Election count - Where we're at

caf said :

jakez: Wouldn’t Optional Preferential Voting (where you can stop numbering preferences whenever you like) be a good enough sop to those who find it hard to understand?

I assume we’re talking about the Senate (and HoR if you want).

I would absolutely like to see that change happen. I think it would go a long way to making things easier for people. I’m not sure if I’d get rid of above the line, though even in that situation. Teetering on the edge.

Mrshmellowman said :

Unfortunately most people don’t see voting as an exciting and important demonstration of their right to choose – most people see it as an interruption of their Saturday
Maybe we should get rid of compulsory voting so only those with a real interest turn up and vote
I wonder how many would come?

Then it just becomes about who can bully and ship enough of thier voters to the polling place. Elections should be about ideas not logisitics.

Mate it sucks I know, but sometimes you just have to accept that the majority of people don’t give a sheizen.

That doesn’t make it right for a political party to take advantage of ignorance by courting people with the “ooh, it’s so easy to vote like this” line.

Unfortunately most people don’t see voting as an exciting and important demonstration of their right to choose – most people see it as an interruption of their Saturday
Maybe we should get rid of compulsory voting so only those with a real interest turn up and vote
I wonder how many would come?

jakez: Wouldn’t Optional Preferential Voting (where you can stop numbering preferences whenever you like) be a good enough sop to those who find it hard to understand?

johnboy said :

A noble defence of a corrupt system Verbalkint.

Convenience is a poor substitute for democracy.

The practice of the current system, rather than whatever justification you drag up for it, is that the composition of a house of parliament, and a house of review no less, is determined by the party executives rather than the electorates.

Very handy for party executives, notso hotso for the rest of us.

Mate it sucks I know, but sometimes you just have to accept that the majority of people don’t give a sheizen.

Caf
Thankyou
Thankyou
Thankyou

It finally makes sense with a real life example

whistle said :

A few myths:

1 Preference deals don’t apply in Hare Clark, they only apply to its sister system the Senate voting system (another variant of the STV family).
2 Those who claim they “pick up” Hare Clark right away are usually wrong, whether they realise or not. eg: They would not know in which cases you redistribute the last bundle assigned to a candidate and in which cases you redistribute from the first bundle.
3 Not all votes are fractionalised – this is only the case where a vote starts with a candidate who topped quota.
4 The graphs are easy to follow. Don’t claim you can follow the system if you cannot follow the graphs.

Can you please explain why these are each myths?

Arty said :

Jakez, I would be surprised if you picked anything up quickly.

Like a dagger through my heart. Who is this clown?

Spectra said :

Nothing shits me more than voting for my prefered candidate and finding out later that they had a preference deal with someone I particularly dispise!

If that happens, you have nobody to blame but yourself. Nobody forces you to follow the how-to-vote cards, or to put a 1 “above the line”. Your preferences are yours to distribute, and it’s only by choice that you put them at the mercy of “preference deals”. And even if numbering all the boxes is all too much effort, the preference distributions are publicly published before the election. If you can’t be bothered spending the time to be an informed voter, that’s nobody else’s fault.

I absolutely agree.

johnboy said :

The existence of the above the line voting for the senate, however, remains a crime against the people and the spirit of the constitution. Perpetrated by the major parties.

Mate I used to think the exact same thing until I actually had to help people with how to vote. A gigantic amount of people (especially old people) find voting extremely difficult to understand. The above the line gives them an easy way to do it. I vote below the line and encourage others to do so, but I certainly don’t have as much animosity to it as I used to.

Arty said :

Don’t waste time on the “un representative swill”. Vote above the line.

A noble defence of a corrupt system Verbalkint.

Convenience is a poor substitute for democracy.

The practice of the current system, rather than whatever justification you drag up for it, is that the composition of a house of parliament, and a house of review no less, is determined by the party executives rather than the electorates.

Very handy for party executives, notso hotso for the rest of us.

verbalkint: The advantage of the system we have in the ACT is that voters can change their government (& opposition) representatives without changing the government – so it has some of the effect of the US system of party primaries.

