groups of uninformed voters, so that their ballots are then transferred to the intended principal beneficiaries. That tactic is far less profitable in PR polls, as papers are first transferred for surpluses of elected candidates, who are generally the highest-polling candidates, whereas if only a single position is being filled, all transfers are from the lowest-polling candidates. Victoria lacks even partial optional preferential voting as Section 20 of those Regulations requires that ballot-papers are not valid unless all consecutive preferences, or all but the last such preferences, are marked.

For the City of Melbourne, the City of Melbourne Act 2001 regrettably provides for popular, but indirect, election of the Lord Mayor and of the Deputy Lord Mayor, and segregates candidates for that election from those standing for the remaining Council positions, which are filled with the undesirable Group Voting Ticket system. See the PRSAV-T Inc. submission to a 2007 Elections Process Forum.

For Victorian municipalities other than Melbourne:

· All regular elections are general elections, on the last Saturday in November in every leap year.

· There is no requirement for all wards in a particular municipality to have the same number of councillors, so unfortunately election quotas can differ for different wards. Section 5B(1) of the Local Government Act 1989 fixes the number of councillors in a council in Australia's narrowest range, from 5 to 12.

· There is no requirement for the number of positions being filled as a group to be an odd number, which leads to many councils lacking the maximizing of the fairness of PR systems that use of an odd number entails.

· There is no minimum number of councillors per ward, so councils can unfortunately have one or more winner-take-all single-councillor wards, as 29 of Victoria's 79 councils (37%) had in 2008.

· Unlike any other Australian State's municipal elections, an unnecessary, and sometimes onerous, full marking of all preferences is required for a ballot-paper to be valid. The absence of optional preferential voting encourages the problem, peculiar to Victoria, of the nomination of many "dummy candidates" in single-councillor wards, and leaves the percentage of informal votes higher than it need be. The proliferation of "dummy candidates" is also greatly facilitated by Victoria's unique practice of inclusion of "how-to-vote" lists with the ballot-paper posted to voters for each candidate that submits such a list.

· Casual vacancies are filled by countback, except for single-councillor wards, or where there are no continuing candidates.

· Robson Rotation in ballot-paper layout is not provided for, thus unfortunately not forestalling donkey votes or organized how-to-vote cards, with the order of candidates' names being set by lot, together with - except for the City of Melbourne - direct election free of Group Voting Tickets.

· The Mayor and Deputy Mayor are elected by the Council, except for the City of Melbourne where they are popularly elected, but indirectly as a team, but that Melbourne arrangement unfortunately lacks Tasmania's requirement for the popularly-elected Mayor and Deputy to not only be popularly elected by separate concurrent ballots, but to also succeed at the election of councillors if they are not to be excluded in the counts of the elections for Mayor and Deputy, which are, in the Tasmanian system, undertaken after the count for the election of councillors has been concluded. That important democratic provision avoids diminishing overall proportionality in the election of all those that will ultimately sit on the Council, and depriving electors of the chance to elect as a councillor a good, but unsuccessful, candidate for Mayor or Deputy ahead of a less preferred candidate that is standing for a councillor position only. Candidates for Melbourne's Lord Mayor and Deputy cannot, as in Tasmania, stand for the concurrent election for councillors.

· Unlike South Australia and Tasmania, and common law and Westminster parliamentary usage, the presiding officer at meetings of Victorian councils or their committees has, if there is a tied vote, a casting vote in addition to his her deliberative vote, so tied votes, which are more likely if the total number of councillors is even, are overridden by that officer undemocratically having that additional vote, which he or she may use as he or she sees fit. Tied votes should be simply lost, but the double vote device places an unnecessary constraint on having an even number of councillors, as well as distorting the representation of voters.

· Deficiencies in the above arrangements result in a miscellaneous collection of electoral combinations with little overall rationale, where 50 of Victoria's 79 municipalities in 2008 used PR in multi-councillor electoral districts exclusively, with only 37 of those avoiding districts with an even number of councillors to be elected, but 14 other municipalities used a mixture of multi-councillor and single-councillor districts, and 15 others used exclusively single-councillor districts, leading to unnecessary institutionalized electoral inequities and injustice.

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NEW SOUTH WALES: A New South Wales Proportional Representation Society began in 1913. Proportional Representation, promoted by that forerunner of the present NSW Branch of the PRSA, was used for Legislative Assembly polls in 1920 (won by Labor), 1922 (won by a non-Labor Coalition), and 1925 (won by Labor). The first Lang Labor Government repealed the proportional representation provisions in its first term (1925-27), but lost the ensuing 1927 election, which was held on the system of single-member electorates with preferential voting that it had restored. Criticisms of that proportional representation system included its lack of satisfactory provision such as countback for filling casual vacancies, and a high percentage of exhausted votes attributed to the fully optional marking of preferences.

Legislative Council of NSW elected by PR: The first NSW Legislative Council had all of its members appointed by the Governor-in-Council. It became part of a bicameral NSW Parliament, from 1856 to 1933, which was reconstituted, by a 1933 referendum, to be indirectly elected by an electoral college of MPs, whereby the third of that Council's seats that became vacant at each Assembly election were elected by PR by an electoral college of all MLAs and the continuing MLCs. The Heffron ALP Government's proposed abolition of the Legislative Council, and proposed prohibition of its restoration, was soundly defeated at a 1961 referendum.

The PRSA's NSW Branch influenced the Wran Government away from [4] a party list system of PR towards the present direct election by a quota-preferential system (albeit marred by the imposition of a Group Voting Tickets device) when that Government introduced a Bill for direct popular voting for the Legislative Council, which was approved at a 1978 referendum. The NSW Parliamentary Elections and Electorates Act 1912 governs NSW State elections. The NSW Constitution Act 1902 entrenches a referendum requirement before a bill or bills that the Legislative Council fails to pass can, notwithstanding such a failure to pass the bill or bills, become law; and also before prescribed changes to either or both of the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly, including abolition, can become law, although there is no express entrenchment of the sections that prescribe such referendums.

Changes in the NSW Legislative Council electoral system: Exploitation of the weaknesses of the Group Voting Tickets device referred to above reached such a level at the 1999 election that an enormous 720 x 1010 mm "tablecloth" ballot-paper was used for the State-wide electoral district. Retrograde changes to supposedly overcome those weaknesses, including the imposition of a "threshold" of the type being proposed for Senate elections by a NSW Liberal senator, were proposed by the then NSW Treasurer, but fortunately neither of those ill-considered proposals went any further. Legislative changes made another "tablecloth" ballot-paper less likely at the 2003 elections, and included modifying Group Voting Tickets so that they could only relate to the candidates of the party lodging them, and allowing voters to mark preferences in the boxes above-the-line to enable transfers to take effect in that way.

Other PRSA(NSW) Work: Since 1984, the Branch has assisted in the incorporation of quota-preferential PR (the Single Transferable Vote) in Schedule 2 to the Constitution of the University of Sydney Students' Representative Council. As a result of the Branch's advice a By-law of Macquarie University (See Clause 9(7) of Schedule 1 of By-law 2005 of Macquarie University) specifies the use of the Society's PR Manual for PR elections to the Council of that University.

PRSA(NSW) Vice-Presidents, Andrew Gunter and Ed Haber, were 2 of the 20 candidates elected for NSW at a national PR postal ballot, to Australia's 1998 Constitutional Convention. Entrenching proportional representation in the Australian Constitution was raised by Ted Mack (Page 44 on 1998-02-02) and by Ed Haber (Pages 252-254 on 1998-02-04 and Pages 368-369 on 1998-02-05) at that forum, but without success.

New South Wales Local Government: In 1928 the Council of the then City of Armidale in north-eastern NSW became the first municipal council in NSW to be elected by quota-preferential proportional representation as a result of a local referendum to adopt it. What is now the PRSA's NSW Branch helped NSW to become the first State in Australia to have PR as its predominant electoral system for local government, which the Cahill ALP Government began in 1953. In 1968, the Askin Liberal Government had reverted to a "winner-take-all" system for all councils, but the PR option was restored by the Wran ALP Government in 1976.

