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QUOTA
QN2021A March 2021 www.prsa.org.au
A comparison
between the 2016 and The U.S.
Presidential Electors that pledged to vote
for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. - as the
President of the Senate, Michael Pence,
dutifully proclaimed, when he declared him,
at the Senate sitting on 06 January 2021, to
be duly elected as President of the United
States - gained an absolute majority of the
popular votes. The details
in Table 1 below show that outcome, but it
was not an outcome achieved by any of the
more than twelve candidates for whom such
votes were cast in 2016. It
could have been then, if transferable votes
had been available to those casting the
popular votes but, under the present
provisions of the U.S. Constitution - where
the power to make that change lies, as it
always has, with each individual State, as
its legislature sees fit - that change can
be made only by each State, unless that
Constitution was changed to require such
votes.
Table 1: The 2020 popular
vote for Presidential Electors versus the
number of them actually elected
PR-STV would have given
a fairer result for the Western
Australian Legislative Assembly
polls The Western Australian general
election held on 13 March 2021 was won
resoundingly by Labor as its candidates for
the Legislative Assembly received 59.9% of
the votes, and 89.8% of the seats there. As at 31 March 2021, the
results for the Legislative Council had not
been finalized, but they should soon appear
on the ABC website, with full details
here. The Assembly consists of 59
single-member districts elected by the
single transferable vote, with a formal
ballot requiring the marking of all
preferences. With nearly 60% of the first
preference votes and 69.7% of the two-party
preferred vote, Labor’s massive majority
left the former Opposition Liberals reduced
to just two seats – both on the cross-bench. In contrast, the National
Party, with far fewer first preference votes
cast for its candidates than were cast for
Liberal candidates, became - quite
unprecedentedly - the official Opposition. Table 1 below
shows the major mismatch between the
percentages of votes cast for candidates of
the various parties and the percentages of
MLAs of those parties that were elected.
Table 1: Percentages of WA
votes cast versus MLAs elected National Party candidates won
less than one fifth of the votes for Liberal
candidates, but twice as many seats, and
became the official Opposition. The Greens
(with no MLAs) and Liberals (with two) each
won more votes than the Nationals, but fewer
seats. A number of interesting
features of this election in the Lower House
set out below are worth noting. More
than 50% of the votes were cast early,
either by post or in most cases at
pre-polls. Whereas in the past such votes
have clearly favoured the Liberal and the
National Parties, in this election the
opposite was true: Labor’s first preference
vote increased by 1.5% once all those early
votes were included. Only
in the North West
Central District
did that not happen, and a Labor lead in the
polling booths get reversed after the
counting of votes cast before election day,
but in the Warren-Blackwood
District
the opposite was true. Most of the present
area of that rural seat had never had a
Labor MLA, but the Nationals’ election-night
lead changed to a narrow Labor win on
counting pre-poll and postal votes. The
election shows that the shift to ‘micro- or
minor’ parties can be stopped. Only 7.9% in
the Lower House and 12.1% in the Upper House
chose non-major parties - those other than
Labor, Liberal, National or Green. That is
much lower than in other recent elections,
such as in Victoria in 2018, where 20.6%
chose non-major parties in its Upper House.
In WA’s Legislative Council,
the representation in party terms was a lot
less skewed, as the preliminary results in
Table 2 below show. Labor’s percentage of first
preference votes in the Upper House exceeds
that in the Lower House, which is again
unusual.
