Election reform in Western Australia

[pedanther]

I was in the servo yesterday grabbing a bite when my eye was caught by the front page of the local paper, done up in black and announcing the Death of Regional Representation.

Wow, I thought, that's a bit dramatic, even by their usual standards for talking about whether the state government is paying enough attention to the regions.

It comes about that the government has announced its proposals for overhauling upper house elections in the state. This has been in the works for a while, but in the event some of the proposed changes go further than a lot of people were expecting.

Here's election analyst Antony Green on the proposed changes: what's going to change, why these changes, and which parts he thinks are good or bad.

(I still think the local paper was being a drama llama about it, but now I can understand the impulse.)

Comments

[igenlode]

I'm a bit flabbergasted by the idea of a ballot paper three feet wide....!

What is 'informal voting', and why are people trying to cut it?

[pedanther]

And now, if you weren't already, try to picture a ballot paper three feet wide where you have to number a set of boxes from 1 to 264, without doubling up any numbers or missing any out...

...there's a reason one of the recurring topics on my 'politics' tag is of finding tools to figure out and double-check the numbering at home before heading to the ballot box.

And this actually brings us naturally to the question about informal voting. An informal vote is one that can't be counted because the voter hasn't filled in the ballot paper correctly, for example if they've only marked one box when they were supposed to number all the boxes... or if they did number all the boxes, but put in 17 twice and missed out 18. The issue of cutting informal voting is about designing the voting process to reduce the risk of people making mistakes like that.

(There's also the kind of informal vote where the ballot paper has "All pollies is bastids" scrawled over it and none of the boxes numbered, because the law says you have to hand in a ballot paper but it doesn't say you can't deliberately mess it up as a form of protest. But that's going to happen regardless of how the ballots are designed.)

I should probably say something about the fact that, strictly speaking, numbering every single box on the senate ballot is not required, just arguably better than the current alternative. This comment is already quite long, but I can go into that in another comment if you're interested.

[igenlode]

Oh right, so informal voting corresponds to what we called 'spoiled ballot papers' -- either defaced or simply filled in wrongly (i.e. an attempt to vote for more than one candidate at the same time...!)

And now, if you weren't already, try to picture a ballot paper three feet wide where you have to number a set of boxes from 1 to 264, without doubling up any numbers or missing any out...

I knew that Australia had a compulsory voting law, which I always felt was quite a good idea, but now I think I see why it was felt to be necessary :-(

I can't imagine being able to make any sort of meaningful choice under those circumstances -- too many possibilities, too little information. (It's bad enough trying to select four from a set of a dozen or so committee candidates based simply on the little blurb they supplied in the voting guide... which of course is ultimately only an indication of how good they are at writing little blurbs and not how good they would be on the committee, although you can usually spot the absolute cranks and monomaniacs.)

[pedanther]

As I alluded to in my previous comment, there is actually an alternative to numbering every single box, but it has its own problems. I personally choose to number every box as a matter of principle -- although I suspect I'd buckle if faced with 264 candidates (which is the record, and remains a famous outlier; the largest senate ballot I've personally had to face was a relatively svelte 79 candidates).

I should say that the phenomenon of ginormous senate ballots is actually a fairly recent phenomenon that's only blown up in the last couple of decades -- ironically as an unintended consequence of a system that was supposed to make things easier for voters.

Under the current system, Australian senate ballot papers are divided into two sections, referred to as "above the line" and "below the line", and they're effectively two different ballot papers: the voter fills in one section or the other. Below the line is the ballot paper we've been talking about, with the list of candidates that has to be fully ranked.

Above the line is a list of the parties that have put the candidates forward, and all the voter has to do is put a mark next to a single party.

As you can imagine, this is much easier for voters to understand and execute, and a vast number of people vote above the line at each election. Unfortunately, the mechanics of how a single mark is translated into the equivalent of a fully ranked below-the-line vote has some weird side-effects.

One way the side-effects have manifested is in a disproportionate chance for independents and single-issue candidates to gain seats despite very few people voting for them directly (which in turn has led to more independents and single-issue candidates standing for election, which is one of the drivers of the huge ballot papers). The current poster boy for this effect is Wilson Tucker, who stood for the most recent WA election with a single announced policy, received only 98 first-preference votes from an electorate of over 50,000, and still gained a seat.

And so one set of changes in the proposed election form is to remove that option from WA senate ballots and replace it with an option where voters only have to number some of the candidates: enough to indicate who you'd like to get in, but with the option to leave off at a certain point and leave the rest of the boxes blank, indicating that you don't want any of them and don't care to quantify which you dislike the most. (Basically the same option was added for federal senate elections a few years ago, and I'm not enough of an election wonk to say whether it made the results more valid and reliable, but it certainly made the task of filling in the ballot much easier.)