Submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters: Inquiry into and report on all aspects of the conduct of the 2013 Federal Election and matters related thereto. by Dr Kevin Bonham, submitted 10 April 2014 Summary This submission concerns the system for voting in Senate elections. Following the 2013 Australian federal elections, the existing Senate system of group ticket voting is argued to be broken on account of the following problems: * Candidates being elected through methods other than genuine voter intention from very low primary votes. * Election outcomes depending on irrelevant events involving uncompetitive parties early in preference distributions. * The frequent appearance of perverse outcomes in which a party would have been more successful had it at some stage had fewer votes. * Oversized ballot papers, contributing to confusion between similarly-named parties. * Absurd preference deals and strategies, resulting in parties assigning their preferences to parties their supporters would be expected to oppose. * The greatly increased risk of close results that are then more prone to being voided as a result of mistakes by electoral authorities. This submission recommends reform of the Senate system. The main proposed reform recommended is the replacement of Group Ticket Voting with a system in which a voter can choose to: * vote above the line for one or more parties, with preferences distributed to those parties and no other; or * vote below the line with preferences to at least a prescribed minimum number of candidates and as many others as they wish to This submission does not support the following solutions: * the imposition of primary-vote threshholds for a candidate to be capable of election * the use of Hare-Clark with Robson Rotation for Senate elections * the use of a divisor-based system * the quarantining of party names such as “Liberal” or “Labor” to prevent parties with similar words in their names from running * the raising of deposits Background about this submission This submission is written to supply views and evidence in written form in advance of a hearing in Hobart at which I have been invited to appear. It mainly derives from an article entitled “Senate Reform: Change This System, But To What?” which appeared on my website on 19 October 2013 at the following URL: http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/senate-reform-change-this- system-but-to.html This submission is largely concerned with Senate reform, which I see as the most important topic arising out of the 2013 election, but I am happy to discuss other matters relating to the elections that may be of interest. Author background I am a Tasmanian political analyst with 26 years' experience as a scrutineer and analyst of preference distributions including Senate counts and other multi-member systems (especially Hare- Clark). I am also the author of a blog-form psephology, poll analysis and political comment website located at http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/ and was widely interviewed in the local and national presses in the leadup to recent elections including the 2013 Australian federal election and various state elections. I am also the former house psephologist for the website www.tasmaniantimes.com , which I left to start my own site in October 2012. My professional background is primarily in an area of science unrelated to politics and elections, but my tertiary qualifications include a major in Political Science. I am now also sometimes commissioned for work relating to electoral and polling analysis. I am writing this submission in a private capacity and am not a member of, associated with or strongly supportive of, any political party. Part 1. Comments on the existing Senate system The existing Senate system allows a voter to just vote 1 for a given party, which results in their preferences being allocated according to one or more Group Voting Tickets submitted by their party. If a voter wishes to vote in a way not specified by any Group Voting Ticket, they need to vote below the line and number at least 90% of the boxes, for their vote to be formal. This system was introduced from the 1984 Senate election. This submission argues that, while flaws in the system have been evident for many years, the 2013 Senate election in particular has demonstrated the current system to be broken and in need of replacement. It is worth stressing from the start that the widespread use of above-the-line voting does not demonstrate that it is supported by voters. Rather, it demonstrates that the only alternative way to cast a formal vote (numbering all squares below-the-line) is so onerous that voters increasingly choose above-the-line voting only as the lesser (or lazier) of two evils. This becomes more and more the case as the number of groups and candidates increases. Another thing I want to stress is that calling for the system to be reformed is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of the micro-party Senators who are elected. Rather it is a comment on their mandate or lack thereof. It is sometimes suggested that a system that chose citizens at random to serve in government for short periods would produce good outcomes. Whether or not that is true, such a system would not be democratic. A similar critique applies to this system, in that there is a high degree of effective randomness in which out of a large number of cross-preferencing micro- parties may win a seat in a given state. Submission 48 by the Family First Party in particular misses this point. Australia prides itself on being an electoral democracy. If the process that leads to a candidate being elected is not an adequately democratic process then that alone is reason to change that process, no matter how good or bad that candidate may be. The following are critical defects in the existing Senate system: 1. Snowballing from very low primaries A preference snowball occurs when a candidate starting from a low base continually outlasts other candidates, adding their preferences as this occurs, and builds up to a very high vote from a low base. The 2013 election saw the victory of Ricky Muir (AMEP, Vic) with 0.51% of the primary vote. It saw the formal election (subsequently voided because of loss of ballots) of Wayne Dropulich (Sports Party, WA) with 0.23% of the primary vote. Various other candidates polling considerably less than one percent came reasonably close to election via preference snowball in various states, and in previous elections candidates have won via preference snowball from below 2% of the primary vote (including Steven Fielding in 2004 and Robert Wood (NDP) in 1987.) Preference snowballs have also disrupted the natural order of party exclusions in other counts. It does not matter whether Senators elected in this way turn out to be excellent or disastrous as Senators. The point is that they would not have been elected under any proportional voting system not including Group Ticket Voting. If preferences were determined by direct voter choice (as in Hare-Clark) then candidates with negligible primary vote totals would almost never be elected, because preference flows in such cases are generally not strong enough to keep them in the count. If a candidate with a very low primary did somehow win by a cross-party preference snowball in such a system, it would be because voters who did not give them their number 1 vote were nonetheless unusually strongly inclined to rank them very highly. 2. Outcomes are dependent on irrelevant events The Western Australian 2013 preference distribution, especially, highlighted this problem. The makeup of the final two seats was eventually determined by the question of which out of the Australian Christians and the Shooters and Fishers party was excluded at an early stage of the count. Victory as a result of such a contest, between two parties that were neither in the race for a position themselves nor ideologically related to the parties contesting the final spots, had nothing to do with electoral merit Furthermore, other such contests at earlier stages, such as HEMP vs Animal Justice, were also resolved by small margins and could have gone the other way had certain parties made different preference decisions at seemingly arbitrary points. In normal preferential multi-candidate elections this problem very rarely occurs, firstly because all parties with low primary votes will usually be eliminated sooner or later anyway, and secondly because even if there existed a network of similar parties that strongly preferenced each other, the exclusion of any would favour any other member of the network, so roughly the same sort of candidate would still be competitive. In the Senate system the idea that preferences flow between ideologically similar parties is often violated by preference deals. Because it is so difficult to untangle the relationship between a party's votes and its outcomes, micro-parties are essentially groping around in the dark in attempting to strategise. They know that dealing with lots of other parties increases the chance of success, but ultimately which micro-party might succeed out of a number that have dealt together is a lottery. 3. Frequency of perverse outcomes In many scenarios at the 2013 Senate election, parties might have won seats had their own position at stages in the count been worse, or lost them had they been better. For instance the Liberals would have won in Tasmania had more of their voters mistaken the Liberal Democrats for them and voted Liberal Democrat instead of Liberal. The Sports Party would have won in Western Australia had the Wikileaks Party not preferenced the Sports Party at a certain point in the count and instead preferenced the Animal Justice Party.