Group Voting Tickets

EMC Submission No. 98 Received 3 September 2019 GROUP VOTING TICKETS THE GIST OF THIS SUBMISSION The use of Group Voting Tickets is a system of virtual ballot-box-stuffing accomplished with the uninformed consent and cooperation of the vast majority of voters. It distorts election results to the extent, in many cases, of reversing the voters’ obvious voting intentions, thus awarding quick and easy success to cynical manipulators at the expense of honest campaigners who patiently build support for their policies over many years. It is one of a number of cynical practices which are working like an acid upon public confidence in democracy, and destroying public willingness to persist in the pursuit of political objectives by conscientious, honest, intelligent and non-violent participation in parliamentary processes. The system could also be described as a dismal failure of political communication – a failure so stupid and so potentially grave in its effect - of delivering unfair advantage and disadvantage - as to suggest that it must have been deliberately contrived. Whether or not that is the case, it is certainly true that GVT’s are now being exploited by a multitude of small parties under the guidance of a ‘preference whisperer’, to achieve outcomes that are more distortive and unjust than ever. SOME GENERAL OBSERVATIONS One might begin a review of what is going on with a few general observations about electoral matters as they affect the Victorian Upper House – as follows: • Upper House contests are rarely mentioned in political advertising and media comment during Victorian state election campaigns, and always play second- fiddle to Lower House contests; • Indeed, it often seems to come as a surprise to voters – some of whom hardly understand that there are two houses of Parliament – that they have to cast this peculiar second vote for candidates they have never heard of; • It is a vote which, if done conscientiously and fully below the line, would require an extent and depth of research by the voter about equal to that required to write a tertiary-level dissertation; • However, it is actually done by many voters in a state of surprise that it has to be done at all, and in a fit of impatience to get the hell out of there; • So we should not be surprised that the average voter is extremely susceptible to the offer of a quick and dirty option viz – to simply find the ATL box of the party s/he has just voted for in the Lower House and put a “1” in it; • The average voter is so susceptible to the appeal of this option, indeed, that the only-slightly-more-difficult option of numbering five boxes BTL is ignored; • Indeed, when I voted in 2018, the VEC booth worker who gave me my ballot papers failed to mention the five boxes BTL option – practically directing me to just put a “1” in a box ATL as if that was all I had to do and all I could do; • While the five boxes BTL option is printed on the ballot papers, I doubt that many people register that it even exists; • Indeed, one suspects that the five boxes BTL option is there merely to make this whole preposterous GVT arrangement look less outrageous; • Perhaps there would be more interest in it if more voters realized that when they put that “1” in a box ATL they are invisibly authorizing the filling in of all the boxes BTL according to something called a Group Voting Ticket which the the vast majority have never seen and only a minority have even heard of;1 • If voters did realise that Group Voting Tickets existed perhaps more of them would attempt to find and study them; • They would have difficulty finding them, however, on the VEC website; • And it is apparent, when GVT’s are posted on the walls of polling booths, that they are about as interesting to the average voter - and as likely to be read - as the terms and conditions for downloading some new software; • And, anyhow, a GVT is incomprehensible unless studied tediously and at length and translated into an intelligible format – that is, listing the parties and groups in the order of their preferencing. (I spent two weeks after the 2018 state election making a part-time job of doing this to the 2018 GVT’s, in order to get a better handle on what was going on. See Appendix A.) • But the vast majority of voters - who will not even bother to take the slightly harder option of numbering five boxes BTL – will obviously never do this;2 • The trouble is, voters do not realise the importance of Upper House preferences – that they are an extension of their vote which will collectively determine who gets the fifth seat and often also the fourth seat in each region, thus critically affecting the makeup of the Upper House and whether legislation not supported by the Opposition will get through or not3. THE UNFAIRNESS OF IT ALL I have to declare a partisan interest in prosecuting this argument. I have been an enthusiastic member and campaigner for the Greens for some 25 years, and consider that the GVT system has been more damaging to us than to almost any other party. This is because: • The Greens are less prepared than most in politics to recommend preferences on How-To-Vote cards which are at odds with our policies and genuine preferences – let alone to direct such preferences via a GVT; • That is to say, we give ourselves less wriggle-room to make deals with other parties over how we will rank each other on HTV’s and GVT’s; • However, failure to preference tactically and cooperatively on GVT’s - with a pretty ruthless disregard for policy agreement and/or disagreement - is liable to result in a party being handicapped right out of the Upper House race; • Because hostile GVT’s are lethal. They guarantee the direction of some 90% of the votes. They are far worse than hostile HTV’s, which have no effect unless copied on to ballot papers; • Furthermore, the GVT system mostly affects the winning of fifth and fourth seats – the ones that get won by candidates who fail to win a quota in their own right on the basis of preferences; • And this is particularly likely to be the case for ‘third party’ candidates – the biggest of the small parties – the leading challengers to the big two; • So the big two have a motive to direct preferences via GVT’s in a manner unfavourable to such ‘third party’ challengers, and favourable to micro-parties; • Worse still, the informal confederation of micro-parties convened by Mr Druery prior to the 2018 election were prepared to preference each other – more or less regardless of their internal policy differences – putting the major parties and the ‘third party’ – the parties that held the final seats the amigos were after – below themselves (with minor inconsequential exceptions4); • That is to say, they directed the alleged preferences of some 90% of voters to parties on the basis of their obscurity and their willingness to pay a fee to Mr Druery, and away from better-known parties on the basis that they were better known and had significant support; • And this is precisely what genuine voters’ preferences do not do, and the main reason that bogus GVT ‘preferences’ produce bizarre results – not merely deciding close contests, but carrying hopeless losers who have lost their deposits past recognised candidates with significant support; • Mr Druery reckons this is good for democracy because it helps “ordinary people” to get into parliament. Apparently it does not matter if they are not the same ordinary people that most ordinary people really meant to vote for; • The micro-parties may think they are breaking the “oligopoly” of the major parties. But what they are in fact doing is fristrating the voting intentions of the majority, in favour of unknown candidates with little or no support; • It is difficult, in fact, to think of anything that could be worse for democracy. A CASE IN POINT FROM 2018 I hope you will not dismiss this as mere partisan special-pleading and whinging. But what happened to the Greens in the Upper House last year stank. And I say that while fully recognizing that we made mistakes which contributed to the outcome. The Greens won 9.25% of the Upper House primary vote and won one seat. The five micro-parties rumoured to be principally involved with Druery (Animal Justice, Sustainable Australia, Transport Matters, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party and Shooters, Fishers and Farmers) won 10.69% between them and harvested 7 seats.5 So the Greens won seats at a rate of 1seat/9.25% while the five amigos got them at a rate of 1seat/1.53%. In the House which purports to be proportionally representational! The defeat of Susan Pennicuik – the Greens’ lead candidate in the Southern Metropolital Region – was particularly outrageous. She achieved a primary vote of 12.85% but was defeated by a Sustainable Australia candidate with 1.26%. So Sustainable Australia now takes the prize for peak electoral injustice achieved under the GVT system – a prize held since 2004 by Family First for its Senate defeat with 1.88% of a Greens candidate with 8.8%. Of course, some inveterate anti-Green will say, ‘Serves you right. You Greens live by preferences so you die by preferences!’ And my answer to that is that I utterly believe in preferences and preferential voting as vastly more fair than so-called ‘first past the post’ voting.6 What I do not believe in is “preferences” that have been neither seen nor comprehended by most of those who are conned into approving them, usurping the place of the genuine preferences.

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