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QUOTA
QN2024C
September 2024
www.prsa.org.au
The
UK’s 2024 general election for its
A general
election for all
650 seats in the United Kingdom’s House
of Commons was
held on 04
July 2024, some six months earlier than
the latest possible date for it. The overall
result was that the Labour Party - which
had been the Opposition for the fourteen
years since it lost power to a Coalition
of Conservative Party and Liberal
Democrats MPs at the 2010
general
election - won 411 seats (63.2%),
but with its candidates winning only
33.7% of the vote. Detailed
results appear
in Table 1 below.
Table 1:
Detailed results of 2024 UK general
election
As in all UK
House of Commons elections since they were
all first
held in
single-member constituencies with plurality counting, in 1950, there has
usually been a gross disparity between
the overall percentages of votes won and
seats won. Table 1 and
the next paragraph show why PR-STV
is needed. The leading UK
reformer,
ERS, highlights PR-STV,
but a few of its people still might accept
something else, just to replace the
plurality system.
At the 2024
general election, neither of the two main
parties, which gained 81.8% of the seats,
but only 57.4% of the vote, gained any
more than 33.8% of the vote. Reform UK
gained a large 14.3% of the vote, and the
Liberal Democrats gained 12.2%. Candidates of
those latter two parties, and nine smaller
parties, and independents, together gained
41.5% of the total vote, but only 18.2% of
the seats.
Labour won 63.2% of the seats, from
a 33.7% vote! Table 1 shows
that the Conservatives fared poorly under
the plurality system they had championed at
their then Coalition Government’s 2011 referendum on the House of Commons electoral
system. The
Conservatives might well have done better
under the proposed single transferable
vote system. See the video of the dishonest arguments
against STV put by their then leader, Rt
Hon David Cameron PC, MP.
The
surprise general election for the French
Republic’s National Assembly
Concern at the claimed move towards
right-wing candidates gaining support at the
2024 elections to the European Parliament
was discussed in QN2024B. France does not use transferable
voting, but instead has MPs elected if they
gain an absolute majority of non-transferable
votes, with a provision - if no candidate wins
such a majority - for a second round of voting
a week later, under prescribed conditions. Results for the second
round
show two main groupings of deputies. Neither
gained an absolute majority in the Assembly.
Those results revealed widespread
dissatisfaction with the electoral system
used, but there were few indications of
popular support for any particular system to
replace it. Elections
for the Upper House, the Senate, are
not held concurrently with those for the Lower
House. They are not due until September 2026.
NSW’s
using Group Voting Tickets in municipal
elections
assisted
Liberals’ nomination debacle New South Wales is the only
Australian state whose municipal elections
predominantly have ballot papers that
include the contrivance of both an above-the-line
and a below-the-line option for
voters. The above-the-line option
operates like the equivalent system that
has applied for Senate elections since
2016, which provides for a single square
in which a number one may be placed by the
voter to indicate an order of preference
for the candidates of the political party
shown against that box, in the preferred
order lodged by it. The voter may number
other squares with later preferences,
which are interpreted as later preference
votes. That system has tended to encourage
political parties to entrust the formal
nomination of their candidates to an
employee of the party organization, as
that has efficiently reduced the workload
of the candidates. Unfortunately, like putting all
one’s eggs in the one basket, a failure by
the responsible party officer can lead to
all that party’s candidates for the whole
State not being nominated by the deadline. At NSW’s 2024 municipal polls, the
State Director of the Liberal Party’s NSW
Division, who had been given the task of
lodging all the nominations for his
party’s candidates State-wide, failed to
lodge many of them by the deadline. That failure resulted in no Liberal
Party candidates being nominated for a significant number
of the State’s municipalities, with some
140 pre-selected candidates not appearing
on ballot papers, and hence not being able
to be elected. The NSW Opposition Leader
gave a press conference on the debacle.
Submission to Tasmania’s
Electoral Matters PRSA Inc. made a submission
to the recent Inquiry by Tasmania’s
Electoral Matters Committee into the
conduct of the March 2024 general election
of the House of Assembly, and the later
elections in May 2024 of
three Members of the Legislative
Council. The submission expressed PRSA
Inc’s longstanding admiration of the
features of the Assembly’s Hare-Clark
system, but it firmly opposed a declared
proposal by the Liberal Premier, Hon. Jeremy
Rockliff MHA, to introduce a bill that
would provide that an MHA who ceased
to be a member of the party he or she
as a member of when elected, would
thereupon cease to be an Member of the
House of Assembly.
