Categories of Electoral Systems ELECTORAL SYSTEMS: The
definition of the word election involves
a choice of a person for a political office or other position by voting, and
is based on the Latin “eligere”, meaning to pick out. The appointment of a
person to a position by a resolution, even though voting is also used, is
different from an election because an election allows the filling of a
defined number of positions from a larger number of candidates, whereas votes
for appointment by resolution are either YES or NO to each of a number of
single candidates conducted seriatim, or
to a single slate of candidates. Australia’s
first Federal Parliament in 1901 chose to make a significant change from the
British Parliament’s practice. It inaugurated its present practice when the Senate
resolved to elect its first President (see
Parliamentary Debates Page 9, on 9th May 1901) by a
preferential secret ballot from the three candidates that stood. The House of
Commons in the UK has since followed that lead for the election of its
Speaker, but in 2001, a century later, Australia’s Corporations Act 2001
still provides that company directors can be appointed by sequential resolutions, rather than being elected from
multiple candidates being compared against each other in one decision.
Alternatives to that provision are now allowed, but no election process is
made mandatory. 1. DIRECT ELECTION OF CANDIDATES versus INDIRECT ELECTION OF
CANDIDATES This
major and fundamental distinction between electoral systems can be seen by clicking here. 2. SINGLE VACANCIES versus MULTIPLE
VACANCIES: The
use of vote-counting systems to fill a single vacancy, such as the president
of an organization, is a simpler operation than their use to fill the multiple
vacancies required to be filled when the members of a representative body are
to be elected, as there are fewer possibilities, and usually fewer
candidates. Similar general approaches can be applied to both situations, but
there are obviously more variations possible with the multiple vacancy
situation. Proportional representation is only
applicable to the election of a representative body, and provides full and
accurate representation of as many voters as possible. It requires
multi-member electorates for it to operate. Single-member electorate systems,
which are necessarily and inherently winner-take-all
systems, do not soundly elect representative bodies, as they collectively
represent barely half of all voters, and leave the remaining voters totally
unrepresented. 3. TRANSFERABLE VOTE SYSTEMS versus
NON-TRANSFERABLE VOTE SYSTEMS A useful resource for details of many of
these systems is the Wikipedia page on Voting
Systems. Single Vacancies: The earliest and simplest voting took
place for single positions, such as the chairperson or presiding officer of
an organization. When there were only two candidates for such a single
position it was obvious that the candidate with most of the votes was the
candidate that should be elected. When there were more than two candidates
the assumption was made that the same "first-past-the-post"
rule should apply there also, and that was widely done as it was not a
difficult operation. Widespread
long term use of such systems has led to their replacement in countries such as
the UK and USA being resisted, although it was soon recognized that having
three or more candidates could result in the candidate with the most votes of
any candidate nevertheless not receiving most of the votes cast overall. A
working solution to that anomaly arrived in the form of the single
transferable vote in the 19th Century, which is the system now used in all
the Lower Houses of Australia's Federal and mainland State Parliaments, but
that was not adopted until 1919, when the Commonwealth Electoral Act
1918 - the present principal Act - was first used. That
system, called the Alternative Vote, Transferable Vote, or preferential system as it is usually
known in Australia, ensures that the votes for the less strongly-supported
candidates are successively transferred to the next most-preferred candidate
until a candidate gains more votes than the remaining votes combined,
whereupon that candidate is declared elected. The
Alternative Vote for a single-member electorate is easy to explain
by showing how it can fill a single vacancy such as that for a single
spokesperson to represent, on behalf of a public meeting - particularly if it was not significantly
party-political and thus perhaps likely to require a secret ballot - what
was decided at that meeting by way of successful resolutions. The meeting
might decide to do that, for convenience, by assembling in groups next to the
various candidates according to their support for them. The chairperson of
the meeting would arrange for a count of each group, and exclude the
candidate with the fewest supporters with a request that they either move to
a continuing candidate's group or to a group for those with no further
preference. Done successively in Thomas Hill's
"schoolboy election" style - but for a single vacancy
only - that would be a procedure that few at an actual meeting of reasonable,
orderly people could successfully contest the logic of, as ultimately it
would be obvious to all present that the person elected had received the vote
of an absolute majority of those voting. By contrast such an election by a first-past-the-post
system could well result in the person elected being strongly opposed by an
absolute majority of those that did not vote for him or her, in the only vote
that the system allowed. The
original bill for the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902
provided for the single transferable vote (preferential voting) for both