Table 2: Likely WA % votes
cast versus MLCs elected The tentative result above
shows two clear points: (1) In
PR-STV
systems, if a party gets a large majority of
votes, it gets a corresponding large
majority of the seats. Labor’s 60.3% of the
vote translated into 61.1% of the seats. (2) The major Opposition party
in the Legislative Council, the Liberals, is
in the clear second place there, despite
gaining a lower percentage of votes than it
did in the Legislative Assembly. Three features of the electoral
system for the WA Legislative Council are
far from ideal. Firstly the 6 Regions are
extremely malapportioned. The Region largest in area (Mining and Pastoral) is some
3,000 times larger than the smallest
(Southern Metropolitan). M&P has about a
quarter the electors of SM, but each of them
elects 6 MLCs. The electors per square km in
SM is over 11,000 that of M&P. Section
16G of WA’s Electoral
Act
1907 prevents substantial malapportionment of WA Lower House Districts,
so a similarly entrenched structure, such as 77 MLAs in
all, with 35 MLCs from seven 5-member
Regions - and each Region congruent with 11
contiguous Assembly Districts - would make
unlawful such malapportionment of WA’s
Regions. Victoria similarly entrenched a
structure where each of its eight 5-member
Regions is congruent with groups of 11
contiguous Districts of its 88-member
Assembly. That also has the advantage that,
because their boundaries are linked, every
redistribution of Lower House Districts
provides an automatic redistribution of the
Upper House Regions. Secondly,
with an even number of MLCs in each Region,
a majority of the votes there need not
translate to a majority of seats. That is
because a majority of seats in a six-seat
Region requires four quotas - that is 57.2%
support. It is thus possible for a party
with overall majority support to receive
between 50.1% and 57.2% support in five out
of six Regions, but only win three out of
six MLCs in each of those Regions, while a
minority party wins the other three in each
of those Regions. If that minority party then
wins just over 57.2% of the vote in the
sixth Region, that minority party could
control the Legislative Council despite the
majority party receiving as much as 54.5%
support.
An
odd number of MLCs per Region would
therefore be much fairer and more
democratic. A third very unfortunate
feature is the Group Voting Tickets that still apply in elections
for Western Australia’s Legislative Council.
Much concern has been expressed that they
let a Daylight Saving Party candidate, Mr
Wilson Tucker - who is not currently living
in Australia – gain election, with 98 first preference votes, ahead of the National Party,
whose leading candidate gained 5,032 first
preference votes. That is because the Group
Voting Tickets of almost all the smaller
parties directed a preference to Mr Tucker;
he thus stayed in the count as, one-by-one,
candidates from the smaller parties were
excluded. Once Mr Tucker moved ahead of
minor party candidates in the count, the
accumulating transferred preference votes of
those candidates gradually moved him towards
a quota.Once ahead of the Greens, and
Shooters and Fishers, Mr Tucker gained their
preferences and was elected. A version of the count, based only on Group Voting
Tickets, that is on the ABC website shows
how the Daylight Saving Party, although very
low in first preference votes, slowly moved
up the count as candidates were elected and
their surpluses distributed, and other
candidates were excluded. There would be no problem in Mr
Tucker’s being elected if it was the
explicit intention of every voter for every
one of those micro-parties to preference
him; there is no reason in principle why a
candidate with a very
low first preference vote shouldn’t be elected, as all
these MLCs are elected by PR-STV, which is a system of
transferable voting. It is
most unlikely that the voters for all those
micro-parties and independents intentionally
preferenced Mr Tucker. Instead their
preferences were set by back-room deals and
‘preference whispering’. Nevertheless, as Table 3 shows
below, a full quarter of the MLCs elected
received fewer first preference votes than
Mr Tucker. The only difference from his case
was that their final total votes were
transferred as surplus votes from successful
Labor candidates, and in one case, from a
Nationals candidate. The WA Constitution entrenches direct election of MPs, so it should make no
difference from whence votes came.
Table 3: The 10 MLCs with
below 100 first preference votes It is to be hoped that the
re-elected McGowan Government will amend
WA’s Electoral Act to discontinue Group Voting Tickets and - by removing that
facilitation of zombie voting - correctly
give effect to the will of voters.
Of Australia’s other six
legislative chambers elected by PR-STV, only
Victoria’s Legislative Council, which was
the last of them to adopt PR-STV, has a GVT
option. The Greens won only one seat in
the WA election, which was by a very narrow
margin in the South Metropolitan Region. The
Greens’ win was only possible because enough
people voted below-the-line,
and therefore marked preferences as they
chose, which averted a result that would
otherwise have been five Labor and one
Liberal MLC in that Region if all the
ballots had been marked above-the-line.
