Informal voting - don't blame the voters!

Ticket voting has halved the level of informal voting that would have applied under Commonwealth legislation. South Australian ticket voting saves ballot papers where the elector mistakenly uses the Legislative Council’s voting method in the House of Assembly. It also saves many ballot papers where an elector has made a mistake transcribing a party’s ticket of preferences.

What ticket voting does not save are ballot papers where an elector made a mistake creating their own sequence of preferences. Ticket voting is very kind to voters who have not understood the instructions, or who make a transcription error in copying preferences. It is less helpful for informed voters who make an honest mistake while voting to truly express their preferences.

Parliaments may insist on compulsory preferential voting, but it is doubtful whether voters have the same commitment. At the South Australian Constitutional Convention in 2002, the 323 attendees chosen as part of a deliberative poll nominated optional preferential voting as the most important reform that could be introduced to the political process in the state. (See summary of finding published by Issues Deliberation Australia.) This was despite the issue not being on the agenda of the convention.

Optional preferential voting always helps the candidate with the highest primary vote. The Labor Party has some history of supporting optional preferential voting, based on experience with the Democratic Labor Party and three-cornered contests prior to the 1980s. This was the thinking behind Labor’s introduction of optional preferences in NSW in 1980.

Yet more recent elections indicate that Labor is now the main beneficiary of compulsory preferences. Between 1955 and 1972, the Labor Party won only a single House of Representatives contest having trailed on the primary vote compared to 34 such victories for the Coalition. Since 1980, the Coalition has won only 5 contests where its combined vote trailed Labor compared to 41 such come from behind wins for Labor.

The introduction of optional preferential voting in Queensland before the 1992 election followed its recommendation by the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission. Initially both sides of politics chose to continue recommending preferences on how to vote material. In 2001, the Labor Party broke with practice and advocated “Just Vote 1” to its supporters. Supporters of other parties clearly took this slogan to heart, and the 2001 election saw a dramatic increase on ballot papers marked with a first preference only. According to surveys in a sample of districts, the number of ballot papers with only a single preference rose from 23 per cent in 1992 and 20 per cent in 1995 to 60 per cent in 2001.

The huge rate of exhausted preferences between competing conservative candidates saw Labor win seats in 2001 with as little as 35 per cent of the primary vote. Yet Labor has also found the system can work to its disadvantage. The failure of Green voters to direct preferences to Labor cost it the seat of Mulgrave at the 1995 state election, and also prevented Labor winning a clear victory in Mundingburra, Labor’s narrow victory eventually overturned by the courts and the Goss Government defeated after a subsequent re-election. Exhausted preferences have also thwarted attempts by Labor in NSW to run third and elect Independents in safe Coalition seats.

So victories achieved with less than half of the formal vote are raised as one of the failures of optional preferential voting. That Labor managed to encourage a higher rate of exhausted preferences with its “Just Vote 1” strategy is seen as a manipulation of the electoral system.

Yet why is this any more outrageous than manipulating compulsory preferential voting to engineer an outcome? There are numerous examples of major parties running dead in their opponent’s safe seats, slipping to third place and then using compulsory preferential voting to engineer victory for an Independent. An even more remarkable case was the Victorian state electorate of Warrnambool in the mid-1980s, when the Labor party ran third and elected a Liberal at a by-election. At the next state election, with the same three candidates, with the Liberal MP substantially increasing his vote since the by-election, Labor’s preferences this time elected a National MP. Yes, on both occasion, compulsory preferential voting delivered a majority vote after preferences. But if voters thought so little of their lower preferences that the simply followed a party’s recommendation, then what is the point of compulsory preferential voting? If the strategically directed preferences of the bronze medallist get to determine who wins gold and silver, it is surely a bigger manipulation of the electoral system than simply leaving the two leading candidates to fight it out between themselves.

Under optional preferential voting, as well as voters getting more choice, parties can avoid the pointless debates about who they are putting last on their how to vote cards. In both 2001 and 2004, the Queensland Labor Party decided not to choose between One Nation and the National Party. At the 2003 NSW election, the Liberal Party chose to exhaust preference in several seats rather than choose between Labor and the Greens. This latter example is surely a more sensible decision than at the 2004 Federal election, when after dire warnings about letting the Greens near the levers of power, the Howard Government chose to help elect the Greens in every contest where they had a legitimate chance of victory over Labor.

In the end, cross party concern on the rate of informal voting will encourage the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters to recommend some form of change. The most likely solution is the South Australian ticket voting system. In the end, neither side is likely to offer voters what they would most want, which is the right not to have to vote for candidates they don’t know or don’t care about.