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1 Exhausted Votes Committee Secretary Timothy McCarthy Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters Dear committee, I am a software engineer living in Melbourne. Over the last few months, I have developed a tool for analysing Senate ballot papers, using raw data made available by the AEC on their website. In this submission, I will present some of my results in the hope that they might be of use to the committee, particularly in evaluating the success of changes to the recent changes to the Electoral Act. The key results are as follows: • Of the 1,042,132 exhausted votes, 917,379 (88%) were from ballots whose first preference was for a minor party or independent candidate. • 25% of the total primary vote for minor parties exhausted, compared to just 1.22% for major parties. • Nationally, donkey votes made up only 0.15% of the vote. The Division of Lingiari had an unusually high number of donkey votes (2.32%), mainly from the remote mobile teams in that division. • Despite the changes to above-the-line voting, 290,758 ballots still marked a single '1' above the line. • 1,046,837 ballots (7.56% of formal ballots) were saved from informality by savings provi- sions in the Act. 1 Exhausted votes Changes in the Electoral Act prior to the election introduced optional preferential voting both above and below the line. These changes introduced the possibility of ballots exhausting, something that was exceedingly rare under the previous rules. At the 2016 Federal election, there were just over 1 million exhausted votes, about 7.5% of the total. These were disproportionately from ballots whose first preference was for a minor party1. Table 1: Exhausted votes by party type. Exhausted votes Primary vote Fraction of Fraction of all primary vote exhausted votes Major parties 124,754 10,188,987 1.22% 11.97% Minor parties 906,319 3,626,476 24.99% 86.97% Independents 11,060 23,437 47.19% 1.06% Total 1,042,132 13,838,900 7.53% Full data at https://tmccarthy.github.io/SenateDB/reports/exhaustedvotes/ A vote that exhausts carries less weight during the Senate count than one that does not. That this disadvantage disproportionately affects minor party voters should be of concern to 1For our purposes, a minor party is any that is not the ALP, Greens or in the Coalition 1 the committee. Consideration must be given to increasing the number of squares voters are required to fill in above the line, or reducing the number of candidates on the ballot paper. 2 Donkey votes in Lingiari A "donkey vote" is one that marks the first square with a '1', the second with a '2', and so on. In my analysis, a ballot had to number at least 4 squares in order to be considered a donkey vote. Nationally, the number of donkey votes was quite small, just 20,553 (0.15%). In the Division of Lingiari, however, the proportion of donkey votes was substantially higher than the national average. Table 2: Top 10 divisions by total donkey votes State Division Donkey votes Total formal ballots for division Fraction of total ballots NT Lingiari 1,046 45,027 2.32% NSW Fowler 321 88,417 0.36% VIC Calwell 317 90,982 0.35% NSW Blaxland 307 83,969 0.37% VIC Maribyrnong 292 94,811 0.31% VIC Gorton 283 99,397 0.28% VIC Wills 283 96,962 0.29% NSW Watson 282 87,200 0.32% QLD Leichhardt 270 92,437 0.29% NSW Werriwa 252 91,662 0.27% Full data at https://tmccarthy.github.io/SenateDB/reports/donkeyvotes/ 2 Lingiari's large number of donkey votes came largely from a few of its remote mobile polling teams. Table 3: Top 20 Lingiari polling places by donkey votes Polling place name Donkey votes Total formal ballots Fraction of total ballots Remote Mobile Team 5 136 1,345 10.11% Remote Mobile Team 2 133 1,297 10.25% Remote Mobile Team 6 74 876 8.45% Remote Mobile Team 1 69 1,324 5.21% Remote Mobile Team 7 67 1,219 5.50% Remote Mobile Team 3 67 634 10.57% Remote Mobile Team 15 56 790 7.09% Remote Mobile Team 4 53 909 5.83% Home Island 45 213 21.13% Remote Mobile Team 14 41 1,382 2.97% Alice Springs PPVC 32 4,649 0.69% Remote Mobile Team 12 27 488 5.53% Remote Mobile Team 8 22 897 2.45% Remote Mobile Team 13 19 624 3.04% Remote Mobile Team 10 16 773 2.07% Remote Mobile Team 9 15 833 1.80% Katherine PPVC 14 1,981 0.71% Remote Mobile Team 11 13 678 1.92% PROVISIONAL 1 13 177 7.34% Remote Mobile Team 17 10 459 2.18% Full data at https://tmccarthy.github.io/SenateDB/reports/donkeyvotes/ I offer no hypothesis or explanation for the prevalence of donkey votes at these polling places. I would simply say that a donkey vote represents a particular and deliberate form of voter disengagement. That donkey votes are so uncharacteristically common in these polling places should be of concern to the committee, and warrants further investigation. 3 3 Votes marking only '1' above the line Despite changes to the Electoral Act, 290,758 ballots (2.1%) were still marked with a single '1' above the line. Table 4: Votes marking only '1' above the line by state State Ballots with only 1 above the line Fraction of total ballots NSW 162,340 3.61% VIC 49,386 1.41% QLD 34,730 1.28% WA 21,080 1.54% SA 17,091 1.61% ACT 2,496 0.98% TAS 2,249 0.66% NT 1,386 1.36% Total 290,758 2.10% Full data at https://tmccarthy.github.io/SenateDB/reports/oneatl/ 4 Ballots saved by savings provisions 1,046,837 ballots, (7.56%) were saved from informality by savings provisions in sections 268A and 269 of the Electoral Act. These ballots fell into one or more of the following categories: Table 5: Savings provision use Savings provision Ballots saved by provision % Insufficient squares numbered above-the-line 913,730 6.60% Counting error above-the-line 442,132 3.19% Insufficient squares numbered below-the-line 66,895 0.48% Counting error below-the-line 44,915 0.32% Used tick for first preference 28,247 0.20% Used cross for first preference 23,415 0.17% Total saved ballots 1,046,837 7.56% Full data at https://tmccarthy.github.io/SenateDB/reports/savedballots/ Regards, Timothy McCarthy 4.
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