Conspicuous by My Absence
I regret to announce that the long anticipated third installment
of my analysis for the American primaries will not be provided here.
Unfortunately, a quick look at the statistics did not really promise
much of interest (not that a non-result has ever stopped me before).
Additionally, with the Republican race now down to one candidate,
it's unlikely there will be enough write-ins to dislodge Donald J
Trump from the GOP candidacy. The Clinton-Sanders race is looking
ever more decided in favour of the former, but there is still life in
that contest; the only meaningful analysis on that, however, comes
from my previous post on racial diversity:
Since then the following races have been decided
Burning through 6 of the 8 tossups and
delivering an 11/14 (or 78.6%) accuracy rating. That's not too shabby
considering that data is purely based on the racial make up of likely
voters.
We will return to the 2016 United
States Presidential Elections later this year, after the Australian
Federal Election, the Brexit Vote and the territorial elections for
both the NT and ACT.
But First
Other
electoral news around the world this week includes Sadiq Kahn taking
office as Mayor of London on Sunday and the Philippines electing
Rodrigo Duterte as president on Monday. In neither election did the
former incumbent run; former London Mayor Boris Johnson did not run
due to his election to the House of Commons, while former President
of the Philippines Benigno Aquino III did not run due
to exhausting his term limits.
Sadiq Kahn is noteworthy for being the
first London Mayor to be a Muslim. Rodrigo Duterte is noteworthy for
being a lawyer who as Mayor of Davao City encouraged (has been
suggested to have been directly involved in) vigilante death-squads
who execute criminals (or assumed criminals) without trial or due
practice. So, kind of an outsourcing Daredevil but without the
blindness.
New Voting Measures
So, before we do any real electoral
prediction or information this year, it's worth looking at the new
voting rules for the Upper House. As you may (or may not – the AEC
has not been publicising this nearly as much as I would have thought)
know, the above- and below the line voting methods have changed.
Many people think they can vote as they
used to, with the added bonus of being able to vote for multiple
parties above the line. I thought this briefly too. THIS IS NOT THE
CASE. (Except that it is – see the next section)
According to the latest amendments to
the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918,
you must vote above the line by “writing at least the numbers 1 to
6 in the squares... printed on the ballot paper above the line” (s 239(2)(a)) or
below the line by “writing at least the numbers 1 to 12 in the
squares printed on the ballot paper below the line” (s 239(1)(a)).
So by
law you must number AT LEAST 6 boxes above the line, or AT LEAST 12
boxes below the line. Below the line voting will work as per usual,
but your vote exhausts once you stop numbering. This makes voting
below the line for less tedious and, if you make an error by skipping
or repeating a number (for example) your vote will still be valid
until the error, at which point it is exhausted. Therefore, your vote
will go to your #1 candidate until she is (a) elected by reaching the
quota or (b) excluded for having too few votes. At this point your
vote goes in full (in the latter case) or in part (by your share for
the excess of votes beyond the quota) to your second choice, and so
on until you run out of numbers.
Voting
above the line assumes you are numbering each candidate in the
associated column from top
to
bottom (s 272):
=
As
such, you are no longer allowed to vote above the line by marking a
single box. You must mark at least six (except you don't – see the
next section). If you were part of the 5% who voted below the line,
though, your old method of voting by marking every box is valid, but
not entirely necessary.
Since
the burden of marking 6 boxes above the line is not drastically
greater than 12 below the line, you might question why we keep both
methods. Below the line gives you the option to skip certain
candidates – for example in the last election in South Australia,
there was outrage that Don Farrell would appear higher on the Labor
list than Penny Wong, or that Cory Bernardi appeared on the Liberal
ticket at all. In both cases, voters could have placed the unpopular
candidates lower in their preferences than their second-placers.
Above
the line voting allows you to quickly prioritise the parties a little
quicker if you don't care about individual candidates, but is
otherwise now largely redundant.
below
the line voting also allows some manipulation of the overflow
mechanics, if you accept the assumption that the majority of voters
number from top to bottom. This may not be the case under the new
system, where the easier below the line vote and harder above the
line vote may see the usual 5:95 split change.
If we
accept, however, that most votes go north to south, you may wish to
number candidates in a party from south to north. This is because if
you favour a candidate that is elected as a result, a portion of your
vote overflows. If you vote for a loser, your whole vote overflows.
