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What’s wrong with single-member electorates - Part 2

By Bogey Musidlak - posted Friday, 15 March 2002


This is part two of Bogey Musidlak's commentary. In part one he discussed the problems with Australia's current system of representative democracy.

As I argued previously, the winner-take-all nature of single-member electorates encourages a 'whatever it takes' mentality in the relatively small number of marginal electorates that will determine government, following earlier internal scrambles for preselection in safe seats.

The preponderance of safe seats and narrow concentration of competitive political effort elsewhere are inherently unhealthy for democracy. Conducting primary elections, extending optional preferential voting or making voting voluntary would not get to the heart of the problem of geographic determinism.

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So what can be done in multi-member electorates and what ought to be done? The key is to encourage voter involvement through effective voting that strongly shapes the composition of the parliament, rather than participation in largely foregone conclusions. This brings the levels of individual and collective accountability where ongoing sympathetic contact with each electorate is essential for political survival.

While Australia has extensive experience of good practice, especially in the Hare-Clark system that has served Tasmania continuously since 1909, this is not always recognised or followed in the discussion or design of electoral systems involving multi-member electorates.

Hybrid schemes

One approach that seeks to remedy gross imbalances between votes and seats in single-member electorates is to use a top-up mechanism to produce fairer outcomes.

This may involve having regional consolation prizes for parties that have most missed out, as set out in the Jenkins Commission recommendations in the United Kingdom. At best, there will be a slight softening of the worst distortions.

Alternatively, as happens in the hybrid systems of Germany and New Zealand, there can be two separate votes for individuals, one in a single-member electorate and the other among regional or national party lists.

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Overall results are determined by some form of proportional representation applied to the party-list votes. Single-member victories are usually subtracted from the 'correct' result to determine how many candidates are elected from the various party lists: however, if there are lopsided single-member regional results, as regularly occurs in Germany, additional seats may have to be created after an election to deal with these major departures from proportionality.

Hybrid systems don’t actually fix the problems of unbalanced single-member outcomes that are known in advance. Voters usually have little or no say about the order in which list candidates get elected. In addition, because the methods used to determine the overall allocation of seats are based on comparisons of (sometimes weighted) votes-per-seat ratios for different parties, large numbers of these party-list votes can be completely wasted.

This can occur either because of excessive splintering of votes among numerous small parties or through the deliberate imposition of qualification thresholds (often around 5 per cent) for representation to discourage such behaviour.

To limit the advantages accruing to the largest parties because of vote wastage in party-list systems of proportional representation based on average votes per seat won, various Scandinavian countries have continued to refine a number of different elaborate allocation mechanisms. The modified d'Hondt scheme the Federal Parliament inflicted on the Australian Capital Territory in 1989 and 1992 highlighted the arbitrariness and instability associated with qualification thresholds: on both occasions, several of the seventeen seats depended on whether one party finished a few dozen votes above or below the 5.56 per cent threshold!

Minimising vote wastage essential

Other unsatisfactory multi-member-electorate experience has been witnessed in Japan and Australia.

For a long time in Japan, voters simply wrote down the name of one candidate in their multi-member constituency and the candidates with the highest number of votes were elected. Where one candidate was extremely popular, the way was paved for others, not necessarily from the same party, to be elected with rather few votes. More alarmingly, the inability to transfer excess votes to other candidates in the same party fuelled the 'money politics' striving of individual candidates and their backers that spawned a series of major scandals related to political donations.

The Australian Senate became a national laughing-stock because of its regularly lop-sided composition prior to 1949. Initially voters were required to mark as many crosses as there were vacancies and the candidates with greatest support, usually from the same party, were elected. The situation changed little in practice when preferential voting was introduced and vacancies were determined sequentially by ignoring the names of candidates already elected and seeing who next achieved a majority of votes.

These examples illustrate the importance, where fairness of outcome is seen as important, of being able to transfer votes from those who have more than strictly required for election and from those with no longer any hope of election. This is best done by giving voters a single transferable vote in multi-member electorates (their marking of preferences indicates the order in which candidates can have access to that vote) and using a quota-preferential count in which candidates are not required to obtain more votes than necessary to be certain of election.

The (Droop) quota is found by dividing the number of formal votes by one more than the number of vacancies and moving up to the next highest whole number. Surpluses above the quota are available for transfer to others in accordance with individual voters’ wishes. Alternatively, the candidate with fewest votes is excluded and each of his or her ballot-papers is examined to see who of the continuing candidates has highest preference.

