Informal voting - don't blame the voters!

As ignorance is never a defence in law, perhaps it is all the fault of the voters for not reading the instructions? Yet even in these days of increased cynicism about politics, voters are entitled to believe that well informed legislators would not go conducting conjoint elections under rules where a formal vote on one ballot paper would be informal on the other. Can you imagine the howls if such strictures were applied to tax returns or BAS forms?

The impact of these rules on the 2004 election can be seen in the 14 candidate contest for the outer Sydney seat of Greenway. It recorded the country’s highest rate of informal voting at 11.83 per cent. In the Senate, on a forbidding Senate ballot paper nearly a metre long and including 78 candidates distributed across 30 columns, the informal rate was only 4.07 per cent, nearly a third of the rate in the House.

The inanity of compulsory preferential voting is that any vote for the Liberal or Labor candidates in Greenway needed a further 13 unnecessary preferences to be admitted to the count. An error with lower preferences would see the vote excluded from the count, even if those preferences would never need to be counted. Any Liberal or Labor primary vote could be excluded because at the 12th preference it did not have a clear distinction between candidates from the Fishing Party, the Citizens Electoral Council or the Independent campaigning for spelling reform. For a formal vote, all preferences must be correct for any preference to count.

The current formality rules and their insistence on absolutely perfect sequences of preferences demean the electoral process. Voters either carefully transcribe how-to-vote material on to the ballot paper, or are forced to randomly allocate preferences to unknown and unwanted candidates just so their ballot paper can pass the formality requirements and register a vote for the candidates they do want.

There are solutions to high informal voting, but it requires a deviation from the current fashion in Australian politics that all wisdom somehow emanates from Canberra. Different formality rules are applied at state and territory elections, and there are clear lessons that can be applied to Commonwealth elections.

First, jurisdictions using optional preferential voting have lower informal rates. Fully optional preferential voting applies in New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT, and all three jurisdictions currently have the lowest level of lower house informal voting.

Second, elections where voters receive an upper house ballot paper allowing single preference voting tend to have higher informal rates. So in each state at Commonwealth elections, and at Western Australian state elections, informal voting is higher, and it is also higher in the lower house compared to the upper house. In Victoria, which uses the same electoral system in both houses, the informal rate is lower, and it is lower in the lower rather than the upper house.

South Australia provides the model on how to lower the informal vote while maintaining compulsory preferential voting. All candidates in an electorate have the right to register one or two ticket votes. These registered tickets are displayed on voting screens in polling places as guides to voters, and are also used as a “savings” provision, allowing ballot papers with incomplete preferences to remain in the count. However, candidates are banned from advocating a vote that does not include preferences. The system is not designed to replicate the upper house group ticket voting system.

The effect of the provision can be seen in the informal rate at South Australian lower house elections.

Informal and Ticket Voting – South Australian Elections 1985-2002

Source: South Australian State Electoral Office. Informal vote as a percentage of total vote, ticket vote as a percentage of formal vote.