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QUOTA Newsletter of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia QN2019D December 2019 www.prsa.org.au
UK House of Commons polls: 2019 At the United Kingdom’s general
election on 12 December 2019, candidates of the
Conservative Party, led by the Prime Minister,
the Rt. Hon. Boris Johnson, won a very
comfortable 56.2% absolute majority of the 650
single-member constituencies in the House of
Commons after the Conservative Party’s share of
the United Kingdom vote rose to 43.6%.
The turnout was 67.3%, compared with 68.8% in
2017. Table 1 below shows that the
Opposition Labour Party won 32.1% of the
national vote, but won a slightly lower
percentage of the seats. Candidates from other
than the two largest parties collectively won
24.3% of the vote, but only 12.6% of the seats,
so the it was candidates of the Conservative
Party that were the main beneficiaries of those
wasted votes. Over 50% of all votes were for defeated candidates, and
those votes were thus totally wasted.
* The 1.6% of votes for ‘Others’
wasted under non-transferable plurality rules
could have, under PR-STV rules, Table 1:
Percentages of House of Commons votes and
seats gained by candidates of the parties
shown At the UK’s 2017
general election, its electoral system of
single-member districts and plurality counting - which is a ‘winner-take-all’ system in each district, but which
does not even ensure that a plurality of overall
votes give an absolute majority of seats –
failed to produce a party with such a majority.
SCOTLAND: The UK’s two largest parties fared
very badly in Scotland’s 59 single-member constituencies,
where 55 of those constituencies (93.2%) were
won by the Scottish National Party (SNP), which
stood candidates in each of those 59
constituencies, but stood none outside Scotland.
Of those two parties, Labour won 18.6% of the
vote in Scotland, but gained only 1.7% of the
seats there. That was less than 10% of the seats
it would have been likely to win if a PR-STV system had applied. Of the SNP’s 55 seats, only ten
were won with an absolute majority of the vote.
The SNP’s vote in those ten ranged from 50.2% to
54.0%. Its vote in the other 45 seats it won
ranged from 35.2% to 49.6%. Unlike the case with
a PR-STV system being used, well over 50% of
voters failed to elect a candidate, as was graphically pointed out by STV-Action, which
is a UK group campaigning for PR-STV as the only
worthwhile replacement for the present system. The UK’s system of constituencies
each electing a single MP using plurality counting resulted in the SNP’s
gaining its 93.2% of the seats in Scotland with
only 45.0% of the votes, leaving the remaining
55.0% of Scotland’s voters quite unfairly
represented by only 6.8% of Scotland’s Commons
seats. That 45.0% of the vote is little
more than the 44.7% of the vote cast for
independence for Scotland at the advisory poll
in Scotland on that question in 2014. In its insistent clamour for a
second plebiscite on independence for Scotland,
the Scottish National Party misleadingly uses as
justification the 93.2% of the seats it
received, not its 45.0% of the vote. Using the single-member plurality
system, rather than the much fairer PR-STV
system, has become a significant factor in
giving Scots voters a false impression that a
majority of them would support separation of
Scotland from the United Kingdom. Even a second poll on that question
would only remove the anomaly of the massive
over-representation at Westminster that the
single-member plurality system keeps providing
to the Scottish National Party, by removing
Scotland from the UK. SA
Local Government Minister proposes a
reversion from PR-STV to ‘bottoms-up’ The PRSA’s South Australian
Branch has made a submission in response to a most unwelcome
proposal in Item 6.3 (Page 59) in a
Discussion Paper by SA’s Minister for Local
Government, Hon. Stephan Knoll
MLA, in August
2019. That proposal is to amend Section 48 of SA’s Local
Government (Elections) Act 1999 to
revert to SA’s idiosyncratic ‘bottoms-up’ counting
of votes in place of the PR-STV counting
that replaced that ‘bottoms-up’ counting in
1999. The Discussion Paper states
that the SA Electoral Commissioner favours the
change because it would enable a faster result
of the count, with less reliance on counting
software. Those reasons are quite implausible,
given the use of such software by most electoral
commissions in Australia, and the very fast
conduct of the scrutiny that such software
offers. The predecessor of SA’s
Electoral Commission had championed ‘bottoms-up’
before SA’s former multiple
plurality system was
replaced by a choice of ‘bottoms-up’ or PR-STV
in 1984, so it was possibly not pleased when
the Olsen Liberal Government - with strong
PRSA(SA) support - removed that ‘bottoms-up’
option in 1999 after its 15 years of declining
use, as Councils had steadily moved towards
using the PR-STV option over that period. OTHER STATES: As
was reported in QN2019B, the Andrews
Labor Government proposed to undo a major
reform of the Bracks Government, which was the
preceding Labor Government in Victoria, by
introducing a new Local Government Bill 2019. In November
2019, it introduced that Bill, which will
remove the option of multi-councillor wards
and make the default system single-councillor
wards, where PR-STV cannot be implemented. The Palaszczuk Labor
Government in Queensland is proposing to
introduce - before the 2024 municipal elections
- a bill that would replace the present multiple
plurality counting in Queensland’s undivided
municipalities, which are
its most numerous municipalities, with PR-STV counting
and partial preferential voting. No changes are proposed to
counting systems in New South Wales, Western
Australia, or Tasmania.
In November 2019, a voter
poll in New York City, USA, was conducted on the
question of introducing a form of transferable
voting for elections to the New York City
Council. That Council changed in 1936
to adopt proportional using the single
transferable vote (PR-STV) counting
instead of plurality counting as a result
of a plebiscite. Unfortunately, a plebiscite
in 1947 led to a reversion to plurality
counting. Between those two years,
PR-STV withstood repeal at two successive
plebiscites, but its later rejection was
attributed to McCarthyist reaction when two
Communists were elected to the 26-member Council
during the time that PR-STV applied, although
it was the Democratic Party that dominated the
Council, and led the move to discontinue
PR-STV. The minority of Republican
councillors supported the end of PR-STV, even
though it led to their losing most of their
representation. The end of the influence of the
Democratic Party’s notorious Tammany Hall
machine had coincided with that
decade of PR-STV. As a result of the 2019 voter poll, a new system, approved by over 73% of the voters, will apply to the Council’s system of entirely single-councillor wards. New York City Council’s present plurality counting will be replaced by a form of what Americans parochially call ‘ranked choice voting’. In this case it is the single transferable vote in single-councillor wards, but with indication of preferences arbitrarily limited to five, which is great improvement of the previous limit of one. It is now similar to the Papua-New Guinea system, which has an arbitrary limit of three preference indications.
National Office-bearers
for 2020-21 The
Returning Officer for the elections of PRSA
National Office-bearers,
Mr Geoffrey Goode, Secretary of the
Victoria-Tasmania Branch, has declared the
candidates below elected unopposed for the
term 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021:
National President:
Dr Jeremy Lawrence National
Vice-President:
Mr John Pyke
National
Secretary:
Assoc. Prof. Stephen Morey
National Treasurer:
Mr Bruce Errol
© 2019 Proportional Representation
Society of Australia
National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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