The introduction of such a system of proportional representation in 1949 has been pivotal in transforming the Senate into a recognised force for government and public service accountability. However the Senate voting system has two major defects as well as significant technical flaws related to the transfer of surpluses from elected candidates: its way of filling casual vacancies adopted after the 1975 constitutional crisis could also have been much improved by re-examining voters' expressed wishes.

Flaws in the Senate voting model

With the enlargement of the national Parliament in 1984, the number of Senate vacancies that usually occur increased from five to six. When six Senators are being elected, just over one-seventh of the vote guarantees anyone election: 42.9 per cent is enough for three places while over 57 per cent is required to guarantee four, and therefore out of reach except in extreme circumstances.

Having an odd number of vacancies is normally important in any quota-preferential election as only then does a majority of votes in an electoral district always translate into a majority of seats.

The Senate voting system also offers safe seats to those at the top of major party columns. Preselections are therefore often fiercely contested in relation to that internal order, and in practice usually only two of the six positions (sometimes three in Queensland because the Liberals and Nationals run separately) are in doubt once nominations have closed.

Party boxes were introduced in the 1983 overhaul of the Commonwealth Electoral Act, ostensibly as a short-cut way of recording a formal vote, and have spread to other jurisdictions. The alternative of having to mark nearly all the squares individually otherwise continues to be an unfair imposition on voters. The result has been a concentration of power in the hands of those making preference deals straight after nominations close, and a proliferation of party groups in New South Wales and South Australian Legislative Council elections where state-wide seats can be won with a relatively small proportion of the votes.

Voters marking party boxes usually have no idea what is to be made of their indicated support. When those influential within Grey Power and the Citizens’ Electoral Councils Group succeeded in blackballing Liberal Chris Puplick in NSW in 1990, most of their groups’ supporters would have been greatly surprised if they ever discovered that their votes made the difference between two or three Labor Senators being elected. At the Western Australian Legislative Council elections of 2001, One Nation supporters marking the party box in two non-metropolitan regions unwittingly handed the balance of power to the Greens, who were placed before the Liberals on those registered how-to-vote tickets.

A straightforward way of avoiding these induced problems would have been to make it easy for all voters to record a formal vote. For instance, in the Australian Capital Territory's Hare-Clark system where the absence of party boxes has been entrenched, voters are encouraged to mark at least as many preferences as there are vacancies, but do not lose their vote if they fail to do so.

Where does that leave us?

Hare-Clark as best practice

If we really want to clean up the image of politics, first we should strive for a system where there are no safe seats at all as that will force anyone with an intention of being in politics for some time to pay attention to what’s important for constituents.

Having an effective vote, one that contributes to the election of one or more candidates, has the Parliament looking much more like what the people indicate they want in each region. It also sparks more interest in politics because individual outcomes aren’t a foregone conclusion.

Once you have seven or nine vacancies in an electorate (12.5 per cent and 10 per cent respectively is enough to secure election), a shift of even 2 or 3 per cent in support is quite likely to change representation. No area can be taken for granted or written off as a lost cause, and there are incentives to build further support to win more seats.

Geographical considerations may point to the inclusion of five-member electorates even though over 16 per cent of the vote could be wasted and major parties might feel confident of winning two seats in most circumstances. While much larger numbers of vacancies would reduce vote wastage, ballot-papers can become unwieldy if a hundred or more candidates nominate.

The best model available is the Hare-Clark system in use in Tasmania since 1909, and adopted at plebiscite and then entrenched in the Australian Capital Territory during the 1990s.

Safe seats have been eliminated through the introduction of Robson Rotation. Names are rotated within party columns on ballot-papers so that the vote for the party gets shared out and those with greatest explicit voter support get elected. This has forced candidates to do much more doorknocking and to make themselves more accessible to voters over a period of time. Being able to generate some publicity while in the Assembly or during the campaign period has been shown to be no guarantee of continued success.

A further highlight leading to more choice for voters on election day is the use of count-back of the votes for a vacating candidate to determine the replacement. This maintains voter influence over the composition of the Parliament at all times without risking compromising proportional representation through by-elections (as occurs in Eire): it will work satisfactorily without delay in all circumstances, unlike the Senate approach of party nomination where possible, under which as many as one in five incumbents has not been elected by the people.

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This is part two of Bogey Musidlak's commentary. In part one he discussed the problems with Australia's current system of representative democracy.



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About the Author

Bogey Musidlak is President of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia.

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