Proportional representation - Xanadu

Mysteryman said :

rubaiyat said :

Mysteryman said :

rubaiyat said :

Here is who exercises far too much power power:

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

Neither deserve to have government in their own right

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

Where did you get those numbers from? They aren’t accurate.

The coalition had roughly 46% of all votes in the House of Reps. In each electorate they won, they received the largest share of the votes. Since government is formed by the team that wins the most electorates, it makes perfect sense that they became the government. The Greens actually received *less* than 9% of all the votes (down on previous year, in fact). Less than 1/10 people in every electorate (except Melbourne) wanted to be represented by the Greens. Why should they have won any more than a single seat?

Minorities get the seats they win fair and square. They just don’t win many seats. That’s not a flaw of the electoral system, it’s a flaw of the minority parties.

Just noticed, you seem to have the wrong end of the stick.

This discussion is about the ACT.

You’re absolutely right! I was wondering how those numbers got to be.

Thanks.

If you ever get the chance volunteer for booth duty!

One of the best things I’ve ever done and I tend to volunteer a lot.

rubaiyat said :

Mysteryman said :

rubaiyat said :

Here is who exercises far too much power power:

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

Neither deserve to have government in their own right

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

Where did you get those numbers from? They aren’t accurate.

The coalition had roughly 46% of all votes in the House of Reps. In each electorate they won, they received the largest share of the votes. Since government is formed by the team that wins the most electorates, it makes perfect sense that they became the government. The Greens actually received *less* than 9% of all the votes (down on previous year, in fact). Less than 1/10 people in every electorate (except Melbourne) wanted to be represented by the Greens. Why should they have won any more than a single seat?

Minorities get the seats they win fair and square. They just don’t win many seats. That’s not a flaw of the electoral system, it’s a flaw of the minority parties.

Just noticed, you seem to have the wrong end of the stick.

This discussion is about the ACT.

You’re absolutely right! I was wondering how those numbers got to be.

Thanks.

Mysteryman said :

rubaiyat said :

Here is who exercises far too much power power:

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

Neither deserve to have government in their own right

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

Where did you get those numbers from? They aren’t accurate.

The coalition had roughly 46% of all votes in the House of Reps. In each electorate they won, they received the largest share of the votes. Since government is formed by the team that wins the most electorates, it makes perfect sense that they became the government. The Greens actually received *less* than 9% of all the votes (down on previous year, in fact). Less than 1/10 people in every electorate (except Melbourne) wanted to be represented by the Greens. Why should they have won any more than a single seat?

Minorities get the seats they win fair and square. They just don’t win many seats. That’s not a flaw of the electoral system, it’s a flaw of the minority parties.

Just noticed, you seem to have the wrong end of the stick.

This discussion is about the ACT.

The House of Reps (Federal) does not use a proportional voting system.

The ACT has an extremely sophisticated modified Hare Clarke system which uses a Multi-Seat Electorate system, combining the best of representational and proportional voting with ingenius modifications to make it fairer.

Strictly speaking it is not proportional, although the result is somewhat similar.

Preferential voting and a rotated candidate list on the ballot paper prevents Parties pushing a particular candidate over others.

I also love that Parties are banned from handing out How-to-Vote material or loitering within 100 metres of polling stations.

Doesn’t stop the Parties doing their damnedest to cheat or manipulate the system to their own advantage, just slows them down.

I was a polling captain at one election and helped people who had to cast votes in all sorts of exceptional circumstances. We had observers from 4 other countries and I was so proud that they got to witness just how impartial and civilly it is handled in this country. If only we could get the UK and USA to observe, it would be a real eye opener.

Looks like quite a few Australians would benefit as well.

“You never know what you had till its gone” – Joni Mitchell

Mysteryman said :

rubaiyat said :

Here is who exercises far too much power power:

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

Neither deserve to have government in their own right

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

Where did you get those numbers from? They aren’t accurate.

