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Proportional Representation
Society of Australia Inc. |
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Tel +61429176725 | ||
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Why Effective Voting
requires proportional representation Why do we want Representation?
Making decisions for
large groups is very difficult. Should all the
taxpayers in the country collectively decide how
the money is to be spent? Could they collectively
decide? Should all members of the PR Society
collectively decide that the Secretary's most
recent postal expenses be reimbursed? Would they
want to? Or would the members prefer to delegate
this responsibility to their representatives? Making decisions in small
groups is easier. Most people prefer to delegate
some decisions. Why do we want Proportional Representation?
There are many ways
representatives can be chosen: members of rich and
powerful families, military leaders, etc. The
underlying principle of democracy is
that decisions that affect the people should
largely accord with the will of the people. One
way to improve the prospects of that is for
representatives to be elected. The basis
of representative democracy is that the collective
and varied views of the elected representatives
reflect the collective and varied views of the
people that elect them. Proportional
Representation (PR) is simply a more accurate
statement of that ideal: the percentage of
representatives that hold a particular view should
correspond closely to the percentage of the people
that hold that view. Note that if there is only a
single representative that is impossible. Proportional
Representation must be based on a corporate
body of representatives. How can we achieve it?
Many systems that look
democratic on the surface do not result in fair
representation. See “Categories of
Electoral Systems”. The video by
John Cleese viewable here
gives a very watchable account of why we should
achieve PR. Voting is not
sufficient.
The late, ruthless Iraqi
dictator, Saddam Hussein, won an overwhelming
percentage of the votes in an election.
Was this a triumph of democracy? Was Italy’s 1923
Acerbo Law
much better? As well as voting we need an
environment free of harassment, a reasonable range
of candidates with access to the media, and
universal adult suffrage. In the 1995 Queensland
State election the Australian Labor Party won government
though it received significantly fewer votes than
the Coalition. As well as voting, we need
a good electoral system. Marking X
is not enough – a transferable vote is essential
for voters to be effective and in control.
If voters only indicate
their first preference – which is all they are
allowed to do in a first-past-the-post
system –
there is simply not enough information for a good
selection of representatives. The overall votes
may be split across several candidates
with similar views, leading to all those
candidates losing while another single candidate
with opposing views wins with fewer votes in
total. Votes for candidates that are not
successful must be wasted since there is
no indication of the voter's second or subsequent
preferences. Systems that lead to votes being
wasted encourage insincere voting:
rather than wasting a vote on the genuine first
preference, which might be unlikely to be elected,
the vote is cast for a lower preference that has a
greater chance of getting elected. Often this
results in people voting for the "lesser of two
evils", and makes it very difficult for smaller
parties to gain ground. Systems based on marking multiple X's
do not solve the problem, and sometimes make
things even worse. Proportional
Representation should rely on the order of
preferences being specified. There are two forms of
Proportional Representation corresponding to two
ways in which ballots are marked. One form is the
"party list"
form – which has been successfully opposed by the
Proportional Representation Society in the four instances
where it has so far been introduced in Australia –
where voters vote for a party and it is assumed
that the voters' preferences are identical to the
preferences of the party, but voters have no
facility, or an inadequate facility, to determine
which individual candidates will be elected, as
the system retains that as the choice of the party
organization, and not the voter. The other, much better,
form of PR is the Single
Transferable Vote (PR-STV) or
quota-preferential form, which is the form of PR
advocated by the Proportional Representation
Society of Australia, allowing voters to indicate,
and satisfactorily implement, their preferences
for individual candidates explicitly. That allows
voters to fine tune a party’s composition, and
also to allow their ballots to be transferred to
other candidates outside their preferred party if
their preferred candidates receive too few votes
to be elected, rather than having their vote
wasted, as occurs with all party list systems. In
contrast, with PR-STV, if a candidate receives
more than a quota of votes (a surplus),
but not enough to elect another candidate of that
party, the vote is not wasted, but is transferred
to the next available candidate preferred by the
voter. Unlike the party list form of PR, PR-STV
conforms with the
letter and spirit of the direct election
provisions in the Commonwealth and Western
Australian constitutions. Single-member
electorates are not sufficient.
If each electorate
returned a single member, and there was an even
distribution of voters, a group with the support
of 50.5% of voters would win 100% of the seats,
and 49.5% of the votes would be wasted. The
collective views of the representatives would
clearly not reflect the views of the people. With
a different distribution of voters (or
electoral boundaries) the group with 49.5%
of the votes can win 99% of the seats! As an
extreme example, assume there are 100 electorates,
each with 10,000 voters. One electorate has only
voters from the 50.5% group,
the other 99 electorates all have 5,001 "49.5%"
voters and 4,999 "50.5%" voters. Deliberate
adjusting of the size and shape of electorates to
achieve a desired outcome is called gerrymandering.
Unfair results can also occur quite by chance, as
happened in Queensland in 1995. Where a single position
is to be filled, however, a transferable vote
sytem ensures that the decision on
who fills it is made by an absolute majority of
those voting rather than by the largest block of votes for a
single candidate as in a plurality
(first-past-the-post) system, which
may be well below 50%. The system of exclusion of
the lowest ranking candidate at successive stages
of the count that is involved eventually results
in only two candidates remaining in the count, one
of whom must have more votes than the other,
unless there is a tie. A tie is usually resolved
by lot. The Single
Transferable Vote form of PR (PR-STV)
The Single
Transferable Vote (PR-STV) system
(quota-preferential PR) is a method of counting
votes designed to result in proportional
representation.
In a
single-member system (which will not
result in PR), a candidate would need
greater than 100/2 = 50% of the votes.
Enhancements of proportional representationThe Australian Capital
Territory has adopted three enhancements that
complement its PR-STV vote counting system. The
first two have been used successfully for many
years in Tasmania, where the system is known as Hare-Clark.
Rotation of ballot papers
Instead of all ballot
papers being the same, different ballot papers
have the candidates' names and affiliations listed in
different orders in equal
quantities. Each candidate will appear near the
top of some ballot papers and near the bottom of
others. This virtually eliminates the effect of
the "donkey vote". Filling casual vacancies
Casual vacancies are
filled by re-counting the
ballots that were used to elect the
vacating candidate. This preserves the wishes of
the voters, and avoids costly by-elections and
divisive undemocratic party appointments. Entrenchment
The major electoral
provisions of the ACT have been entrenched
by requiring a referendum or 2/3 majority in
parliament. A government can no longer tinker with
the electoral system to further its own dubious
motives. Advantages of
proportional representation
There are a great number
of advantages of proportional representation. Here
we list a few of them. There are no safe seats
With single-member
electorates, safe
seats are common. Political parties
generally put most of their efforts into trying to
please the minority of voters that are in marginal
seats. With multi-member electoral districts,
every seat is marginal, and the parties must take
more interest in the views of all voters in the
district. Voters also tend to take more interest
in politics if their vote is more likely to have
an effect, and actually contribute to actually
keeping the status quo, or changing
something, according to the voter's views. Voters have more choice
Major parties endorse
several candidates for each multi-member
electorate. Voters can choose between parties and
between different candidates from within the same
party. This contrasts with single-member
electorates (and party list PR) where the parties
and the factions within parties have much more
control over whom is elected, and the voters have
correspondingly less. The elected body is far
more representative
This is a good thing for
democracy, whether the elected body is the
parliament of a large country, or the executive of
a small organization. Unless proportional
representation applies, there is a mismatch
between the level of voters' support for a
particular school of thought and the
representation it receives. * * * * * * * |
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