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BELOW-THE-LINE VOTES AT THE 2006 VICTORIAN STATE ELECTION q BELOW-THE-LINE VOTES AT THE 2006 VICTORIAN STATE ELECTION Introduction A new voting system was introduced for Victoria’s Legislative Council (Upper House) at the 2006 State election. The system changed from preferential voting for a single vacancy (the same system as for the Lower House) to a Senate-style form of proportional representation. Instead of numbering all the squares on a small ballot paper, voters now had a choice of either voting “1” above the line across the ballot paper for a party or group, or of voting below the line for individual candidates. Unlike Senate elections, in which electors who vote below the line are instructed to number every square, Victorian Legislative Council elections are optional preferential – electors only have to vote “1” to “5” for their vote to be counted. There was considerable interest in the operation of the new system. The media, parties and political scientists studied how voters’ preferences translated into the seats won by the various parties. The VEC examined informal ballot papers, measuring the incidence of types of informal voting and trying to explain them. It appears that the new Upper House system did affect the informal vote. (See the VEC’s Report to Parliament on the 2006 Victorian State election, pages 90-96) Only some 5% of the voters chose to vote below the line. However, these votes were potentially very important for the result of the election. Preference flows for above the line votes are determined by the parties and groups of candidates, and follow publicly available group voting tickets lodged by the parties and groups. Above the line preference flows are thus predictable. In contrast, preferences on below-the-line votes are decided by the voters themselves. These unpredictable preferences could decide who won the fifth seat in each region. Because the VEC data-entered the below-the-line votes as part of the election count, the pattern of preferences on each ballot paper is available for study. Such study does not infringe the secrecy of the vote, since the ballot papers cannot be traced back to individual voters. The VEC engaged a team at the University of Melbourne to conduct programming work on the database of below-the-line votes and to produce statistics. The VEC is grateful to Vanessa Teague, Kim Ramchen and Lee Naish for their work in January 2008. Incidence of below-the-line votes Below-the-line votes comprised 5.16% of the total votes for the Legislative Council. Reasons for this small proportion appear to be that it is easier to vote above the line than below the line, and that all the party how-to-vote cards urged their supporters to 2 vote above the line. On the other hand, the proportion of below-the-line votes in the State election was more than two times higher than the 2.05% of Victorians who voted below the line at the 2007 Senate election. Clearly, the fact that voters only had to number five squares encouraged some Victorians to vote below the line at the State election. The rate of below the line voting varied according to parties. Broadly, the larger and more established a party was, the lower its rate of below-the-line voting. Thus, only 2.52% of Liberal voters voted below the line, while 22.91% of People Power voters did so. The highest rate of below-the-line voting was among supporters of Northern Victoria Region’s Group H (headed by Laurie Whelan), 48.46% of whom chose to vote below the line. It is significant that the supporters of the major parties, who nearly all voted above the line, also tended to conform with their party’s how-to-vote cards (See the VEC’s Report to Parliament on the 2006 Victorian State election, page 98). The reasons appear to be the same in both cases. Firstly, a high proportion of voters for the major parties would be lifelong supporters, who would tend to heed their party’s directions. Secondly, the major parties were better able to get their message out to their supporters, through stationing members at every voting centre to hand out how-to-vote cards. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) had the second lowest rate of below-the-line voting, at 3.36%. The party did have the most prominent case of below-the-line voting in the State election: supporters of Elaine Carbines, who was the third-placed Labor candidate for Western Victoria Region, urged Labor voters to vote “1” for Carbines below the line, and 2,825 voters did so. This support was not enough to elect Ms Carbines. The highest rate of Labor below-the-line votes was 4.61% in Southern Metropolitan Region, without any issues being apparent. The Australian Greens were the largest source of below-the-line votes, outnumbering Labor and Liberal below the line votes and making up 28.2% of the total. Below-the-line Green voters made up 13.76% of all Green voters, with the proportion varying little across the State. The below-the-line voting rate was considerably higher for the Greens than for two smaller parties, Family First (8.5%) and the DLP (7.78%). It is difficult to explain this high rate of voting below the line. Possibly some Green voters, having broken with their previous voting habits, were more inclined to make up their own minds about the direction of their preferences. Geographically, the below-the-line vote rate ranged from 3.96% in Eastern Victoria Region to 6.86% in Southern Metropolitan. The highest proportion of below-the-line votes was in the two regions covering the inner suburbs (Northern and Southern Metropolitan, 6.72%), while the three regions covering the outer suburbs (Eastern, South Eastern and Western Metropolitan) had distinctly fewer below-the-line votes at 4.6%. Part of the explanation for the high numbers of below-the-line votes in Northern and Southern Metropolitan could be that these regions were the 3 strongholds of the Greens. However, supporters of other parties were also more disposed to vote below the line in these regions: in Southern Metropolitan Region, below-the-line votes for the Labor, Liberal, Family First and People Power parties were the highest in the State, and the same was the case for Democrat voters in Northern Metropolitan Region. In Northern Metropolitan Region, the Greens had both their highest vote in the State (18.06%) and their highest proportion of below- the-line votes (15.34%). These figures suggest that there is something in the nature of these regions that made their voters more likely to vote below the line. From the VEC’s Information Kit for the 25 November 2006 State Election, one factor that these regions have in common is a high proportion of the workforce in professional occupations. Types of below-the-line votes Although a huge number of combinations of below-the-line votes is mathematically possible, in practice voters tend to follow patterns. The VEC analysis was designed to tease out the numbers of voters who followed likely patterns at the 2006 State election. Mistakes Some voters make mistakes when completing their ballot paper, skipping or duplicating numbers. Such votes are formal if the voter has voted “1” to “5”, but preferences cannot be counted from the point of the mistake. Very few voters made mistakes when voting below the line. Across the State, only 1,437 voters made mistakes on their ballot paper – less than 1% of the total. There was no particular point at which voters were more likely to get it wrong; mistakes were few in number and randomly scattered from the 6th square on the ballot paper to the 38th. In terms of parties, the incidence of mistakes varied from 0.62% for the ungrouped candidates to 2.07% for the Socialist Alliance. Supporters of the larger parties tended to be less likely to make mistakes, probably because most of these voters simply voted “1” to “5”. Keeping within group Voters have the option of either keeping to one group of candidates for their first few preferences, or switching from one group to another – for example, voting Labor 1, Greens 2, People Power 3, Labor 4 and so on. It is easier to vote within a group, though a well known candidate might attract preferences from supporters of other parties. In fact, 83.17% of below-the-line voters kept within one group for their first preferences. Although below-the-line voters exercised their own judgement, the 4 great majority of them appear to have been committed to one party or group, or at least found it simpler to vote within that group before going on to other groups. There was little variation by region, but much greater variation by party, from 74.14% for Group E in Northern Victoria (headed by Stefano de Pieri) to 91.19% for the Socialist Alliance. The rate for the major parties tended to be slightly lower than that for the smaller parties. One possible explanation for this is related to the number of candidates in each group. While the smaller parties fielded two or three candidates per region, the larger parties mostly had five candidates in each region. There is a correlation of -.688 between each party’s average number of candidates per region and rate at which each party’s voters kept within the group. This indicates that the more candidates there were in a group, the more inclined voters were to stray from that group.

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