The coalition had roughly 46% of all votes in the House of Reps. In each electorate they won, they received the largest share of the votes. Since government is formed by the team that wins the most electorates, it makes perfect sense that they became the government. The Greens actually received *less* than 9% of all the votes (down on previous year, in fact). Less than 1/10 people in every electorate (except Melbourne) wanted to be represented by the Greens. Why should they have won any more than a single seat?

Minorities get the seats they win fair and square. They just don’t win many seats. That’s not a flaw of the electoral system, it’s a flaw of the minority parties.

chttp://www.elections.act.gov.au/elections_and_voting/past_act_legislative_assembly_elections/2012_act_legislative_assembly_election/2012_election_results2

Liberal 86,032 38.9%
Labor 85,991 38.9%
Greens 23,773 10.7%
Australian Motorist Party 9,179 4.2%
Bullet Train for Canberra 8,864 4.0%
Independent 4,053 1.8%
Liberal Democratic Party 2,340 1.1%
Marion Lê Social Justice 940 0.4%
Total 221,172

I wasn’t disputing the results, just pointing out that the claim that the Greens had a disproportionate power/representation was obviously not true.

rubaiyat said :

Here is who exercises far too much power power:

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

Neither deserve to have government in their own right

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

Where did you get those numbers from? They aren’t accurate.

The coalition had roughly 46% of all votes in the House of Reps. In each electorate they won, they received the largest share of the votes. Since government is formed by the team that wins the most electorates, it makes perfect sense that they became the government. The Greens actually received *less* than 9% of all the votes (down on previous year, in fact). Less than 1/10 people in every electorate (except Melbourne) wanted to be represented by the Greens. Why should they have won any more than a single seat?

Minorities get the seats they win fair and square. They just don’t win many seats. That’s not a flaw of the electoral system, it’s a flaw of the minority parties.

watto23 said :

Grail said :

It is Democracy itself, not any particular voting system, which is the Xanadu fantasy based on the delusion that all voters are informed, can make a rational decision, and care enough to do so.

Yes Democracy itself is a flawed system, but also what is ideal for someone, is a nightmare for others. Its based on compromise, something many politicians forget.

The real issues with democracy in Australia is:

1. Policies are based around who donates to your political party, regardless of the policy and whether its good for the country or the people. It is then “sold” to the public to gain approval. Fortunately we are not as bad as the USA with regards to this.

2. The voting system means that ultimately one of the 2 major parties often wins a seat. Now I understand why it is preferential. The goal being to find the preferred candidate from a majority. However how many people donkey vote to avoid voting, or don’t wish to give any preference to a party? I prefer exhaustive preferential system, whereby if i only want to preference 3 candidates then that is all I have to do without risk of my preference helping someone get elected.

3. The last few governments, the politics has been all negative. Pretty much every policy gets opposed. Some really did need to be opposed because what they were being “sold” to the public to do, had nothing to do with why they were being introduced. But others should have involved negotiation. I’m not sure the current government knows how to negotiate. they are very good at laying blame on everyone else though.

+1

Grail said :

It is Democracy itself, not any particular voting system, which is the Xanadu fantasy based on the delusion that all voters are informed, can make a rational decision, and care enough to do so.

Yes Democracy itself is a flawed system, but also what is ideal for someone, is a nightmare for others. Its based on compromise, something many politicians forget.

The real issues with democracy in Australia is:

1. Policies are based around who donates to your political party, regardless of the policy and whether its good for the country or the people. It is then “sold” to the public to gain approval. Fortunately we are not as bad as the USA with regards to this.

2. The voting system means that ultimately one of the 2 major parties often wins a seat. Now I understand why it is preferential. The goal being to find the preferred candidate from a majority. However how many people donkey vote to avoid voting, or don’t wish to give any preference to a party? I prefer exhaustive preferential system, whereby if i only want to preference 3 candidates then that is all I have to do without risk of my preference helping someone get elected.

3. The last few governments, the politics has been all negative. Pretty much every policy gets opposed. Some really did need to be opposed because what they were being “sold” to the public to do, had nothing to do with why they were being introduced. But others should have involved negotiation. I’m not sure the current government knows how to negotiate. they are very good at laying blame on everyone else though.

switch said :

I meant that your second preference etc. did NOT count as a full vote, which better reflects I didn’t vote them Number One.