PR is now one of the two electoral systems in Section 285 of the Local Government Act 1993. Quota-preferential PR applies where more than 2 councillors are to be elected from an electoral district. The official term for the alternative system is "Optional preferential", but that is a confusing term, as the other option of quota-preferential PR is also an optional preferential system. That system, where only 1 or 2 councillors are to be elected from a ward or district, is a preferential winner-take-all system.

In 2008, 141 councils used PR, compared with only 11 councils that used the preferential winner-take-all system, as they had wards with fewer than 3 councillors. When 2 councillors are to be elected in a ward, that system - which is the same system that the Chifley ALP Government, with the support of the Opposition led by Robert Menzies, discontinued for Senate elections in favour of the present quota-preferential PR system in 1948 - usually results in both vacancies being filled by the same bare majority of voters, even where the second candidate elected gains a much lower first preference vote than the strongest-polling unelected candidate.

The systems, neither of which uses Robson Rotation, appear in NSW Local Government (General) Regulation 2005, Schedule 4 [majority-preferential winner-take-all] and Schedule 5 [quota-preferential PR]. The first of those systems is termed "optional preferential" in the regulation, which is confusing, because the PR option is also an "optional preferential" voting system. The PR option unfortunately does not fill casual vacancies by countback. It is good that partial optional preferential voting applies, but NSW regressed when it introduced Group Voting Tickets into local government in Australia. Unlike the lopsided ward representations allowed in Victoria and SA, the number of councillors per ward must be identical for a given council, but there is unfortunately no requirement for the number of councillors in the electoral districts to be an odd number.

A flexible and reasonably democratic feature in NSW is the requirement for a council to hold a municipal Constitutional Referendum, under Sections 15, 16 and 17 of the Act, to enable certain aspects of a municipality, such as the number of councillors or wards, and hence the electoral system, to be changed, but the electors have no ability to initiate such a referendum, so a council that is one of the few councils to have a winner-take-all rather than a PR electoral system is unlikely to move for a change to its status. View the worksheet here that shows the details and results of the Constitutional Referendums held in 16 municipalities in 2008.

For New South Wales municipal elections:

· All regular elections are general elections, on the second Saturday in October in every leap year.

· Section 210 of the Local Government Act 1993 requires that for all wards in a given municipality divided into wards the number of electors per ward must not differ by more than 10 per cent, so for a given municipality all wards must have the same number of councillors. Fortunately election quotas are thus essentially equal for all its councillors. Section 224 of the Act fixes the number of councillors in a council in a range from 5 to 15.

· All but 12 of the 152 municipalities in NSW had 3 or more councillors per electoral district for the 2008 polls, in which case PR elections apply, but those remaining twelve municipalities each had only 2 councillors per district - in which case the multiple majority-preferential winner-take-all electoral system, which can easily result in one-party gaining all, or nearly all the available seats - applies, examples being Wollongong Council, where corruption led to the councillors being replaced by administrators, and Botany Bay Council, whose Mayor and all six other councillors belong to the same political party, the Australian Labor Party, which has, cosily - apparently for a long time - had all seven councillors elected unopposed. In 2008, only 8 of the 138 PR councils that held elections (just 5%) had some unopposed elections, whereas 8 of the 10 non-PR councils that held elections (80%) had some unopposed elections. Legislation has been passed for elections for Wollongong and Shellharbour Councils to be held again in 2012, but they will use proportional representation instead of the previous winner-take-all system.

· There is no requirement for the number of positions being filled as a group to be an odd number, which leads to some councils lacking the maximizing of the fairness of PR systems that use of an odd number entails.

· There is no minimum number of councillors per ward, so councils could have one or more winner-take-all single-councillor wards, although none are used at present, and it would appear to be an option that would win little support at a referendum.

· Partial optional preferential voting applies, where the number of preferences to be marked must not be less than the number of candidates to be elected.

· Casual vacancies are unfortunately not filled by countback, but by by-election polls.

· Robson Rotation in ballot-paper layout is not provided for, thus unfortunately not forestalling "donkey votes" or organized "how-to-vote" cards, with the order of candidates' names being set by lot, together with - for all proportional representation polls - the use of a Group Voting Tickets option, which detracts from the ideal of direct election of candidates.

· The Mayor can either be elected by the Council, as in most councils, or by a separate, but concurrent popular election. A person can stand for the position of Mayor and also for that of a councillor, and if elected Mayor, his or her votes in the election for councillors pass on to the next available preference of those that voted for him or her. Unfortunately Tasmania's requirement for the popularly-elected Mayor to also succeed at the election of councillors does not apply, thus diminishing overall proportionality, as the Mayor's seat on the council does not depend, as it does in Tasmania, on his or her receiving the same quota of votes, on the same basis, as every other councillor.

· Unlike South Australia and Tasmania, and common law and Westminster parliamentary usage, the presiding officer at meetings of NSW councils or their committees has, if there is a tied vote, a casting vote in addition to his her deliberative vote, so tied votes, which are more likely if the total number of councillors is even, are overridden by that officer undemocratically having that additional vote, which he or she may use as he or she sees fit. Tied votes should be simply lost, but the double vote device places an unnecessary constraint on having an even number of councillors.

· Deficiencies in the above arrangements, including the use of electoral districts unfortunately returning an even number of candidate, result in a less than ideal pattern overall, but the great preponderance of councils are elected with PR, with the main deficiency being that, instead of Robson Rotation applying to enhance electors' role in themselves participating in the choice of which of a party's candidates become elected, all PR municipal elections in NSW have imposed on them a Group Voting Ticket option, which is the aspect that greatly facilitates the domination of political party organizations in the decision of who is ultimately elected from a party.

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WESTERN AUSTRALIA: A “Proportional Representation Society of Western Australia” was formed in 1913, with Mr Gawler MLC as its President, and Mr Frederick J Esmond as its Hon. Secretary, but it would appear that the onset of the First World War led to its early demise. The PRSA's WA Branch (Electoral Reform Society of Western Australia Inc.) was formed in the latter part of the 20th Century, and it promoted the 1987 law for Senate-style PR for the Legislative Council. An ERS member, Hon. Ed Dermer MLC, spoke of its work in his inaugural speech on 12th March 1997 to the WA Legislative Council. The Electoral Act 1907 of Western Australia now provides that a variant of countback fills casual vacancies, as an excellent amendment of Western Australia's Constitution Act 1889 by the Government of Sir Charles Court in 1978, Part VII Section 73(2)(c), alterable only by referendum, requires all WA MPs to be directly chosen by the people. Australia's other States and Territories lack such a provision and, unlike Sections 7 and 24 of the Commonwealth Constitution, it also applies to the filling of casual vacancies.

Mr Jack Wright, PRSA National President, was keynote speaker at the WA Government's 1984 Parliament Week seminar. The unfortunate Unweighted Inclusive Gregory Transfer provision for the Legislative Council, which replicated the present Senate system, has been replaced with the Weighted Inclusive Gregory Transfer provision in Schedule 1 of Western Australia's Electoral Act 1907.

Western Australian Local Government: Richard Court's Liberal Government retreated from the preferential system used for local government, and substituted the primitive first-past-the-post procedure, in both its single and multiple form, which ran counter to enlightened electoral systems for Australian local government that began in South Australia in 1840. The Act did not prohibit "plumping", nor did the Regulation 35 of Part 7 of the then Local Government (Elections) Regulations 1997.

The PRSA's WA Branch campaigned for the replacement of this anomalous first-past-the-post throwback by a quota-preferential proportional representation system. In 2006 the then WA Government introduced a Bill for that purpose. A hostile and negative campaign by the Western Australian Local Government Association resulted in that bill being referred to a parliamentary committee for scrutiny, but the bill was enacted. Regulation 35 of WA's Local Government (Elections) Regulations 1997 then required the full marking of preferences for a vote to be valid.

The WA Local Government Association has continued its misguided campaign against that excellent new quota-preferential proportional representation system then provided for in Schedule 4.1 of WA's Local Government Act 1995. The current WA Liberal Government announced that it would legislate to revert to the previous crude first-past-the-post procedure so that it would take effect for the October 2009 municipal polls, and it acted accordingly.

For Western Australian municipal elections:

· WA holds municipal elections for as nearly as practicable half the councillors on the third Saturday in October in every odd-numbered year.

· The number of councillors in a council is fixed by vice-regal proclamation.

