Above or below the line? Managing preference votes

• The Labor Party was more interested in re-electing its third candidate, Senator Jacinta Collins, than conceding a Senate seat to the Greens.
• The Australian Democrats were more interested in staying in the count long enough to collect Coalition preferences and elect themselves than they were in helping to elect a Greens Senator.
• Family First, the Christian Democrats and the DLP were always attracted to helping to elect Labor’s Jacinta Collins to stop the Greens winning a seat. All three groups chose to direct preferences to Collins ahead of the Coalition, improving her chances of holding off a Green challenge.
• The Coalition was happy to help all the small Christian parties and the Australian Democrats at the expense of Labor and the Greens.

This confluence of interests explains how Family First came to win the final Senate place on Labor preferences. Labor did the deal in an attempt to elect one of its own Senators at the expense of the Greens. Had Labor not done deals and simply directed preferences to the Greens, it might have kissed goodbye to any chance of electing Jacinta Collins. The strategic preference swap with Family First was a gamble to elect a third Labor Senator. It was a gamble that failed, electing a Family First Senator when the preferred choice of the majority of Labor voters would have been a Greens Senator. It is fair to say that the will of the electorate was subverted by the wheeling and dealing created by ticket voting.

The deals that resulted in Labor winning a third seat in both South Australia and New South Wales at the expense of the Greens were essentially the same as the one that saw Family First elected in Victoria. At the final count in all three states, a Christian Party led the race for the final vacancy, Family First in South Australia and Victoria the Christian Democrats in NSW. In NSW and South Australia, the Greens failed to pass Labor, so Green preferences elected Labor senators. In Victoria, it was Labor that failed to catch the Greens, at which point Labor’s preference deal backfired and elected Family First.

Failed strategic deals have had a critical impact on the last two Legislative Council elections in Western Australia. In 2001, One Nation deprived itself of the balance of power in the Council by helping elect two Greens MLCs and giving the Greens the balance of power. In 2005, a decision by the National Party to swap preferences with the Greens in an attempt to gain an extra seat backfired and again delivered the balance of power to the Greens.

There are several different approaches that can be taken to overcome the democratic deficit created by group ticket voting. The first is to give voters more options to direct their own preferences, which will weaken the control parties have over preferences, making elections more reflective of the will of the electorate. The second is to change the way parties lodge ticket votes to discouraging micro-parties engaging in preference harvesting, and also to discourage larger parties from gambling with their preferences.

The easiest solution is optional preferential voting below the line, voters only having to fill in as many preferences as there are vacancies to fill. A second is to adopt the new NSW Legislative Council system, where voters are allowed to fill in their own preferences for parties above the line, again ideally using optional preferences. Both of these options give voters a much more manageable way of voting against the pre-determined preference tickets of parties.

The second approach would be to put an upper limit on the number of parties that could be included on a group ticket preference list. If a party could only give preferences to five other parties on the ballot paper, it would have two consequences. First, preference harvesting by micro parties would be made much more difficult. Second, with a limit on preferences, parties would be encouraged to list like minded parties on their preference tickets rather than gamble one of their precious preferences on a strategic deal.

The solutions above would all increase the number of exhausted preferences, which will weight the system against parties that rely on preference deals to get elected. This is not a controversial issue. An electoral system should encourage parties and candidates to campaign for votes rather than arrange deals with preferences.

Finally, the romantic would call for ticket voting to be abolished and Tasmania’s Hare-Clark system adopted. The first problem is that the quota at Tasmanian state elections is 10,000 voters compared to 550,000 in the NSW Senate. A very personal electoral system like Hare-Clark seems inappropriate for electing second chambers at conjoint elections. Second, any change must not result in a rise in informal voting, which despite its other faults, is one of the successes of group ticket voting.