23 October 2008

Election count - Where we're at

| johnboy
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Over on yesterday’s story Jimbocool has produced an analysis of where the crucial Molonglo count is up to today:

    “Ok – a productive morning has been spent doing some analysis. Now a big caveat here is that the interim distribution of preferences is still too early for my projections to be reliable, but for fun here they are:

    1)On the current preference flows the greens will end up with 1.743 quotas and the Libs 2.788 – indicating that the final seat is down to 0.045 quotas, roughly 490 votes. this also means that the winner of the final seat will not actually get a quota.

    2)At an individual level the fate of Caroline Le Couteur is determined by whether or not Elena stays ahead of Pangallo. If she doesn’t – most likely – then Caroline ends up on 0.653 quotas -7115 votes. If she does stay ahead of Pangallo – less likely – then Caroline ends up on 0.772 quotas – 8407 votes which is probably enough to outlast Jones

    3) I can’t do a remotely reliable projection of where Jones ends up on this distribution as Hanson is neither elected nor excluded. A very rough figure is 0.424 quotas -4616 votes- which is obviously wrong but perhaps indicates she’s behind

All you psephologists it’s your time to shine!

UPDATED: The ABC says the Liberals are still favoured for the final seat according to Antony Green

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Oh, and just to add – you could get the same effect if the above the line vote in the Senate meant a vote for the candidates in that column, in random order. That would 1) Allow above-the-line voting for people who don’t care about who in that party is elected, but also 2) take the power to decide who is elected from each party away from the party officials and give it to the electors who voted for that party.

verbalkint: The election last weekend right here had several instructive examples of incumbents (eg. Pratt) being turfed out in favour of newcomers from their own party.

Thanks sepi & caf! That’s all I needed for the proverbial penny to drop.

Not at all johnboy. I already said ‘sure’ to fnaah’s moral assertion. I was merely providing what I believe is the reason behind why the major parties don’t go out and talk about below the line voting.

If I have however misunderstood, I apologise and please point out my mistake (I’m not particularly well versed in Rawls).

verbalkint said :

The fact is that the people speak with their pencils every federal election and vote above the line because they want the parliament to be controlled by people who represent their values, and other than political leaders, they don’t care about the person who fills the suit that votes in the chamber for those values.

They do it because they’re lazy and stupid and the unnecessary requirement to completely number the ballot nudges them to be ever more so.

It’s not something to be encouraged.

Also to Jakez:

jakez said :

Sure. However a very important rule in politics is ‘don’t make it hard for people to vote for you’. If I were to be preselected as the Liberal candidate for the ACT senate, and went out with a convoluted pitch that included voting below the line, I’d lose the election.

…I’d probably lose the election anyway but I wouldn’t be helping matters. ;-P

Meaning you’re rather failing the veil of ignorance test no?

Yes but that can lead to dodgy preference deals and even fake parties.

Eg – the Motorists Party, or the Support Logging Party could be registered as a party, and their preferences could go straight to the Liberals.

They would never get their candidate in, and the people voting for that ‘idea’ have no concept that their vote is just a straight out vote for the liberal party.

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.

The people of Australia can vote below the line and change the people without changing the government, but most don’t care. If you look at the big vote grabbers, they are people that are known the electorate – Stanhop, Gallagher, Zed and previously Big Bill.

The effect is just the same as if we had above the line voting – they look for the people or party they know and put a 1 in it. It isnt anymore thought out, genuine or democratic, because they do it for a persons name rather than a party name.

The fact is that the people speak with their pencils every federal election and vote above the line because they want the parliament to be controlled by people who represent their values, and other than political leaders, they don’t care about the person who fills the suit that votes in the chamber for those values.

fnaah said :

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.

Sure. However a very important rule in politics is ‘don’t make it hard for people to vote for you’. If I were to be preselected as the Liberal candidate for the ACT senate, and went out with a convoluted pitch that included voting below the line, I’d lose the election.

…I’d probably lose the election anyway but I wouldn’t be helping matters. ;-P

areaman said :

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.

It doesn’t become that at all. You need ideas in order to inspire people to get to the polls. Can you seriously tell me that Australian elections are more about ideas than US elections? NZ elections? UK elections? I’d keep going but we are one of a very small number of countries that have compulsory voting.

Mrshmellowman: Hard to say really. US and UK are around the 50-60% mark roughly. NZ gets about 80% (they have compulsory registration but not compulsory voting). In Iraq they got about a 60-70% turnup to vote on the constitution and first elections even with the great threats of violence.

It doesn’t matter to me personally. Not showing up to vote is just as powerful a statement as voting in my book.

whistle said :

4 The graphs are easy to follow. Don’t claim you can follow the system if you cannot follow the graphs.

Rubbish. Don’t presume to tell people what they do or don’t or can and can’t understand with ease.

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.

Mrshmellowman3:57 pm 23 Oct 08

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.

Mrshmellowman3:48 pm 23 Oct 08

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.

Mrshmellowman2:52 pm 23 Oct 08

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.

Mrshmellowman2:39 pm 23 Oct 08

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”

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.

Mrshmellowman2:09 pm 23 Oct 08

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.

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