· Schedule 4.1 of the Local Government Act 1995 now unfortunately prescribes a first-past-the-post procedure for the filling of both single and multiple positions on councils in WA, but plumping by voters is permitted.

· Municipalities in WA may be undivided or may be divided into wards.

· Mayors and presiding officers at a meeting have both a deliberative and a casting vote, under Section 5.21 of WA's Local Government Act 1995.

· The system to elect the Mayor or President of a municipality may be either by councillors, or by electors. The latter may requisition a referendum on that.

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QUEENSLAND: Queensland - the first State to change from the defective relative majority procedure, (in 1892 it adopted a system called "contingent voting") - reverted to that procedure from 1942 until 1962, when the majority-preferential method, with a requirement for full marking of all preferences began. In the late 1980s, a major judicial inquiry (FitzGerald), led to malapportionment of electoral districts being greatly reduced, but the PRSA's former Queensland Branch had steadfastly warned that equal enrolments will, by definition, stop malapportionment, but will not prevent gerrymanders, either accidental or intentional. Marking of preferences became fully optional in 1992.

Electoral Legislation: The electoral provisions for Queensland's unicameral Parliament are in Queensland's Electoral Act 1992. The former PRSA Branch sought the re-introduction of an Upper House, elected by PR. The former Upper House was abolished by the Constitution Act Amendment Act 1922. It was not until twelve years later that the Constitution Act Amendment Act 1934 amended the Constitution Act 1867 (which still operates concurrently with the Constitution of Queensland 2001) to require approval at a referendum before any Bill to restore an Upper House, or to extend the term of the Legislative Assembly beyond three years, could take effect.

Queensland Local Government: The Local Government Act 2009 provides two methods for counting. In single-councillor electoral districts, known as wards, which are usually found in urban or near-urban areas, fully optional preferential counting applies.

For multi-member electoral districts, which are found typically in rural areas, the highly unsatisfactory multiple first-past-the-post procedure, with plumping not allowed, that was abandoned for Senate elections in 1919 applies, except that Schedule 2 of the Act, as detailed below, makes rather unusual and deceptive provisions that require the voter's marks in ballot-paper squares to include sequential numbers, which can give voters the false impression that their ballots might be counted using one of Australia's normal preferential counting systems. The Act requires that voters mark a number of squares equal to the number of vacancies to be filled, but it also provides that any numbers marked beyond the sequence required will be disregarded, without that rendering the ballot informal. Certain unions also use this surreptitious system.

There is no provision for PR in Queensland municipal elections. Parliament in 2010 resolved to refer its possible introduction to a parliamentary inquiry, but the Inquiry did not recommend PR.

For Queensland municipal elections:

· All regular elections are general elections, on the last Saturday in March in every leap year. Access details and results here.

· Section 15 of the Local Government Act 2009 requires that for all wards in a given municipality divided into wards the number of electors per ward must not differ by more than a defined percentage, so for a given municipality all wards must have the same number of councillors, and fortunately election quotas are thus relatively equal for all its councillors.

· The number of councillors for a municipality is five unless a regulation requires otherwise for that municipality. Wards are winner-take-all single-councillor wards.

· Schedule 2 of the Act prescribes the two different counting methods used. Fully optional preferential voting (Section 357 of that Schedule) applies for polls in municipalities with single-councillor wards, where a single, unique first preference constitutes a valid ballot-paper. For municipalities with multi-councillor electoral districts, the unsatisfactory multiple first-past-the-post system applies (Section 358 of that Schedule).

· Plumping is allowed, but the law requires, unlike nearly all plurality systems, that all preferences after the first, which can be marked with a tick, a cross or the number 1, must be marked as consecutive numbers 2, 3, etc. The law provides that if the number of marks exceeds the number of positions to be filled, the preference numbers marked beyond the number of vacancies to be filled are disregarded. Despite an order of preference having to be marked, as in normal public polls in Australia, which have used preferential voting and counting since the 1920s, that order as such is disregarded in the count, as the highest number marked and recognized, up to the number of vacancies to be filled, counts equally with the lowest number marked and recognized.

· Allowing voters to mark preference numbers when the counting system treats a defined number of those markings as each carrying equal weight and significance, with preferences marked beyond the number of vacancies to be filled being disregarded, appears to be deceiving voters into believing that the counting is preferential, when it is not. That apparent subterfuge succeeds in overcoming what has always been a major difficulty with the multiple first-past-the-post system, namely avoiding the tendency for many voters to vote for more than the number of candidates to be elected, and thus to cast invalid votes.

· Casual vacancies are filled by by-election polls.

· Robson Rotation in ballot-paper layout is not provided for where preferential voting applies, thus unfortunately not forestalling "donkey votes" or organized "how-to-vote" cards, with the order of candidates' names being set by lot, but fortunately a Group Voting Tickets option, which detracts from the ideal of direct election of candidates, does not apply.

· The Mayor is elected by a separate, but concurrent popular election. Unfortunately Tasmania's requirement for the popularly-elected Mayor to also succeed at the election of councillors does not apply thus depriving electors of the chance to elect a good, but unsuccessful, candidate for Mayor ahead of a less preferred candidate as a councillor, as candidates for Mayor cannot, as they can in Tasmania, stand for both concurrent elections.

· Unlike South Australia and Tasmania, and common law and Westminster parliamentary usage, the presiding officer at meetings of Queensland councils or their committees has, if there is a tied vote, a casting vote in addition to his her deliberative vote, so tied votes, which are more likely if the total number of councillors is even, are overridden by that officer undemocratically having that additional vote, which he or she may use as he or she sees fit. Tied votes should be simply lost, but the double vote device places an unnecessary constraint on having an even number of councillors.

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AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY: The electoral system used for the first self-government election, in 1989, instituted by the then Labor Federal Government, was a modified party list form of proportional representation called the Modified d'Hondt system.

It was a highly unsatisfactory system that was widely ridiculed and regarded as unfair. Its last use was at the 1992 election, as the Federal Government had acknowledged its failure, and had decided to hold a plebiscite in conjunction with the election to enable ACT electors to indicate which of two alternative replacement systems they preferred for future ACT polls. That 1992 Australian Capital Territory plebiscite (the informative brochure all electors received is accessible from that hyperlink), which was officially, but misleadingly, described as a referendum, had 65% of voters favouring a Hare-Clark form of PR over the alternative of 17 single-member electorates.

A 16-1 Assembly vote in December then passed the Proportional Representation (Hare-Clark) Entrenchment Bill 1994. Approved by 65% of ACT voters at a 1995 referendum (the informative brochure all electors received is accessible from that hyperlink) where the PRSA(ACT) campaigned strongly, the resulting Act prohibits changes to the major Hare-Clark aspects of the electoral law without a two-thirds Assembly majority or a referendum.

ACT Local Government: As there is no separate system of local government in the ACT, the functions of local government are carried out by the ACT Assembly and the ACT Government.

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NORTHERN TERRITORY OF AUSTRALIA: The Electoral Act 2004 of the Northern Territory specifies preferential voting in the single-member districts prescribed by Section 13(4) of the Commonwealth's Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978 (which is effectively the Territory's Constitution), and also specifies a requirement for voters to indicate all preferences. The ballot-papers have, for Australia, the novel requirement that a photograph of the candidate must be printed against the name of each candidate, and a requirement, superseded elsewhere in Australia, that names be listed in alphabetical order on the ballot-paper. At the first election of the Northern Territory?s Legislative Assembly, in 1974, before self-government, the Australian Labor Party won all 17 seats, despite gaining over 30% of the first preference vote. As NT Electoral Commission figures show, a huge imbalance between seats and votes still occurred at the 2005 NT elections.

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Northern Territory Local Government: Local government elections in the Northern Territory are held under the Local Government (Electoral) Regulations. These prescribe a winner-take-all majority-preferential system if there is only one seat per electorate, but where there is more than one seat per electoral district, its Section 54 prescribes a winner-take-all multiple majority-preferential system, of the type that became discredited, and was abandoned for Senate elections in 1948.

Following the replacement of that system for multiple vacancies in Victoria by a quota-preferential proportional representation system, the only surviving use of it for public elections in Australia is for the Northern Territory municipalities above, and for the 12, of the 152 municipalities in New South Wales, that still do not use proportional representation. View the 2008 count for Alice Springs Town Council aldermen to see how the successive re-use of the same ballots that elected the early winners allows the last elected to win despite stronger support for other, unelected candidates.