Further consideration of the 2020 NZ polls In New Zealand’s Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system, voters mark two
ballots – on one a single mark for a direct, but inherently distorted, plurality election for one constituency MP
from each of 72 single-member districts - and
on the other a single mark for the indirect
election of 48 MPs from the nation-wide party
lists to compensate for that overall
distortion in a party sense. A much sounder approach would be
direct election of all MPs by a
nationally-uniform PR-STV process. Wikipedia
points out that the Labour Party “achieved
the highest percentage of the party list
vote (50.0%) since MMP began in NZ,
winning a plurality of the party vote in
71 of the 72 constituencies (Epsom was
the sole exception).” If voters had cast the
constituency vote exactly the same as their
party vote, and the election had used a
plurality (first past the post) count, Labour
would have won 71 of New Zealand’s 72
electorates (98.6%) with just over 50% support
nationally. Under the ‘constituency vote’,
the Nationals won 23 seats, though not Epsom,
because there was a big difference between the
votes for National in the ‘party vote’
compared with the ‘constituency vote’. In Pakuranga, for
example, the direct ‘constituency vote’
there gave the sitting member, National’s
Simeon Brown, a comfortable absolute
majority of 57.86% but, if the indirect
‘party vote’ in that constituency had
decided the matter, it would have instead
elected Labour’s Nerissa Henry by a
plurality of 41.8%, only 3.49 percentage
points above the National’s runner-up. On election night, Labour was
shown as winning 43 of the single-member
districts, the ‘so-called electorate vote, but
as Wikipedia says, “… three electorates flipped to
Labour following the inclusion of special
ballots, namely Northland, Whangārei and Maungakiekie.”. The
use of that term ‘flipped’ is misleading as it
might imply that the ‘special ballots’ are not
as ‘authentic’ as those cast on the day,
whereas all valid ballots are equal in value. A major PRSA criticism of MMP is
that candidates are not directly
elected.
The PRSA has studied the list of Labour’s
candidates for the 2020 election. Of the 65
elected Labour members, 46 were directly
elected from the constituencies, and 19 were
indirectly elected from the party list. Of those 19, ten were also
candidates in the constituencies, but were
defeated there under plurality counting, and
were only elected by being on the party list.
Of the nine elected MPs that were on the party
list only, and not also standing in a
constituency, two were former constituency
MPs. Sixty-two of the new Labour MPs
were on the party list, with only three
elected MPs being on the ballot in their
constituency, but not on the party list. Those
were as follows: (a) Greg O’Connor, MP Ōhāriu –
this is a safe Labour seat with a 2020
majority of 9,991, (b) Tangi Utiekere, MP for Palmerston North,
also a safe Labour seat with a 2020 majority
of 10,442, and (c) Anna Lorck, MP for Tukituki, a
very marginal 2020 gain, with a majority of
772. Only two defeated Labour
candidates in constituencies were not listed
on the party list: ·
Baljit
Kaur
(Port Waikato),
defeated by National MP Andrew Bayly, majority
4,313, and ·
Lorayne
Ferguson
(Whangaparāoa),
defeated by National MP Mark Mitchell,
majority 7,823. Note that Labour won more votes
than the Nationals in the ‘constituency vote’
in each of those districts. Many of the members that gained
constituencies for Labour were already MPs via
the party list. For example Kieran McAnulty,
who won Wairarapa (rural,
south-east corner of the North Island)
was the defeated Labour candidate in both 2014
and 2017, but was elected as a party list
member in 2017 - and had a local electorate
office. In the election night commentary
on NZ television, the point was made that most
voters don’t distinguish between party list
members that are local to their area, and the
elected single-district member, so in effect
he has been an MP for the area since 2017. The
Tasmanian
Speaker’s loss of Liberal Party
preselection helps prompt early
general election
The Hon.
Susanne Hickey MHA has been Speaker of
Tasmania’s House of Assembly since May 2018.