Dante: See sepi’s post. An example from the AEC’s latest data for Molonglo:

A quota at the moment here is 4111 votes. In the initial count of first preferences, Zed has 6140 votes and Katy has 4847 votes, so they both get elected – Zed with an excess of 2029 votes and Katy with an excess of 736.

Here’s the “Step 1.5”. Out of Zed’s 6140 ballot papers, 6032 gave a second preference, so these all have to get redistributed – but the total value of them has to be only 2029, so each of these redistributed ballots is only worth 2029 / 6032 ~= 0.34 of a vote, to whoever gets them. Similarly, all of the 4789 ballots for Katy that gave a second preference get distributed, but each one is only worth 736 / 4789 ~= 0.15 of a vote.

The AEC’s “Table 1” tells us (in the line marked “Count 2”) that of those 6032 ballots for Zed, 1219 gave their second preference to Jacqui Burke. So that gets multipled by 0.34, to give Jacqui Burke 410 more votes (which you can see in the AEC’s “Table 2”).

if “the people” hated above the line voting, they would choose to vote below the line.

When they have the toption of voting on party lines or with freedom of choice, they overwhelmigly choose to vote on party lines.

Above the line voting is

– the preferred method of the huge majority of people people choose to vote
– better for candidates (because they dont have to run against each other when in the same party)
– can attract better candidates (the current system means that smart, well qualified people need to spend their whole time making people remember their name and makes it very hard to attract good people from outside the normal political system)
– better for parties (because they can focus on running against the other team, not building name recognition)
– fair and democratic (votes are counted in the same way)

I have no idea why anyone would prefer the current system over above the line voting, unless they were an independant who used to be on radio, because this system doesnt work for independants, it doesnt work for the major parties and it doesnt let people vote in a way that they clearly prefer.

This is why we need how to vote cards – and parties allowed closer to polling – how many people have the first idea about how their really vote works?!

Don’t waste time on the “un representative swill”. Vote above the line.

I usually vote below the line as well
I do the good ones first and then the worst ones and fill in the middle at random

I always vote below the line. I’ve normally got nothing better to do.

You could argue the entire party system is against the spirit of the constitution because political parties aren’t mentioned in it…

The existence of the above the line voting for the senate, however, remains a crime against the people and the spirit of the constitution. Perpetrated by the major parties.

Nothing shits me more than voting for my prefered candidate and finding out later that they had a preference deal with someone I particularly dispise!

If that happens, you have nobody to blame but yourself. Nobody forces you to follow the how-to-vote cards, or to put a 1 “above the line”. Your preferences are yours to distribute, and it’s only by choice that you put them at the mercy of “preference deals”. And even if numbering all the boxes is all too much effort, the preference distributions are publicly published before the election. If you can’t be bothered spending the time to be an informed voter, that’s nobody else’s fault.

Whistle
I was saying that it was good that preference deals don’t apply to Hare-Clark

Maybe a little less angry yes?

5 The “graphs” are called tables – not “graphs”

Phil Green explains the distribution in this video:
http://www.canberravotes.com/2008/10/mr-phillip-green-act-electoral-commissioner-17-october-2008/

A few myths:

1 Preference deals don’t apply in Hare Clark, they only apply to its sister system the Senate voting system (another variant of the STV family).
2 Those who claim they “pick up” Hare Clark right away are usually wrong, whether they realise or not. eg: They would not know in which cases you redistribute the last bundle assigned to a candidate and in which cases you redistribute from the first bundle.
3 Not all votes are fractionalised – this is only the case where a vote starts with a candidate who topped quota.
4 The graphs are easy to follow. Don’t claim you can follow the system if you cannot follow the graphs.

The up side of the Hare-Clark is that we don’t have to worry about preference deals between the parties. Nothing shits me more than voting for my prefered candidate and finding out later that they had a preference deal with someone I particularly dispise!
In the ACT, I can direct my preferences where I want them, even if they are worth 1/3 of a vote (thanks Sepi).

jakez said :

Sepi has it. I picked up the system pretty much straight away so it’s hard for me to help people with their problems, however I’ve noticed a lot of people don’t know how it works.