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TERRITORY OF NORFOLK ISLAND: Section 20 of the Legislative Assembly Act 1979 of Norfolk Island now prescribes, for the election of the Territory's 9-member Legislative Assembly by a single Territory-wide electoral district, cumulative voting, which is a crude, inferior procedure that was used in Cape Colony (South Africa) in the 19th Century, and by the U.S. State of Illinois from 1870 to 1980, until Illinois's only constitutional change ever effected by a citizen-initiated referendum replaced it with the even worse 'first-past-the-post' system that all the other U.S. States use. Unfortunately a 1982 Norfolk Island referendum substituted cumulative voting for the earlier Hare-Clark PR used for the first two elections under that Act. Each voter must mark 9 crosses on the ballot-paper, each of equal value, and can mark an arbitrarily prescribed maximum of 4 for any one candidate.

As it uses non-preferential, non-transferable ballots, votes are wasted by some candidates receiving more than a Single Transferable Vote PR quota, and others receiving less, with no procedure for transferring such votes to contribute to a quota. The Government's Web site sometimes shows voting figures, such as the 2001 results, which showed that at that poll (at others it could be worse), 36.5% of the 9,243 votes on the 1,027 valid ballot-papers completed by the Territory's voters made no contribution to electing anybody, but with STV (quota-preferential) PR, in this case of 9 vacancies being filled by the votes of one electorate, the wasted fraction of the votes would be only 9.9%, and never more.

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Introduction.

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA:

Tom Roberts's painting of the Opening of the First Parliament hangs in the Federal Parliament building in Canberra on permanent loan from HM the Queen.

Members in both Houses of the first Commonwealth Parliament (1901-03), which is shown above being opened in May 1901 by His Royal Highness, the Duke of Cornwall and York (later King George V), had been elected by the systems for the Lower Houses of the Parliament in their State (Sections 9, 10 & 31 of the Australian Constitution). Quick and Garran's "Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth" gives background on the Constitution. Thus Tasmania's first 5 MHRs and 6 senators were elected by Hare-Clark from a single state-wide electoral district. Queensland used its contingent voting, which was a limited form of preferential voting, in single-member electoral districts.

All other States used relative majority voting; MHRs from single-member electoral districts, with boundaries fixed by the State Governments (except South Australia, which used a single State-wide electorate to elect its 7 MHRs as a group). Each mainland state elected its 6 senators as a group with the whole State as one electorate, using a multiple first-past-the-post voting system where plumping was not allowed. See PRSA history here. A complete list of all the people ever elected to the Commonwealth Parliament, and all the Federal Ministers, is shown in the latest Parliamentary Handbook.

Tasmania's first federal by-election, to replace an MHR, had the whole State as a single electorate, as the Federal Parliament had not yet used Section 31 to pass an Electoral Act. The House of Representatives passed the Barton Government's Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902, which specified preferential voting in single-member electoral districts for the House of Representatives, and quota-preferential PR for Senate elections, with fully optional preference marking applying for both houses.

That was the only form of PR that would satisfy the requirement of Section 7 of the Constitution that senators "be directly chosen by the people", but the Senate, which had, except for the senators for Tasmania, been elected by a first past the post multiple vote, amended the Bill (see the Hansard debate on that 1902 Bill) to substitute that system, with plumping being made unavailable. See the Australian Electoral Commission's summary of the history of the federal electoral system.

1. Full Marking of All Preferences, Partial Optional Preference Marking, or Fully Optional Preference Marking:

The 1901 election of the six senators for NSW gave a dramatic early warning about the need to make ballot-papers and their use comfortably manageable by a wide range of voters, as 38,674 voters (up to 17.5% of the ballots cast) cast informal (invalid) ballots because, with 50 candidates, and with only 6 senators to be elected, many voters failed to strike out exactly 44 names of the candidates they did not want, as was the law for NSW colonial polls in small single-member electorates, which law applied for the first NSW Senate poll, but not later polls. The unavailability of plumping, under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902, required that a voter had to indicate a vote for the same number of candidates as there were vacancies in order for the completed ballot-paper to be accepted as valid.

The use of plumping, in which voters in multi-member electorates could, under earlier first past the post multiple votes systems, which are still the common law voting system, vote for fewer candidates than there were vacancies, and hence concentrate their vote on fewer candidates, even just one, had in certain earlier colonial and, as has recently been reverted to on the Isle of Man, allowed some rudimentary proportionality, as did the 1925-94 Japanese Lower House system of multi-member districts with a Single Non-transferable Vote. The method of indicating an Australian Senate vote from 1902-17 was, unlike the 1901 poll, the placing of a cross (X) against the name of each candidate voted for. The 1917 periodic Senate election, in which W.M. Hughes's Nationalist Party won all Senate seats in all States, was the last time the first past the post multiple vote was used for Senate elections.

NSW Senator Hon. Albert Gardiner was an advocate of proportional representation for Senate elections. As the prevailing winner-take-all electoral system had resulted in the Nationalist Party gaining all the18 Senate seats to be filled in 1917 and, 17 of the 18 seats (Albert Gardiner was the only Labor candidate elected) in 1919, for the whole of Australia, he was the only Labor senator in the 36-member Senate from 1920 until 1923. He held the position of Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, even though he had no party colleagues to lead. His solitary position, despite Labor's having gained 43.7% of the national Senate vote in 1917, and 42.8% in 1919, was a stark testament for the need for proportional representation. He made a 12 hour speech in the Senate in the debate on the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 introduced by W.M.Hughes's Nationalist Government. It remains the longest speech ever made there, as time limits requiring shorter speeches were imposed in 1919. That consolidated Act, which is still the Principal Act for federal elections, changed the electoral system for MHRs from a first past the post to its present majority-preferential system, but the Senate system was not changed until the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1919 replaced the previous multiple first past the post system (see 1917 NSW example) with a multiple majority-preferential system (see 1919 NSW example). It also provided that, to cast a valid vote, voters had to indicate preferences for a number of candidates equal to one more than twice the number of vacancies to be filled.

The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1934 introduced by the Lyons United Australia Party Government began what many now see to be an oppressive and ridiculously unnecessary requirement that, to cast a valid vote, a voter in an election in a multi-member electorate must indicate a preference for each of the candidates, regardless of how many there might be. When the Chifley ALP Government introduced the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1948 to change the Senate electoral system from a multiple majority-preferential system to a quota-preferential system, it insisted on continuing that provision despite it being imposed on a PR system, which is a very different system from the multiple majority-preferential system to which the provision was originally applied, and despite the proven success of Hare-Clark's partial optional preferential voting Tasmania-wide since 1907.

The Menzies Coalition Opposition unsuccessfully moved to amend the 1948 Bill to provide instead for partial optional indication of preferences, but the Chifley Labor Government insisted that a voter must indicate all preferences on the ballot-paper for it to be valid. In 1974, the Whitlam Labor Government proposed partial optional indication of preferences, but its lack of a Senate majority prevented it legislating for that, as the Coalition had, by then, changed its view on the matter. It is ironic that the PR system in the Commonwealth Electoral Bill 1902 introduced by the Barton Government, and rejected by the 1902 Senate, had provided for fully optional marking of preferences. The statutory requirement to mark all preferences for a valid vote, which has never applied in Tasmanian State elections, has given rise, in mainland Australia, to the widespread use by political parties of how-to-vote cards.

2. Senate's 2 former Winner-take-all Electoral Systems (1903-17 & 1919-46) & Proportional Representation (1949- ):

• From 1903-17 the multiple, or bloc, first past the post (also known as plurality or relative majority) vote, was the Senate system, as the Senate in 1902 had, as stated at the end of the previous section, rejected the Barton Government's proposal for proportional representation for the Senate, and had provided instead for a multiple first-past-the post system with plumping prohibited.
  
  

• In 1919, the Senate's multiple first-past-the-post system gave way to a multiple, or bloc, majority-preferential system after William Hughes's Nationalist Government had introduced, in 1918, preferential voting for the House of Representatives, to avoid splitting of the conservative vote by the newly-formed Country Party, which supported the Nationalists in a Coalition government. Since then, the Coalition, in its various forms, has been the only governing group, other than the Australian Labor Party, in the Federal Parliament, and it has been the Government for most of that time.
  