Consider
a party fielding 2 candidates as your preferred party, and you don't
know enough about the individuals to choose. Lets assume the quota
for getting elected in 1000 votes. If you number them top to bottom,
and the top candidate gets elected by 1001 votes, 1/1001th
of your vote flows to candidate two. 1/1001th
of every other vote also overflows. Most will go to candidate two,
but maybe some will not. This gives candidate two less than one whole
vote from the overflow. Worse, if candidate 1 is not elected,
candidate two will have dropped out even earlier.
If,
however, you number the party from bottom to top, and candidate 1
still gets elected, you ensure a full vote goes to the second
candidate. If the first candidate is not elected, sooner or later the
second will be eliminated and your vote will go to candidate 1
anyhow. Thus you have but that candidate at nor real disadvantage.
This
also applies for the parties you dislike, when numbering all the way
down the ticket. If you let your vote exhaust, you're saying you've
reached the extent to which you care and the rest of the parties are
of equal value to you. If, however, you dislike one party more than
the others, you want to prevent your vote from exhausting, otherwise
you have no say in whether that disliked party beats the others.
Here, again, numbering from the bottom gives your less-hated parties
an advantage over the more-hated ones.
This
all assumes the trend of numbering from top to bottom remains. While
the ease of below the line voting may undermine this lightly, most
below the line voters will probably still vote top-to-bottom anyhow
without thinking it through, and any above the line voters certainly
will. But even if the candidates are numbered randomly by other
voters, you're not actually disadvantaged. Only if the technique of
voting south to north becomes popular will this strategy lose its
power. That's your vote and your gamble.
But That's Not the Whole Truth
It is
true that under s 239 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act
1918 you must at least mark 6
boxes above the line or 12 boxes below the line. And that's what all
the information you get from the AEC will tell you and, for the
latter rule, what paragraph
268(1)(b)
will insist.
However,
under paragraph
269(1)(b)
“[a] ballot paper in a Senate election is not informal under
paragraph 268(1)(b) if... the voter has marked the number 1,
or the number 1 and one or more higher numbers, in squares printed on
the ballot paper above the line.”
In
other words, although you are required by law to number six boxes
when voting, your vote will still be valid so long as you mark at
least one. You would be in breach of s 239 and thus breaking the law
by voting in this way, so I'm not advocating this method, but your
vote would technically still count.
Similarly,
for below the line voting, paragraph
268A(1)(b)
states “[a] ballot paper in a Senate election is not informal under
paragraph 268(1)(b) if ... the voter has consecutively
numbered any of those squares from 1 to 6 (whether or not the voter
has also included one or more higher numbers in those squares).”
So by law
you must mark at least 6 boxes above the line or 12 bellow, but to
cast a formal vote, you only need one box above the line or six
below. To put it another way, you are legally required to cast a
hyper-valid vote.
Why is
this? A combination of two reasons. One mathematical, one pragmatic
and forgiving. Mathematically, they want everyone to mark at least 12
candidates (a party above the line will have at least 2 candidates)
so that even in a double disillusion election (like this one) and
even if everyone votes identically, 12 senators can be picked. If
everyone cast only one vote, and they all voted identically, there's
be one candidate elected and no way to fill the remaining 11 seats
(or 5 in a normal election).
That's
why the law requires you to fill that many boxes. The reason a vote
with fewer will still count is the pragmatic one. People make
mistakes, especially when we change the system on them. Occasionally
someone'll skip a number or write one twice. But now that we're
exhausting votes, we can more easily give effect to their wishes as
far as they are clear. For example, if someone intends to number six
boxes above the line, but actually numbers two boxes as “3”, the
vote will still be valid for the first two boxes. There have always
been these redundancies. If you use a tick or a cross on a senate
paper, it's read as a “1” (ss
268A(2)(a),
269(1A)(a))
and if you leave a square blank on the House of Representative form,
but otherwise number the squares consecutively, that unmarked square
will be read as the last number in the sequence (s 268(1)(c)).
Upcoming
As
soon as the upper house ballots are finalised we'll be doing an
run-down of the parties on your state or territory ticket and what
they stand for. Other than that, and the standard prediction methods
of comparing swings to margins, most of the upcoming material is a
surprise (even to me) and will depend on my available spare time. Oh,
and colourable maps. I'll try and get those done too, for those
playing along at home on July 2.