She was the Lord Mayor of Hobart from 2014
to 2018, and was first elected - as one of
the two Liberals elected for the Assembly
division of Clark (formerly Denison) - at
the 2018 general election. When the
newly-elected House first met, on 01 May
2018, with the Clerk presiding, she
surprised her Liberal colleagues by
accepting
nomination by the
Leader of the Opposition - and seconding by
the Leader of the Greens Party - as a
candidate for the position of Speaker. She
did that after the Liberal Party’s
candidate, Rene Hidding MLA - who had been a
former Liberal Minister, and a Leader of the
Opposition - had been nominated, as is
customary, by the Premier and seconded by
the Deputy Premier. The Clerk
declared that the result of the House’s
secret ballot for that position was that Ms
Hickey was elected. She was then led to the
Speaker’s chair. To be elected by a majority
of the House’s 25 MHAs, she would have had
to receive 13 votes. As she had unconventionally
accepted nomination by the Opposition and
the Greens Party, which together had only 12
votes, all of which were presumably for her
- and the 12 Liberal MHAs other than her
were likely to have voted for Mr Hidding -
it would seem she must have gained the
necessary 13th vote from another Liberal
MHA, who might have been herself. Ms Hickey
usually backed the Liberal Government in a
tightly-balanced House where her casting
vote was nearly always used, but she did
displease it occasionally by instead voting
with the Opposition, thus defeating some
items of Government business. On 21 March
2021, the Premier, the Hon. Peter Gutwein
MHA, told Ms Hickey that she would not
receive preselection as a Liberal Party
candidate for the election due before the
middle of 2022. She responded by stating she
would stand in Clark as an Independent. If
elected, she would be Tasmania’s first
female Independent candidate to be elected
to the House of Assembly at a general
election. The Premier
later said that a general election for the
Assembly would be held on 01 May 2021, which
was unconventional, as periodic Legislative
Council elections must, by law, be held in
May 2021 for the divisions
of Derwent, Mersey, and Windermere, and 01
May 2021 was the date gazetted before the
Assembly election was called. Conventionally,
Tasmania’s Assembly general elections are
held on a different date from those for the
Upper House, which has long had the value of
helping campaigners, and voters, focus on
each house separately. The State of
Tasmania has never had such conjoint polls
before. Several Independent MLCs claim there
are increasing moves to weaken their
customary role as fair-minded reviewers of
uncompromising and entrenched party
attitudes shown in the more
democratically-elected Assembly. Nominations
for the Assembly close on 07 April 2021, but
those
for
the Legislative Council
closed on 31 March 2021, when the
Independent MLC for Mersey Division since
2009, Hon.
Michael
Gaffney MLC, was the
only candidate for that division. In the
other two divisions, the sitting
MLC is a candidate,
and one Labor and one Liberal man are
standing. In Derwent, those men are joined
by an Animal Justice Party man, and in
Windermere the men are joined by three
Independents, only one of whom is a woman.
Of the 15 sitting
MLCs, 9 are women
(60%), as are 14 of the 25 sitting
MHAs (56%). Robson
Rotation makes voters the main deciders of
those percentages.
Table 4: Candidates for Clark
Division as at 31 March 2021 As Table 4
above shows, Labor can have, at that May
2021 election, no more than one outgoing
Clark MHA of their party as a candidate in
the Clark division, as Ms Hickey would be an
Independent, and the only outgoing Labor MHA
would be Eloise Haddad, unless some other
outgoing Clark MHA is endorsed by the party. Ms Haddad was
one of two Labor MHAs elected in Clark in
2018. The other one, Scott Bacon, resigned
and was replaced, in a countback in September
2019, by a former
Labor MHA, Madeleine Ogilvie, who was a
Labor MHA for Denison from 2010 to 2014. She failed to
be re-elected as a Labor candidate at the
2018 general election, but chose to sit as
an Independent after her election at that countback. Ms Ogilvie
has since joined the Liberal Party. It has
endorsed her as one of its five candidates
for Clark at the 2021 election, so it will
now be the only party to have two outgoing
Clark MHAs among its five candidates for
Clark. The other
candidates to date are listed in Table 4
above, and include all five sitting MHAs,
but any later candidates, for all five
Assembly divisions, and the three
Legislative Council divisions, should be
accessible from Dr Kevin Bonham’s
informative and regularly updated web
page. All those
five MHAs happen to be women. Four Clark
candidates are municipal councillors* in Clark. In Clark, all
parties in the dissolved Assembly now each
endorse only one MHA that was in that party
throughout the term. Two outgoing MHAs have
left the party that endorsed them at the
previous general election. The Clark outcome
could be surprising.