houses of the Australian Parliament with marking of second and later
preferences being fully optional, as is the optional preferential system
for the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, but that 1902
Bill, which was introduced by the Barton Government and passed by the House
of Representatives, was amended in the Senate to remove the transferable
element, leaving a "first-past-the-post"
non-transferable vote for the electors for both houses. The House of
Representatives passed the amended bill, which became Australia's first
federal electoral law. Multiple Vacancies: With multiple
vacancies both transferable and non-transferable vote systems exist. The
non-transferable systems can be either proportional or winner-take-all (majoritarian), as can the transferable systems. For
example the first and the second
federally-enacted vote-counting systems at Australian Senate elections were
both winner-take-all systems:
That
second system was in turn was replaced in 1948 by the present quota-preferential system of proportional representation,
which is a transferable proportional system. Since 1948, no single party has
won all the seats, Australia-wide, at a periodic Senate election, as happened
in 1910, 1917, 1925, 1934 and 1943. Both Eire and Malta use quota-preferential PR for elections
to their national parliaments. Interest in PR is growing in the USA and Canada. By
contrast the majority of countries on the continent of Europe use
proportional systems that involve non-transferable votes, usually called
party list systems. Many new introductions of electoral systems involve
the use of such systems ostensibly because of the ease of use for voters, despite
(or because of) that ease of use leading to the voters having no real control
over the actual persons being elected, as the voters are only permitted to
vote for parties. Examples of such systems are those now used in South
Africa, Sri Lanka and Iraq. New Zealand uses
a hybrid MMP system, like Germany, where one part is winner-take-all (majoritarian) and the
other part is an attempt at a proportional correction, in party terms, of the
distortions of that majoritarian component.
Fortunately the use of party list systems, which do not directly elect MPs,
would appear to be unconstitutional (see next paragraph) for electing either
MHRs or senators to Australia's Federal Parliament and – alone among the Australian
States – 4. MULTIPLE VACANCY SPECTRUM:
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION to WINNER-TAKE-ALL The Proportional Representation End: At the
proportional representation end of this spectrum are those systems, whether
transferable vote or non-transferable vote systems that provide, in electoral
districts electing five or more candidates as a group, for the election of
candidates with a significant degree of diversity able to represent,
collectively, some five-sixths of the total number of voters. This end of the
spectrum includes
The Winner-take-all
End:
At the Winner-take-all end of the
spectrum are those systems, mostly like the two different majoritorian
systems above used for Australian Senate elections from 1902-46 where,
like the multiple plurality system (1902-17), the
candidates that gained the largest single group of votes filled all the
available positions, or the multiple
majority-preferential system (1919-47), where the candidates that
gained a bare absolute majority of votes filled all the available positions.
At five separate periodic Senate elections, a single party won all available
seats Australia-wide! Intermediate Positions: Between those two ends of the spectrum of
proportionality are systems that give a degree of proportionality, but tend
to have some bias towards larger groups. Examples are quota-preferential
systems where the number of persons to be elected is fewer than five, and
non-preferential non-proportional systems that nevertheless enable some
minority representation, such as the limited vote or the cumulative vote.
The
requirement of transferable vote electoral systems relating to the marking of
preferences has extended from a requirement to mark all preferences
consecutively without error or any omission or duplication of numbers to the
complete removal of any requirement to mark any preferences other than a
unique first preference. In all quota-preferential systems a ballot-paper is
informal if it has no unique first preference marked on it.
The
Hare-Clark system of proportional representation
used in By
contrast, electoral systems in other parts of Australia and elsewhere have
been overlaid with aspects that operate against voters being the real
arbiters of whom is elected. Examples of such aspects include a degree of stage management where political parties
are allowed to decide the order of candidates on ballot-papers, and the Group Voting Tickets
used for other parliamentary PR polls in Australia. Those aspects allow
voters to be readily persuaded to adopt a specific choice of candidates from
a ticket lodged by their party of choice, and to not bother distinguishing
between the particular candidates, even though, unlike the case with party
list systems, which are indirect electoral systems, there is provision for
them to do so, although that is made harder for them than the easy method of
donkey voting or ticking a Group Voting Ticket box. Representative bodies elected from
single-member electorates weaken voter control in the sense that, unlike
proportional representation systems, nearly half the voters in each
electorate, and hence overall, are unrepresented by the final outcome. 7. DESCRIPTIONS OF A WIDE RANGE OF
VOTE-COUNTING SYSTEMS
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