Submission to Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters
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1 Submission to Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters Chris Curtis September 2019 Emailed to [email protected] Submission to JSCEM on 2019 Election – Chris Curtis 2 Contents Purpose . 3 Summary . 3 1. Principles . 4 2. The Single Transferable Vote and the Constitution . 5 3. The Irrational Complaints and the 2016 “Fix” . 5 4. Devaluing Some Voters by Thresholds . 12 5. Devaluing Most Voters by Dividing States into Six Electorates Each . 13 6. Imposing a Party List System. 13 7. Nothing Undemocratic about Group Voting Tickets . 14 8. The Real Issue . 15 9. Personal How-to-Vote Website . 16 10. Constitutional Entrenchment of Democratic Voting . 16 11. Reducing the Number of Candidates Democratically. 17 12. Ensuring Political Parties Are Real . 17 Conclusion . 18 Appendix: Tables . 19 Table 1. 2013 Senate Election Results . 19 Table 2 2019 Senate Election Results. 19 Table 3 Informal Votes. 19 Table 4 2019 Senate Election Results by State. 21 Table 5 2013/14 Micro-party Victors. 24 Table 6 2013/14 Established Party Victors from Tiny Primary Votes . 24 Table 7 2016 Micro-party Victors. 25 Table 8 2016 Established Party Victors from Tiny Primary Votes. 25 Table 9 2019 Micro-party Victors from Tiny Primary Votes. 26 Table 10 2019 Established Party Victors from Tiny Primary Votes . 26 Submission to JSCEM on 2019 Election – Chris Curtis 3 Purpose The aim of this submission is to restore and constitutionally entrench a democratic and honest voting system for the Senate. The current Senate voting system is a disgrace in that it misleads all voters and discriminates against some. It does so because a campaign of hysteria designed to favour a small minority over a much larger minority succeeded in convincing the Turnbull government to amend the Australian Electoral Act in 2016. The current system ranks with the gerrymandered electorates of 40 years ago in its contempt for voters. The only problem with the pre-2016 Senate voting system was the difficulty of voting below the line. All that was required to fix that problem was to make preferences below the line optional after a certain number. Instead of taking that simple, honest, democratic course of action, the Coalition government, the Nick Xenophon Team and the Greens abolished the convenience of multi-party group voting tickets, brought in above-the-line preferences (i.e., group voting tickets within each party), required different voters above the line to express different numbers of real preferences from each other, required voters below the line to express a different number of preferences from those above the line and required the Australian Electoral Commission to give voters dishonest voting instructions. Summary 1.An electoral system should be fair and equitable. In particular, it should as far as practicable for stable government represent the people in the proportions in which they voted. 2. The single transferable vote is designed to elect individuals. The system is perfectly in accordance with Section 7 the Australian Constitution: “The Senate shall be composed of senators for each State, directly chosen by the people of the State, voting, until the Parliament otherwise provides, as one electorate.” At the end of the process, from 1949 to 2013, we had the candidates elected that had the most support and thus a Senate that was most representative of the people in each state. 3. The current Senate voting system is the result of a campaign of hysteria about the election of a few micro-party candidates from tiny primary votes in 2013/14 while ignoring the election of hundreds of established party candidates from tiny primary votes in every election from 1949 to 2013. This has been confirmed by the lack of outrage at the election of 60 established party candidates from tiny primary votes in 2016 and 2019, including those with smaller percentages than those of all the successful micro-party candidates in 2013/14. Furthermore, the new system dramatically cut the representation of the almost one quarter of Australians who vote for the micro-parties and increased both the real and the official informal vote, substantially in the case of the former. 4. The imposition of thresholds would be highly undemocratic as it would devalue the votes of some voters. Under the single transferable vote, all voters are equal. The vote of someone who supports a micro-party candidate is not of less value than the vote of someone who supports an established party candidate. Submission to JSCEM on 2019 Election – Chris Curtis 4 5. Dividing each state into six very unequally sized Senate electorates would distort people’s votes by weighting a country vote at several times more than a city vote and make the Senate highly unrepresentative. 6. Having two sets of compulsory above-the-line preferences and two sets of compulsory below-the-line preferences is undemocratic, irrational and discriminatory. 7. Group voting tickets, like package holidays, are perfectly fair and reasonable, as long as people are not intimidated into not voting below the line. 8. The only changes needed to the voting system were to make preferences below the line optional after a certain number and to restrict the number of preferences a group voting ticket could express to the same number. 9. The Australian Electoral Commission should provide assistance to voters to vote formally below the line via a website. 10. The Constitution should be amended to entrench the single transferable vote for Senate elections and to provide for fixed terms for both the Senate and the House of Representatives. 11. Tightening deposit requirements would reduce the clogging the ballot paper by candidates who cannot be elected and thereby make voting below the line easier. 12. Tightening party registration requirements would reduce the number of overnight parties with no base in the state that they are contesting and thereby make voting below the line easier. 1. Principles An electoral system should be fair and equitable; i.e., it should ensure: * that the elected body is as representative as possible of the way the voters voted, * that as many voters as possible have a vote that counted towards the result, * that no group can win a majority of positions without first winning a majority of the vote, * that all voters are treated equally and * that all voters are treated honestly. The only voting system that meets the first three criteria is the single transferable vote version of proportional representation. The previous Senate voting system and the current Victorian Legislative Council voting system meet the last two criteria. The current Senate system does not. It is also deficient in the first three principles. Ideally, every candidate who stood for election would be genuine in his or her desire to represent the people and every voters would make the effort to learn the policies of all the candidates and rank them in a carefully considered order, no matter how many there were. That is unrealistic, and the more candidates there are the less likely a voter is to give a considered ranking to them all. Most people would happily rank 12 candidates, few would rank 120 and almost no one would rank 1,200. It is therefore necessary to put reasonable limits on the process of nomination and on the number of preferences a voter must mark, while it is essential to allow the marking of all preferences if a voter wishes to do so. Submission to JSCEM on 2019 Election – Chris Curtis 5 2. The Single Transferable Vote and the Constitution The single transferable vote is designed to elect individuals. Each person’s vote moves from one candidate to another until the necessary number of candidates have sufficient votes to be elected; in the case of the senators from each state, this is 14.29 per cent of the vote. The system is perfectly in accordance with Section 7 the Australian Constitution: “The Senate shall be composed of senators for each State, directly chosen by the people of the State, voting, until the Parliament otherwise provides, as one electorate.” Senators cannot be “directly chosen by the people” unless the people have the option for voting for every candidate on the ballot paper. Party lists systems that compel a vote for the number one candidate of a party and prevent a vote for the number two candidate of that party are unconstitutional because they interpose a party choice between the candidates and the voters’ rights. That would mean that senators are no longer “directly chosen by the people”. This does not make group voting tickets or the option of above-the-line voting unconstitutional as neither of them compels a vote for particular candidates or prevents a vote for others: the voter retains the freedom to vote for any individual candidate on the ballot paper. However, there are still issues of principle and practicality involved in any arrangements that do not require voters to vote for individual candidates. The single transferable vote allows voters to vote for any candidate they wish in any order they wish. The above-the-line addition gave particular party-chosen sets of preferences an advantage over the millions of other possible sets of preferences possible, but every voter had the right to choose one of those non-party-chosen sets of preferences, even though few did so. The system upheld the Constitution, though the addition of above-the-line voting and group voting tickets made the practical operation of the system similar to a party list system. The single transferable vote means that at each stage of the count a choice is being made between those candidates with sufficient support to be left in the count.