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Australia Elects Libertarian-Leaning Senator (By Accident)
LordLucless writes "Australia's Liberal Democratic Party, which describes itself as a classically liberal, free-market libertarian party, has had their candidate for New South Wales elected to the upper house, with roughly double the number of votes they were expecting. In part, this has been attributed to them being placed first on the ballot paper (which is determined by a random process) and similarities in name to one of the major parties, the Liberal Party of Australia."
Once the count was on and I started to see a few more votes in that pile for the liberal democrats, I knew it was going to take a sizable proportion off the mainstream party in error. Having a look at statistics though, where I was working and surrounding regions had informal vote rates of 12% to 15% (much higher than the national average). It's also a labor party stronghold, which is the party who just got knocked out.
It's also worth pointing out that the particular ballot paper was enormous, over 1m long, 110 candidates for 6 positions, 35 parties and can be very confusing to explain to people who barely speak english, on how to make their vote formal, let alone read the 6.5 point print on who they're voting for.
Moral of the story is, you can't help stupid people, but you can let them to vote... (NB: Australia has compulsory attendance to vote and compulsory preferential voting in federal elections)
I spent about 15hrs going through all the various policies from all the senate candidates. It truly was a difficult decision who to put last... and really quite depressing to have parties like the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who only got a very small number of primary votes make it through to the senate on preferences.
... wait, what?
That's because the power never really changes. It stays in the hands of the businesses and their lobbyists. They pay any side that looks like it has a chance of winning. They don't care who the figure head is.
It also helps that there's multiple precedents of the new guys forgiving and hiding any wrongdoings the other guys did.
The Australian Labor party is what you'd call a liberal party.
The Australian Liberal party is a centre-right conservative party,
And this Liberal Democratic party is closer to your republicans.
Got it?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Sure, the article says "Mr Leyonhjelm accepts his party probably gained votes in error, with voters thinking they were choosing the Liberals." ... but what else is he supposed to say?
I think the mistake was that the voter simply didn't care. I highly doubt, as dumb as Liberal voters are that they would accidentally vote Liberal Democrat as opposed to Liberal.
What happened is that apathetic voters simply put 1 into the first box on the page and dumped the paper into the Ballot box. They really didn't care who was in the box, they just voted to avoid being fined (yes, in Australia if you dont vote you get a fine). I'm just glad one of the obviously racist parties (One Nation, Stable Population) wasn't in pole position.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Election of this candidate was no accident. This is not first-past-the-post voting and the individual did not gain a quota outright. He won because other parties passed their votes to him after they were eliminated. As the LDP candidate points out, the senate voting preference system is open, well documented and the specific preferences are available to the public for weeks before the election. If electors cannot be bothered to vote with their own preferences (an admittedly tedious affair) then they take the parties preferences as published. In this case, there were tight preference deals between the litany of single-issue and minor parties. That minor parties can use that system to their own advantage is neither a surprise nor unexpected. It's equally naive to think the major parties do not play the same game... they are just not as "looney" or "fringe" and less worthy of media sensationalism.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
You don't have to mark your ballot, and even if you did, that would require them to check your ballots before you dropped it in the box, which they don't do.
You can drop in a blank ballot, draw a penis on it, or whatever you like; if it doesn't follow the rules it's called "informal" and not counted.
What you're describing is still quite common - it's called the donkey vote (numbering the ballot from the top), is a valid vote, and actually gives the top candidates a slight edge.
You don't actually have to put anything in the Ballot - if you were so inclined you could simply sign off your name and put the blank ballot papers straight into the box and nothing would be said.
As a side note: People must dislike the Australian Electoral Commission vote counters because it's not like a politician is ever going to see the penises and expletives they marked their ballots with.
As a vote counter I can assure you that during the long and tedious process of counting votes, the pictures of penises and swear words give us a chuckle and lift our spirits.
...there is no sig...
There's three reasons for that:
- The lower house determines who the PM is, which is the thing everyone really wants to know
- We only elect half the Senate at a time, so there's less of a shift than there is in the lower house where everything's up for grabs
- The new Senators don't take their seats for almost a year
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Sorry, but no. There was a question about the 2000 election, but Bush still won when the media conducted their own recounts*. What "controversy" are you referring to in 2004? Or are you just disagreeing with the outcome, again?
Newspapers' recount shows Bush prevailed
* It's worth pointing out that the hotspot for that controversy about the "chads" took place in a county controlled by Democrats.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
People didn't want an Abbott government, that was made quite clear by the ~4% swing against Labor translating to only a 1.5% swing to the Libs (in first preference votes).
Yep,
As much as the Murdoch and Reinheart papers would like to pretend, Abbott got in by a narrow margin and if minor parties end up ruling a hostile senate he's already promised a Double Dissolution (wikipedia link) which typically does not bode well for the government that calls it.
But if the Liberals truly wanted a landslide win, they should have put Turnbull in charge. Tony Abbott is too extreme on the right and Australians typically prefer centrists (this was what Gillard and Rudd had going for them) which Turnbull is. Turnbull is also a populist. Turnbull vs anyone in Labour would have resulted in a massive swing to the Libs. Unfortunately, unlike Abbott, Turnbull wont be a puppet for Liberal powerbrokers.
We've elected the faceless men. All we can hope for is a hostile senate.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
1) Australia practices compulsory voting. If you are eligible to vote and fail to do so, you are fined. From eyeballing the turnout numbers of the 2008 and 2010 elections in the U.S., my impression is that the people didn't really "decide" the Democrats were better in 2008, and the Republicans better in 2010. What happened was the Republican voters were dejected and didn't bother to vote in 2008, and Democrat voters were dejected and didn't bother to vote in 2010.
2) Australia uses preferential voting. You rank the candidates in the order you like them. That means you don't get situations where two candidates with similar political ideologies split the vote, resulting in a minor candidate with the opposite ideology winning because votes for that ideology weren't split. Most Australians just use the simplified version (rank their choice #1, leave the rest blank) which has the same result as the plurality voting system used in the U.S. (greatest vote recipient wins). But having the option to rank the candidates means the system is protected from splitting the vote.
Another voting option used in some parliamentary elections (not sure about Australia) is to vote for a party, not for individuals. This means if there are 100 members in parliament and the Green party gets 1% of the vote nationwide, they get 1 member in parliament. This system is incompatible with the representative system used in the U.S. (the idea being that if a Congressman or Senator represents a district or state, s/he will be more responsive to the wishes of the his/her electorate). In a representative system, the 1% Green party vote gets spread out over all the representative areas, and no Green party member ever gets voted to office.
The combination of the representative system with plurality voting in the U.S. virtually guarantees there will only be two political parties - if there are three parties, the two whose ideologies are closest improve their odds of winning elections by merging into one party. Good luck explaining all this to regular people though. I've been trying to explain the benefits of a preferential voting system ("instant run-off") since the 1990s. Most people don't understand or don't care.