It has its structural flaws but every system does. I would like to know what the knockers would prefer.

I’ve lied most of my life in Victoria, and though I know all systems have flaws this Hare-Clark system has my mind boggling. The time it takes to work out, the way candidates with a tiny proportion of votes can win, and the instability that seems to be a consequence of it are all things that make me wince. But this is my first election here in the ACT, so maybe with time I’ll get used to it…?

Jakez, I would be surprised if you picked anything up quickly.

Thanks Jimbocool, my only concern is that the average punter is not interested politics and I’m pretty sure the average voter has no idea which political party is pushing which policy, sure they may have a general idea what the parties stand for, but if you went down the street now and asked the first 10 people what they thought about the Greens transport policy? You would get a blank look and then maybe something along the lines of they want more buses; that would be the extent of the detail. The more complicated the voting system the more likely people will disengage further from the political system. Further example of this is the number of people not enrolled to vote, it is amazing!

The various discussions on this topic have certainly helped me grasp the system better, though I’m with Sepi – I don’t follow the tables on the Elections ACT website at all.

Sepi has it. I picked up the system pretty much straight away so it’s hard for me to help people with their problems, however I’ve noticed a lot of people don’t know how it works.

It has its structural flaws but every system does. I would like to know what the knockers would prefer.

Redistribution of preferences is hard to understand, because they are distributed as tiny percentages of a vote, not as whole votes.

So – if a quota is 100 votes, and Shane Rattenbury gets 150 votes, there are 50 votes worth of votes to redistribute. (Not just 50 votes, cos they go back to everyone’s vote to see their second preference. TKs Jimbo for that!)

SO – of the 150 votes, 1/3 is excess, not needed to get Shane in, so each second preference is now worth 1/3 of a vote.

So if a 1/3 of Shane’s second preferences went to Green Caroline L, she gets 1/3 of 50 votes added to her existing total.

All the other second preferences in Shane’s pile of votes also get valued at 1/3 of a vote and passed on to the name second on that ballot paper.

Clear as mud hey!

I am starting to vaguely understand the theory of the system. I can’t follow the numbers in the graphs to save myself though.

So it’s magic then? I just can’t seeing in being that big a difference considering the small transfer values of anyone who isn’t Zed or Katy.

Areaman, the short answer is that the Green-destined preferences travel more efficiently the longer the Greens stay in the count. The effect is worth about 1,000 votes by my calculation so significant. The long answer involves half a page of handwritten calculations which would be tedious to reproduce here.

Granny & Arty – the confusion isn’t helped by the media picking up the daily fluctuations in the count and breathlessly reporting that ‘so and so is now in trouble’- Simon Corbell is not in any trouble. Nothing in the last couple of days changes the most likely outcome from being 7,7,3. The race for the final seat in Molonglo is very tight, though so there is a chance of 7,6,4.

caf: the basics are easy enough to understand, it’s the redistribution of preferences that doesn’t seem to be clearly explained anywhere… I’ve discussed this with mates many times this week, trying to grasp how these votes can be used a second time.

Anyone care to explain step 1.5?

Yeah … no … I’m with Arty.

It’s not really. Basically, to get elected you need to get a quota of votes in your pile. In Molonglo, a quota is 12.5% of valid votes cast.

You start by putting votes into candidates piles based on the first preference. You then:

1. Declare anyone with more than a quota in their pile elected, and distribute their excess votes to the next-preferenced candidates (repeat as necessary);

2. Knock out the candidate with the lowest number of votes in their pile, and distribute those to the piles of the next-preferenced candidates, then go back to step 1.

The major complication is that in step 1, you have to redistribute *all* the votes, but their value is diminished because they’ve already used up some of their “electing power” getting that candidate elected. But that’s the basics.

For a voting system that is supposed to be the most democratic it is bloody hard to understand!

Repost from the last thread:

Jimbo, I’m still not really understanding why you’re concerned about when the third green gets knocked out. Is it just controlling leakage within the greens? Surely any Pangello preference that was going to one of the greens will go to to any other still in.