  
• By 1948, the decades of operation of those two systems showed that they filled Senate seats so grossly disproportionately to votes that Parliament in that year replaced the Senate's multiple preferential system with the present quota-preferential proportional representation (PR) system. The Opposition supported the change.

The 1929 Royal Commission on the Constitution [5], whose members were appointed on the advice of S.M.Bruce's Nationalist Government, recommended inclusion of PR in the Constitution, but that was not implemented. The Proportional Representation Society of Victoria held a Melbourne Town Hall meeting in October 1943 (see Uhr, J Page 18), which resolved to press the Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. John Curtin MHR, to introduce PR for the Senate. Copies of that Society's letter to the Prime Minister and the reply are attached.

A volume of the 1948 Hansard [6] records the Attorney-General, Rt. Hon. H.V. Evatt KC, introducing his Bill that amended the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to provide for PR for the Senate, and acknowledging the help of 'the Proportional Representation Society of England'. A 1948 letter from the Proportional Representation Society of Victoria congratulated the Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. J. B. Chifley, on the Bill that introduced PR. The Bill was not opposed by the Opposition, led by the Rt Hon R G Menzies KC, except that they did, unsuccessfully, move that the Bill's continuation of the existing requirement for full marking of all preferences other than the last preference in order for a ballot-paper to be valid be altered to provide for partial optional preferential voting.

Since then, the PRSA has monitored the Senate system - the world's largest scale quota-preferential PR election. PR is the longest operating electoral system used for Senate elections. The PRSA has monitored other Australian elections also. Regrettably there is no constitutional or other entrenchment requiring approval at a referendum, or even an absolute majority vote in both houses of Parliament, before the Senate's PR system can be weakened or abolished.

3. Casual Vacancies Setback: Senator Peter Rae, and some other Tasmanian senators that had a good understanding of the Hare-Clark system and its countback procedure for filling casual vacancies in a PR system, agreed with the PRSA that the Constitution Alteration (Senate Casual Vacancies) Bill 1977, in ostensibly seeking to modify the original form of Section 15 of the Constitution, which provided for the filling of Senate casual vacancies, to make it consistent with the PR system used since 1949, should have used countback, rather than the system of nomination on a party basis that replaced that original 1901 provision. They advocated that replacement senators should be elected by the people via countback and not, as proposed in the Bill, by the Constitution requiring State Parliaments to endorse the nominees of political parties. In the Bill's rushed and hushed, very cursory passage, a Call of the Senate denied, eight senators, including four Tasmanian senators - Brian Harradine, Michael Townley, Peter Rae and Sir Reginald Wright - voted against it.

Use of Countback would have ensured direct election of all replacement senators, but those senators' advocacy failed to change the Bill, so senators filling casual vacancies since 1977 have been, regrettably, indirectly elected since approval of the Bill at a 1977 referendum by over 90% of voters in each State produced an alteration resulting in the present form of Section 15 of the Constitution. From the adoption of the original 1901 Constitution until that change in 1977, Section 15 had prescribed that casual vacancies had to be filled - until the next periodic or general federal election - by a person appointed as the relevant State Parliament, or until it sat, the State Governor, saw fit. That temporary appointment provision was abused in 1974 and 1975 for partisan gain. Its replacement was well justified, but not by an indirect system of party appointment, when a provision for countback would have given direct election by the voters, and also party continuity in all significant cases.

With the 1948 adoption of PR for Senate elections, the occasional extra place to be filled reduced the quota and could have the disadvantage of causing the number of places to be an even number rather than the odd number that was provided for before the number of senators per State was increased to12, which leaves an even number to be elected at each periodic election of senators.

Since then, senators directly elected by the people, such as Senator Michael Tate (ALP, TAS) and Senator John Herron (Liberal, QLD), have resigned after serving only a month or so of their 6-year term, and their places have been filled for nearly 6 years by persons unelected by the people. The looseness of the present form of Section 15 of the Constitution has allowed other anomalies such as:

• the failure of the Tasmanian Government to replace Senator Donald Grimes (ALP, TAS) in 1987 by the nominee of the ALP, John Devereux;
  

• the public revelation by Senator Brian Harradine (Independent, TAS) in 1996 of manipulative loopholes that he honorably chose not to exploit; and
  

• the disturbingly facile circumvention of the disqualification provision of Section 44(iv) of the Australian Constitution as evidenced in the appointment of Senator Jeannie Ferris (Liberal, SA) to fill a Senate casual vacancy she had just caused by her own resignation, which resulted in a very disputatious 70-minute Joint Sitting of South Australia's Parliament in 1996.
  
  

In 1997 the Senate consisted of senators over 20% of whom had not been elected by the people of Australia!

The 1977 change was motivated by the breach in 1975, by the NSW and Queensland Governments, of the convention that a person appointed to replace a senator would always be a person that belonged to the party of that vacating senator. The practical importance of that convention had increased greatly since proportional representation had been introduced in 1949, but the convention was originally accepted after a 1907 High Court decision that voided the purported appointment, under Section 15 of the Constitution, by the South Australian Parliament in 1907 of the Hon. James O'Loghlin, a Labour Party member, as a senator to replace Mr Joseph Vardon, an endorsed Anti-Socialist Party member, whose election at the 1906 periodic election of senators was, in 1907 after a recount, declared void by the High Court acting as the Court of Disputed Returns. That High Court decision led to the 1908 Special Election in South Australia, at which Messrs O'Loghlin and Vardon were the only candidates. A separate 1907 High Court action, the King versus the Governor of South Australia, also touches on this matter. Mr Vardon was elected to fill the vacancy that had not been filled at the 1906 periodic election, and that the High Court had declared was not a casual vacancy subject to being filled under Section 15 of the Constitution, as had been attempted by the Parliament.

4. Gregory Fractional Transfer variant replaces Random Selection Transfer: The Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform of the Federal Parliament in 1983 appeared to have been concerned about potential difficulties with the procedure for transfer of surplus votes by random selection that had applied at Senate scrutinies since the changes made by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1948. The narrow margin of 560 votes (0.089% of the total formal vote) between Jack Evans (Australian Democrats) and the final senator elected, Noel Crichton-Browne (Liberal), in the 22nd and final count in the October 1980 Senate poll for Western Australia and the potential problems that Mr Evans's appeal to the Court of Disputed Returns might have raised if it had been successful and the Court had had to consider ordering a recount of the poll. With a random element in the scrutiny, there is no guarantee that a recount would resolve the doubt in a close finish. The Committee's recommendation led to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 being amended in 1983 so that an Unweighted Inclusive Gregory fractional transfer is now prescribed in Section 273(9-12), replacing the original Senate procedure of random selection of the number of surplus ballots for transfer at full value.

The original form of the Gregory fractional transfer, which Hare-Clark has always used, is the transfer of all ballot-papers showing a particular first preference, but at a fractional value appropriate to the level of the surplus. When it is applied to transfers of surpluses other than those arising from first preferences, it applies only to the last parcel of votes received, whereas the inclusive variants apply to all parcels. Victorian Liberal Senator Alan Missen had Hansard in 1983 [7] incorporate a PRSA letter expressing concern about the disadvantages of the Unweighted Inclusive Gregory fractional transfer introduced then, which still applies. The PRSA notes that the standard computer counting at Senate scrutinies would allow the substitution of a Weighted Inclusive Gregory fractional transfer, as discussed in a paper by Professor David Farrell, with advantage.

A Weighted Inclusive Gregory fractional transfer is prescribed by Schedule 1 of the Western Australian Electoral Act 1907 . See in particular Clause 5 of that Act's Schedule 1. A submission in 2008 to the federal Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters by the South Australian Branch of the PRSA proposed that Senate counts should use a Weighted Inclusive Gregory fractional transfer instead of the present unweighted transfer.