Mrs
Nancye Yeates, the
first National Secretary of the Proportional
Representation Society of Australia, held that
position from 1982 to 1983, and died,
aged 91, on 04 January 2021. She became the
President of the PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania
Branch in 1992. While in New Zealand in 1997,
Nancye met New Zealand’s then
Deputy Prime Minister - who
has since become the Rt. Hon.
Winston Peters - and
invited him, if he was visiting Australia,
to address a meeting of the PRSA. She was very pleased when he
accepted that. His much-appreciated address
to the Society took
place at the University of Melbourne, in
1997. She and her husband later moved to
live in north-eastern Tasmania, which is
where she died.
Hare-Clark’s
faithful reflection of Tasmanian voters'
growing support for female candidates
Tasmania’s
Hare-Clark system, where parties usually
nominate as many candidates as there are seats
in a division (currently five), has enabled a
more equal balance of genders in the Assembly
than in the single-member divisions of the
Legislative Council. Women have been able to stand
for Tasmania’s Parliament since
1922, but they have
increasingly been elected in larger numbers to
form a larger percentage of the House of
Assembly, as shown in Table 5 below, without
any
stage management
applying, or being possible, with Hare-Clark.
Table
5: Years the only 33 female MHAs ever were
first elected A report in QN2021B
giving results of Tasmania’s general election
in May 2021 may well enable a few extra names
to be added to the above table.
Stability in Eire's
Dail, but not Israel's Knesset
Eire’s Dail: Since the last report of the
outcome of elections to the above chambers in
QN2020B, there
has been stability in Eire, where the Dail,
the Lower House, is directly elected using a
PR-STV electoral system in 39 multi-member
constituencies where the maximum district
magnitude is five. A coalition of Fianna
Fail and Fine Gael, which have for most of
Eire’s history taken turns in governing
alone, and the relatively new Greens Party,
now governs Eire, with the Sinn Fein Party -
which was the party that gained the highest
percentage of first preference votes -
forming the Opposition. Israel’s Knesset: That has not been the
outcome for Israel’s unicameral Knesset,
whose 120 members are elected indirectly
by a party list system from a single
nation-wide electoral district. That far
less satisfactory system has led to the
fourth national election in two years
giving the largest single party, Likud,
led by the outgoing Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, only 30% of the seats. The President has called on him to form a Government, but the splintering of political views occasioned by there being such a large district magnitude, of 120, with no transferable ballots, makes his task seem very difficult. If Israel is to avoid such over-frequent elections, it could well consider the PR-STVsystem used by Eire. Former PRSA
National President awarded OAM Geoffrey
Goode was the immediate
successor of the late Jack
Wright, who was the first PRSA
National President, and held
that position from 1986 to 1993.
He is currently the Secretary of
the PRSA’s Victoria-Tasmania
Branch. He was awarded the Medal
of the Order of Australia in the
2021 Australia Day Honours List
for “service to the community as
an advocate for electoral
reform”. He said the award
was a recognition of PR-STV’s significance to Australian
democracy, and that he was
pleased with the mention in
his citation
of the Proportional
Representation Society of
Australia. The PRSA was also cited when a PRSA member since 1982, Ms
Alison Harcourt AO, was made
an Officer of the Order of
Australia, for “distinguished
service to mathematics and
computer science” in the 2019
Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
© 2021
Proportional Representation Society of Australia National President: Dr Jeremy
Lawrence npres@prsa.org.au
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