Victorian
Electoral
Matters Committee’s Inquiry The Final
Report of
the above Inquiry was tabled in
Victoria’s Parliament on 30 July
2024. In two volumes, it comprised
478 pages. The PRSA had made a
written submission and a
presentation of
its concerns about poor aspects of
the Legislative Council electoral
system, particularly its retention
of the now discredited contrivance
of an above-the-line
option on ballot papers and the
associated Group Voting Tickets, to the Committee at a
hearing on 11 August 2023. Recommendation
17, at Section 6.2 in the 116-page Volume
1 of the
Committee’s Report, included
advice for “the Government to
legislate to eliminate Group
Voting Tickets”, as well as
introducing Senate-style
provisions, but keeping the
present “below-the-line”
arrangements. Recommendation
19, at Section 6.3 of Volume 1, was,
“That the Parliament refer an
inquiry into the possible reform
of the Upper House electoral
system and their impacts to the
Electoral Matters Committee.” Recommendation
20, at Section 6.4 of Volume 1, was
- despite Robson Rotation’s being a
recommendation in the second-last
paragraph of Section
11 of
the Final Report of Labor’s 2002
Constitution Commission - “That
Robson Rotation not be adopted for ballot
papers in Victoria.” Volume 1 ended
with a Minority Report by the
Opposition members of the Committee
giving, among other things, its
strong views against Group Voting
Tickets, and one by David Ettershank
MLC, of the Legalise Cannabis
Victoria Party, whose report was the
sole one in favour of retaining
GVTs. Victoria’s
Parliamentary
Committees
Act 2003
requires the Government to respond
to proposals in the Final Report
within six months of its being
tabled in the Parliament, i.e. a
response by 31 January 2025. Death
of former Victorian MLC, Noel
Pullen
Noel Pullen, the last
Member ever elected to Victoria’s Legislative Council for
its former Higinbotham Province,
died on 23 August 2024. Mr Pullen’s election to the Legislative Council in November 2002, by a narrow margin in what had always previously been a safe Coalition seat, was a surprise to most observers, and it especially disappointed the new Liberal candidate, Michael Heffernan, who had resigned his seat on Bayside City Council in anticipation of soon becoming a Member of the Legislative Council (MLC).
Noel’s election gave the
re-elected Labor Government the
numbers of supportive MLCs it needed
to alter Victoria‘s Constitution Act 1975 to introduce
proportional representation with the
single transferable vote (PR-STV)
for the Legislative Council. In
voting on 27th March 2003 for this
reform, which would also change
MLCs’ terms to 4 years from their
previous 8 years, Noel, along with
other MLCs elected in November 2002,
voted himself out of serving for a
parliamentary term that would
otherwise have lasted until 2010. Some
MLCs raised concerns about that, but
Noel never wavered in his commitment
to vote for the bill as presented
because that was what the Bracks
Labor Government had put to the
voters before the election, and it
was therefore part of the
Government’s policy. Noel
was not subsequently pre-selected
for the ALP in the new Legislative
Council, and he left the Parliament
in 2006 after a single 4-year term.
A
more detailed account of PRSA’s
discussions with Noel, and the
background to the introduction of
PR-STV to the Victorian Parliament,
which was the last bicameral
parliament in Australia to adopt
PR-STV, is at www.prsa.org.au/qn/2003a.html#section2.
Northern Territory’s
2024 elections After
the elections held on 24 August
2024, once again the Northern
Territory Assembly does not reflect
the way people voted. With
just under 49% of the vote, the
Country Liberal Party has won 68% of
the seats (17 MLAs); while Labor,
with just under 29% of the vote, has
won 16% of the seats (just 4 MLAs).
The
Greens Party won 8% and just managed
to win one seat by a very small
margin; Greens Party voters were
very nearly left completely
unrepresented in the Assembly. All
the Labor seats are in rural areas,
so in urban Darwin and Palmerston
there is now no Labor representation
at all. One noticeable feature of
these elections was the very low
turnout in three of these Labor-held
seats, as low as 42% in the Gwoja
electorate (Western Desert and
Warlpiri lands). That
was possibly the lowest turnout
anywhere in Australia for a general
election since ‘compulsory voting’
was enacted in the 1920s. Even in
Darwin, the turnout was low, with
most districts under 80%. The
reason for the distortion of the
voters’ will is the single-member
district system, combined with very
small populations in each of the
seats, leading to significantly
distorted election results. For
many years now, Territory Assembly
elections have been very bouncy and
unpredictable, and have not properly
reflected the genuine interests of
the community. Table 2 below shows
the extent of the distortion, but it
also shows how PR-STV would
have led to a much fairer situation.
See the data spreadsheet
for Table 2.
Table
2: 2024 Northern Territory
election result – comparing
single-member districts with
PR-STV
For this
PR-STV analysis, the PRSA Inc. Secretary
divided the Territory into five
districts each electing five members.
While a much fairer overall result is
the obvious benefit of PR-STV, the
system has two other equally important
benefits. The first is that every
district would be represented by several
MLAs, from a range of parties. Secondly,
each district would have a genuine
competition, with no more ‘safe seats’
where campaigning is unnecessary, and
where voters often get taken for
granted. As Table
3 below shows, if PR-STV had applied at
the 2020 election, the Labor Government
would have been returned without a
majority, and it would have needed to
work with Territory Alliance and
Independent MPs. See data spreadsheet
for Table 3.
Table 3: 2020 Northern
Territory election result – comparing
single-member districts with PR-STV
Lower
House:
The world’s largest election so far,
held on seven days between 19 April and
01 June 2024, was for the 543 members
of India’s House of the People (Lok
Sabha), the Lower House of its
bicameral Parliament. The result was
declared on 04 June 2024. Although
there were initial expectations that the
Hindu nationalist party of the Prime
Minister, Narendra Modi, would gain a
substantial majority of the seats in the
Lower House, the outcome was that it
gained a much smaller percentage of the
seats than that. That left Mr Modi
heading a National Democratic
Alliance coalition
government, as Wikipedia reports here.
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