5. Group Voting Tickets Setback: Changes in 1983 to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 introduced the unfortunate Group Voting Tickets provision in Section 211. In his 1983 Senate speech, in which he included the letter from the PRSA President referred to above, Victorian Liberal Senator Alan Missen referred to his concerns about the ALP Government's Group Voting Ticket proposal, as did NSW Liberal Senator Sir John Carrick, NSW Nationals Senate Leader Senator Douglas Scott, and Tasmanian Independent Senator Brian Harradine. The above-the-line Group Voting Tickets are the latest in a history of ballot-paper designs beginning in 1940 that have led to nearly all the voters at Senate elections endorsing their party's ticket rather than having to be persuaded of the virtues of the various candidates and choosing them explicitly, as fortunately still occurs with Hare-Clark. That hyperlink shows how Tasmania's Parliament rejected Group Voting Tickets, with the result that first preference votes at Tasmanian Assembly elections are not highly concentrated on just two candidates, as occurs at Senate elections, leaving nearly all elected senators receiving only a tiny number of first preference votes.

That concentration of first preference votes on a single candidate of a party, which Dr H V Evatt called regimentation of the vote, preceded Group Voting Tickets and even the Senate's proportional representation system. It perversely increases minor party representation at the expense of that of the major parties, as described in a 1988 article in The Canberra Times, but this seems either not to be understood by the parties, or their operatives prefer instead to sacrifice some representation in order to retain their power of controlling the order in which candidates appear on Group Voting Tickets.

Group Voting Tickets have also led to candidates of very small parties being elected as a result of several larger parties all placing them on relatively high positions on their tickets and thus having them elected, when it is clear that their total vote without that help would have left them unelected. An example of that was the 2004 election of Victorian Senator Steve Fielding of the Family First Party, with 1.85% of first preference votes, with the remaining 12.43% of the vote needed for his quota of 14.29% being nearly all the result of transfers from candidates outside his party.

Challenges in the High Court, to one aspect of Group Voting Tickets in the 1984 case brought by C J McKenzie, and the 1999 case brought by D K Ditchburn, failed. Above-the-line voters have a far less onerous task, and far less chance of voting informally, than below-the-line voters, as formal above-the-line votes require just a single mark, whereas below-the-line votes must have nearly every box marked correctly, although partial optional preferential voting below-the-line has now been introduced for elections to the Legislative Council in Victoria. The percentage of below-the-line Senate voters in NSW and Victoria is now only about 4%, but in the two Senate electorates where Hare-Clark is used for Assembly elections, Tasmania and the A.C.T, the awareness of the voters of the merits of an untramelled quota-preferential PR with Robson Rotation keeps the below-the-line vote at about 20%.

The leader of the Greens Party, Senator Bob Brown, introduced his Commonwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008 into the Senate in a proposal to have the above style of above-the-line voting replaced with a system where above-the-line voters would, for a valid vote, have to indicate their preference between groups by numbers in the squares above-the-line. Each square would relate to its party's candidates only, in an order lodged by the party, and no party or group could lodge an order of preferences to be given effect to except for the candidates of that party, which is a significant improvement on the complete ordering of a voter's ballot that Group Voting Tickets presently entail. The marking of later preferences among parties would not be fully optional, as a minimum number of party squares would be prescribed to be marked for an above-the-line vote to be a formal vote.

In election campaigns, parties would still urge voters to vote above-the-line, and that pressure would still be re-inforced by the existing and daunting unnecessary requirement for voters below-the-line to mark a preference for virtually every individual candidate, regardless of how many there are (there were 78 candidates at the NSW Senate poll in 2004). Senator Brown's Bill would unfortunately not abolish the political parties' self-serving party-oriented above-the-line device in respect of any particular party's block of candidates, and would also fail to remove the existing daunting and unjustifiable requirement for below-the-line voters at Senate elections to mark virtually every square in order to be able to cast a valid vote, and thus be at least even-handed, by making the workloads of both categories of voter able to be more equal. By contrast, for Victoria?s upper house ballot-papers, the minimum number of preferences to be marked for a formal below-the-line ballot is equal to the number of positions to be filled in the electoral district involved.

6. Failed Campaign to Stop Transfers to Candidates whose First Preference Vote or Party Total is below a 'Threshold': In 1998-9, a NSW Liberal, Senator Helen Coonan, campaigned for a change to the Senate's electoral system that would have required the exclusion from the count of any candidate that failed to gain a prescribed fractional part of a quota, which she termed a 'threshold', or whose party failed to gain such a part. The aim of her proposal was to prevent candidates of parties with a low level of first preference vote support from accruing votes transferred from other less successful candidates, and ultimately achieving a quota of votes and being elected. The effect of the proposal would be to reduce the proportionality of the counting system. The weakness in her failed plan (see Endnotes No. 50, which refers to a 1999 letter to The Age), is its arbitrary redirection of voters' ballot preferences away from one or more of their higher preferences to one of their lower preferences, which is manifestly against the plainly expressed wishes of such voters.

7. Why the Number of Senators to be Elected should be an Odd Number: From 1984 six senators were to be elected from every State at a periodic election of senators, instead of the previous five. Until 1948 there were three to be elected, and then that number was increased to five, both of those numbers being an odd number. The disadvantage and inadvisability, with a proportional representation electoral system, of setting the number of places to be filled as an even number were not unknown, as the 1951, 1974 and 1975 "double dissolution" elections, at which it is unavoidable that an even number of senators is to be elected in each State, were held after the adoption of PR for Senate elections.

The advantage of setting an odd number is that an absolute majority of votes for a given party, however slight, produces an absolute majority of seats for that party whereas, with an even number of places, an absolute majority of votes for a party does not, unless it is high enough, produce an absolute majority of seats for that party. If the absolute majority is not large enough to produce an absolute majority of an even number of seats, the party gaining such an absolute majority of votes will only gain half the number of available seats, and the party, or parties, that jointly gain only a minority of the seats, will gain the other half of the seats, which is unsatisfactory.

The remedy for this problem is to arrange matters so that the number of places to be filled is an odd number, but the requirement of the nexus provision in the first sentence of Section 24 of the Constitution has made that onerous and expensive as the size of the Parliament has increased. The greatly increased difficulty, with there no longer being an odd number of places to be filled in each State at periodic elections of senators, for either major party to obtain a majority of seats in any State has led to increased demands for a relaxation of the careful safeguards of Section 57 of the Constitution, which provides for procedures that can ensue following a disagreement between the two Houses of the Parliament.

There is also the fact that, with an even number of places to be filled in each State, a party that gains half of the quotas of Senate votes in all States at two successive periodic elections (42.9% of the vote), or a single election after a dissolution of the Senate (46.2% of the vote), can thereby, with much less than 50% of the overall vote, gain half the seats in the Senate, and thus deprive an opposing party that might have gained Government by the vagaries of the single-member electorate system used for elections to the Lower House of a majority of Senate seats, thus enabling it to reject any Government Bill it chooses. A change to the law to set the numbers for periodic Senate elections to be odd numbers would be desirable, but a further change to provide for PR for the House of Representatives would be better still.

8. A Sounder Basis for Dividing State Senators into Two Classes after a Dissolution of the Senate: Section 13 of the Australian Constitution requires the Senate, at its first meeting after any dissolution of it, to divide the newly-elected State senators into two classes of equal numbers, with one class to be long-term senators, with a six-year term, and the other class to be short-term senators, with a three-year term. From the first election onwards that division has been effected by a resolution of the Senate that had the first class consist of the half of the State senators first declared elected in each Senate electorate made long-term senators, with the rest of the State senators being made short-term senators.

That long-standing practice was examined by the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters, which reported to the Parliament that the practice had been appropriate under the Senate's previous two winner-take-all electoral systems, but was inequitable under the current system of proportional representation. It therefore recommended that the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 should be amended to include a new section that required the Australian Electoral Commission to conduct, after each election after a dissolution of the Senate, a recount of the vote to determine, in each State Senate electorate, which candidates would have been elected if only half the number of vacancies were to be filled, and to report that to the Parliament. That new section, Section 282, was added to the Act.

At the first opportunity to implement the new system, the Hawke Labor Government, which had supported it at the Joint Select Committee, and had supported the introduction of the necessary Section 282 of the Act, failed to support it in the Senate. The chairman of that Committee, ALP Senator Robert Ray, spoke in favour of the new section, as Page 3220 of the Senate Hansard of 2nd December 1983 shows. The Coalition Opposition supported the new approach that the Hawke Government had developed but, at the first opportunity to implement it, when the Senate met on 15th September 1987 and proceeded to its task of dividing the newly-elected State senators into two classes, the Australian Democrats senators joined with the Hawke Labor Government senators to defeat an Opposition motion to implement the new procedure that the Hawke Government had developed, which reversal in attitude appears to have resulted from an assessment that avoiding implementing the reform would result in fewer long-term senators for the Coalition Opposition than would occur if the reformed procedure was adopted.

Liberal Senator Jim Short's speech advocating the use of the reformed procedure appears on Page 96 of the Senate Hansard of 15th September 1987 and continues on Page 155 of the Senate Hansard of 16th September 1987. The speech by the Australian Democrats spokesman, Senator Michael Macklin, shown on Page 156 of the Senate Hansard of 16th September 1987, reveals quite frankly that the Australian Democrats' vote against implementing the new system was based on a consideration of which system would yield more long-term senators for them for the coming term. Until the Senate's carte blanche to decide which senators after a dissolution of the Senate will gain the benefit of the longer term has been superseded by an alteration of Section 13 of the Constitution along the lines of the reform that the Hawke Government had originally advocated, it would seem that party political advantage will continue to override considerations of electoral propriety.

9. Quota-preferential PR (STV) for the House of Representatives: The Australian Constitution does not require that electoral divisions for House of Representatives elections are single-member divisions, nor does it specify how the votes shall be counted. The final sentence of Section 29 states that, "In the absence of other provision, each State shall be one electorate", which provision applied in the case of the first election of MHRs for South Australia and Tasmania, although South Australia used a multiple first-past-the-post system, whereas Tasmania used Hare-Clark PR. The election for each House of Representatives single-member division was counted using a first-past-the-post system until 1918, but ever since then preferential voting (the alternative vote) has been used, as prescribed in Section 274 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.

A misconception that some commentators have about preferential voting in a single-member electoral district is that it amounts to electors voting more than once, or insinuations of "a second bite of the cherry". This misconception was authoritatively refuted in the 1999 High Court case of Ditchburn vs Divisional Returning Office for Herbert, where the High Court made it clear that a preferential vote was a single vote, transferable according to clear rules.

The PRSA suggested improvements to Australian Democrats Senator David Vigor's Commonwealth Electoral (Representation of the People) Amendment Bill 1985, which sought to amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to provide for quota-preferential proportional representation for House of Representatives elections. As Section 24 of the Constitution requires that at general elections MHRs be "directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth", quota-preferential PR is fortunately the only form of PR that can be used for electing MHRs at a general election. Hansard [9] records Australian Democrats Senator John Coulter drawing the Senate's attention to the PRSA's 1993 Federal Election Analysis. The PRSA has produced PR Analyses of House of Representatives polls for 1996-2004.

Mr Michael Organ MHR, a Greens Party member elected at a by-election in the division of Cunningham, introduced in the House of Representatives, on 1st December 2003, his Royal Commission (House of Representatives Elections) Bill 2003, which provided for the appointment of a Royal Commission to investigate the implementation of a system of proportional representation for the House of Representatives but, without support by any other political party in that House, it did not proceed beyond its first reading (Hansard Page 23318), and has now lapsed.

10. Forestalling a 1988 Constitution Alteration Blunder: An eagle-eyed PRSA(NSW) member, Ed Haber, warned the PRSA of a major drafting blunder in a 1998 Constitution Alteration Bill. Insistent PRSA representations to the Australian Democrats, and discerning support by their Senator John Coulter, led the Senate [8], even though the House of Representatives had to be recalled just to pass the amended bill, to omit from Clause 5 of the Hawke ALP Government's Constitution Alteration (Fair Elections) 1988, a potentially disastrous sub-section that was one of four proposed new sub-sections.

It was a new Section 29(2) of the Constitution, "Electoral divisions: The number of members shall be the same for each division of a particular State", that - had the ensuing referendum unfortunately passed without that omission having been made - would have, for no good or discernable reason, removed quota-preferential PR as a practicable constitutional option for House of Representatives elections, unless each whole State where the total number of MHRs was a prime number, or was otherwise not divisible to attain the proposed constitutional requirement, became a single electoral district. Such a single electoral district would be most ill-advised for a populous State such as NSW, with a number of MHRs that has reached 50, and could become larger.

As shown on Page 28 of the pamphlet - posted to each voter under the requirements of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984 - the bill in the form presented to the electors contained a quite different Section 29(2), which had been reduced to being one of only three sub-sections instead of the four proposed in the Government's original form of the bill. The referendum was one of four alterations proposed. Each failed to achieve a majority in any State.

11. PRSA Member Successfully Suggested Improvement to Commonwealth Electoral Act: Section 213(1) of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 owes, since 1984, its present wording to a recommendation by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters made after a PRSA member and statistician, Mrs Alison Harcourt, proposed in evidence to that Committee that the existing legislative provision for achieving the random ordering of candidates' names on House of Representatives ballot-papers, and the random ordering of party columns from left to right on Senate ballot-papers, was insufficiently rigorous, and should be replaced by the double randomization method that she proposed, and that is now provided for in Section 213(1).

12. PR for the 1997 Constitutional Convention Election: PRSA advice to the Government on its use of a quota-preferential proportional representation system for electing half the members of a Constitutional Convention at a 1997 national postal ballot was acknowledged in Hansard of 24th June 1997 [10]. Two PRSA(NSW) officers were among the 20 people elected to represent NSW. This was only the second time in Australia's history that members of a federal Constitutional Convention were popularly elected, the first such election soon before Federation being for all members of the Convention, but conducted using a multiple first-past-the-post counting system, and without women being allowed to vote.

13. Representation and Institutional Change Conference: PRSA representatives attended this August 1999 Conference, to commemorate 50 years of PR for the Senate, in Parliament House, Canberra, run by the Department of the Senate (see Item 34) and the Australian National University.

14. Formation of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia: State bodies promoting quota-preferential electoral systems have varied their names occasionally, and once operated informally as PRSA branches. The PRSA Constitution took effect on 1st January 1982 when PR societies and their members in NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory formally established the PRSA, and those six societies became PRSA Branches.

The PRSA's former quarterly newsletter, Quota Notes, begun in December 1975 as the NSW Branch newsletter, became the national society's newsletter in September 1983 with its Issue No. 31. The last issue of Quota Notes was produced in March 2006. The PRSA's first National President, Mr J.F.H.Wright, wrote the informative book, Mirror of the Nation's Mind - Australia's Electoral Experiments (available for the PRSA), and had earlier been recognized for his international contributions by being elected a Vice-President of the Electoral Reform Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He died on 13th May 1988. See the table of PRSA National Officers since the PRSA's inception. PRSA Presidents to date have been:

Mr Jack Wright (NSW) 1982-85

Mr Geoffrey Goode (Victoria) 1986-93

Mr Bogey Musidlak (ACT) 1994-

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NEW ZEALAND: The PRSA publicly supported STV, the quota-preferential PR option, at the 1992 plebiscite in New Zealand on whether its single-member electorate, relative-majority electoral procedure should be replaced. Voters were asked to vote on a multi-choice (unfortunately non-preferential) question on which of four options should replace it if it was to be changed. Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP), the German party-list hybrid, which the PRSA considers a distinctly inferior approach to implementing the principle of proportional representation, was chosen. The PRSA opposes MMP as it is party-proportional only, and not proportional within individual electorates, with a majority of MPs being elected in single-member districts by first-past-the-post counting, and the large remainder indirectly from a party list.

Neither of those methods of electing MPs has the advantage of quota-preferential PR, by which all MPs have the same basis of election, each being directly elected by a quota of votes from a multi-member district. A 54% vote confirmed MMP at a 1993 national referendum. On 25th July 1997, New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, Hon. Winston Peters MP, was Guest Speaker at a PRSA meeting held in the Council Chamber of the University of Melbourne. He spoke [11] on New Zealand's experience of MMP.

In November 2011, in conjunction with the scheduled election for the New Zealand House of Representatives, a non-binding plebiscite will, as a result of the Keys National Government's dissatisfaction with New Zealand's MMP electoral system, be held on two questions. The first question will be, "Should New Zealand keep the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting system?"

The second question will be, "If New Zealand were to change to another voting system, which voting system would you choose?" and there will be four options:

· I would choose the First Past the Post system (FPP)

· I would choose the Preferential Voting system (PV)

· I would choose the Single Transferable Vote system (STV)

· I would choose the Supplementary Member system (SM).

If a majority of voters vote NO to the first question, the Government may hold a referendum at the subsequent General Election at which voters would be given a choice between the existing MMP system and whichever of the four options above (a preferential voting system will not be used in that poll) gains the highest vote in 2011
.

New Zealand Local Government: New Zealand, perhaps as a consolation prize to its citizens for going no further than its hybrid party-list system for national elections, has taken the bold step of providing a very advanced form of computerized quota-preferential counting as an option for local governments. The system used is the Meek system, which is designed to overcome some of the relatively minor and infrequently-experienced anomalies that exist with simpler systems for counting quota-preferential proportional representation elections. The Meek system, devised by Dr Brian Meek, a member of the Electoral Reform Society in Britain, is so labour-intensive that computer counting is required for its practical use. The Meek system is offered to municipalities as an alternative to the pre-existing quite crude first-past-the-post system.

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PAPUA NEW GUINEA: The 2007 general election for the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea marked the first use of the nation's Limited Preferential Voting System, where voters in the single-member electoral districts used are limited to indicating their first three preferences among the candidates standing. The previous voting systems used in PNG are mentioned at that first hyperlink. The ballot-paper, which is printed by the Papua New Guinea Electoral Commission, has three rows where the voter is required to mark, on the first row, which displays the number 1, the code or name of the candidate that is his or her first choice, on the second row, which displays the number 2, the code or name of the candidate that is his or her second choice, and finally, on the third row, which displays the number 3, the code or name of the candidate that is his or her third choice.

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CANADA: A 2005 referendum in British Columbia demonstrated 57% support for Hare-Clark type PR to replace the existing single-member electorate system still used throughout Canada. There are similar moves federally, and in other provinces, but unfortunately some of those moves are for systems that, unlike Hare-Clark, do not fully allow direct election, such as party list or mixed systems like New Zealand's Mixed-Member Proportional system.

The British Columbia referendum did not result in the implementation of PR because one to the criteria for its success was a 60% majority of votes province-wide. The other criterion - that 60% of the province's 79 electoral districts must show a majority for PR - was easily met, as over 97% (77 of the 79 electoral districts) showed such a majority. Because that referendum failed so narrowly, British Columbia held a further referendum for a change to a Hare-Clark type of PR (called BC-STV) in conjunction with the provincial elections on 12th May 2009. Fair Voting BC was the main campaigner for BC-STV, but unfortunately a reversal in support for the two options occurred, with BC-STV gaining only 38.74% of the overall vote, and showing a majority in only 7 of the 85 electoral districts. The only consolation is that BC-STV twice gained a larger percentage of the vote than the distinctly inferior "Mixed-Member Proportional" systems gained in the referendums in other provinces described below.

Canada's Mixed-Member Proportional proponents might see a message in results of the three referendums so far held to replace the single-member electorate systems used in Canada's provinces. The PRSA view is that quota-preferential PR is the way to provide for direct election by proportional representation, and that the MMP system, which is mostly single-member electorates, with an indirectly elected party list top-up, is markedly inferior.

At Prince Edward Island's failed 2005 referendum, 36% of voters favoured MMP, with the only alternative being offered being the existing single-member system.

At Ontario's failed 2007 referendum, 37% of voters favoured MMP, with the only alternative offered being the existing single-member system. A majority vote for MMP was gained in fewer that 5% of the 107 provincial electorates.

The results should discourage parliaments from holding further MMP referendums, but the more publicly-acceptable quota-preferential PR could gain the extra 3 percentage points needed to succeed in British Columbia in 2009. Its success there could revive moves to replace Canada's single-member systems, but it would be wise if the moves were for a Hare-Clark type system.

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MALTA: The Constitution of Malta, Section 56(1), now requires proportional representation, with the Single Transferable Vote, and electorates with an odd number of members between 9 and 15, and Section 66(2) requires a 2/3 vote of Malta's MPs for the deletion of that requirement.

Unlike Eire, Malta has a General Elections Act, Part III of the 13th Schedule of which provides for countback for filling casual vacancies. See the reference, under Tasmania, to Sir Gerald Strickland, who successfully introduced Hare-Clark principles to Malta.

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REPUBLIC OF IRELAND: The Constitution of the Republic of Ireland, which was adopted at a 1937 referendum, requires that both the lower house (Article 16.2) and the upper house (Article 18.5) of the parliament must be elected by proportional representation with the Single Transferable Vote, although only the lower house is directly elected by the people. Referendums in 1958 and in 1968 to replace the requirement for proportional representation with a single-member plurality electorate system, which were each introduced by the governing Fianna Fail party - but opposed by the next two largest parties, Fine Gael and Labour - each failed. The last such referendum, in 1968, showed that support for PR had increased to above 60%. Malta and Eire are the only members of the European Union in which all the Members of the European Parliament for the country are elected by STV-PR. (The only other MEPs elected by STV are those representing the Northern Ireland province of the United Kingdom).

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Catherine Spence of South Australia helped publicize the proportional representation cause in lecture tours in the United States of America. She addressed an 1893 "Proportional Representation Congress" at the Chicago World's Fair. Jack Wright, the first PRSA President, met in the USA Dr George Hallett, joint author of the 1926 classic book Proportional Representation [12]. Professor Douglas Amy, author to the book Real Choices/New Voices - The Case for Proportional Representation in the United States acknowledged in his book helpful correspondence he had with Geoffrey Goode, the second PRSA President.

The Center for Voting and Democracy, in Washington DC, has acknowledged on its website the PRSA as the originator of the Gerrymander Wheel, which convincingly demonstrates the absurdity of single-member electorates (the PRSA called a large-scale version of it the Berrymander wheel in the ACT, after an MLA opposing Hare-Clark PR during our successful campaign there). An electronic version of the wheel, called "Redistricting Roulette" appears on the Center's website. The word "gerrymander" originates from a cartoon that ridiculed the tortuous shape (said to look like a salamander) of an electoral district whose boundaries had been contrived for partisan political advantage, and that Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts (he was a signatory to the US Declaration of Independence, and later was the Vice-President when James Madison was President) had approved.

The USA's early start as a democracy has not always meant that it has been easy for it to overcome some of the entrenched impediments to democratic best practice that younger nations such as Australia have achieved. US electoral systems have not evolved as progressively as have Australia's, but some efforts to eradicate impediment have succeeded, as a 1963 Supreme Court decision on Georgia demonstrated. The replacement of the Electoral College used for Presidential elections, and the replacement of winner-take-all plurality systems with quota-preferential systems of proportional representation are yet to come.

United States Local Government: Quota-preferential proportional representation was once used for elections to more than 20 municipal councils in the United States, including New York City, but the mid-20th Century fear of communism in the USA, and the election of even one minority councillor, appears to have led to all but one municipality, the City of Cambridge, in Massachusetts - where Harvard University is located - unfortunately reverting to plurality counting. Attempts continue to extend PR for municipalities.

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References:

1. lectoral Reform Society of Great Britain and Ireland,

The Best System - An account of the first hundred years of the Electoral Reform Society, ISBN 0 903278 09 X

2. Catherine Spence, A Plea for Pure Democracy, 1861, Reprinted by the PRSA, ISBN 0 9599728 7 0

3. Quick, J & Garran, R R, The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, 1901, Part IV(7)

4. New South Wales, Proof Hansard No. 61 of 2nd June 1977, Page 6563

5. ommonwealth of Australia, Report of the Royal Commission on the Constitution, 1929, Page 267

6. Hansard: House of Representatives, 16th April 1948, Page 965, and 29th April 1948, Page 1300

7. Hansard: Senate 30th November 1983 Pages 3054-3055

8. Hansard: Senate 1st June 1988 Pages 3324-3335

9. Hansard (Proof): Senate 19th August 1993 Pages 308-309

10. Hansard: Senate 24th June 1997 Page 5026

11. Transcript and audio tape of Address by New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister, Hon Winston Peters MP, is available

from PRSAV-T Inc.

12. 'Proportional Representation', by Clarence G. Hoag A.M. (Harvard) and George H. Hallettt Jr. Ph.D. (Pennsylvania) - The Macmillan Co. New York 1926

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