Why not go for the Koranic system as well. Women’s vote is only half that of a man, and the infidel’s is zero.

Ignoring that there is no proportion of the vote that should not count. You simply couldn’t get first choice, so the next choice will have to do.

For people who can’t count and can’t get their heads around such a basically simple system, there is the French Presidential system, where you vote once, then if that doesn’t pan out you all go back and vote again another time, without the first round candidates that din’t get a high enough vote.

Apparently we Australians are a mixed bunch, some smart enough to create the more efficient method and the others not smart enough to get what is going on.

rubaiyat said :

In the USA, the UK and other so called “democracies” if you don’t vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee you are throwing away your vote and being disenfranchised.

Perhaps you could point us towards countries with ‘real’ democracies then?
Presumably in your world a real democracy is where minor parties with small percentages of the votes actually win elections? (And presumably where the minor party is YOUR party, of course)

rubaiyat said :

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

I think you need to take a breath and read what you wrote; ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’ received a total of 88% of the vote, your team got 11%, and for some reason you think your team should NOT be ‘voted down on most issues’?

What do you think SHOULD happen? Should they be allowed to make 11% of the decisions?

And If you vote for a team that lost, you are not ‘disenfranchised’ , you just voted for a team that lost. Someone has to.

I for one am glad that I live in a place where even self-righteous zealots who believe ‘their’ party has a moral right to tell everyone what to do, has to have face the voters every few years. The fact that the Greens hover around the 10% confirms my belief in the collective good sense of the electorate.

rubaiyat said :

rubaiyat said :

Here is who exercises far too much power power:

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

Neither deserve to have government in their own right

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

Or to put it another way:

The Greens got OVER 1/4 of the votes of either Labor or the Liberals but only 1/8th the representation in the Legislative Assembly.

When the government meets, Shane Rattenbury faces twice as many Labor members as got votes compared with him.

And in the 2008 election, the Greens had four seats off a 15.8% vote compared to Labor’s 7 and the Liberal’s 6 despite both major party’s vote being significantly above those ratios proportionally when compared to the Greens.

rubaiyat said :

Here is who exercises far too much power power:

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

Neither deserve to have government in their own right

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

Or to put it another way:

The Greens got OVER 1/4 of the votes of either Labor or the Liberals but only 1/8th the representation in the Legislative Assembly.

When the government meets, Shane Rattenbury faces twice as many Labor members as got votes compared with him.

rubaiyat said :

justin heywood said :

switch said :

….weighted voting so your 2nd preference counted as only half a vote etc..

Now that is a good idea.

For heavens sake.

You are not getting “extra” votes, it is the same vote, just your first choices are being eliminated if they don’t get enough to count.

Really is it that difficult to follow?

I meant that your second preference etc. did NOT count as a full vote, which better reflects I didn’t vote them Number One. Painful to do by hand, which is why it isn’t done that way as well as inertia in changing anything to do with the voting system. Not a problem with computer voting, but that’s a long way off (local experiments with computer voting in ACT elections are a joke and don’t count. Tried it last time, never again).

rubaiyat said :

It is so people can genuinely choose who they want, and not have to second guess what everyone else might be doing.

In the USA, the UK and other so called “democracies” if you don’t vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee you are throwing away your vote and being disenfranchised.

The “You must number every square” that is the law in most elections in Australia ENSURES either Tweedledum or Tweedledee will be elected. Unless there is a really popular Independent for a term or two.

I will give you a typical example of what the voter “wants” and “thinks”.

I helped out a Senate (unelected) candidate at her meet and greets around Canberra to watch people demand that she do something about the garbage collection!

She was apparently to blame for the noisy trucks in the morning!

I apologise if that may have been you.

justin heywood said :

rubaiyat said :

justin heywood said :

switch said :

….weighted voting so your 2nd preference counted as only half a vote etc..

Now that is a good idea.

For heavens sake.

You are not getting “extra” votes, it is the same vote, just your first choices are being eliminated if they don’t get enough to count.

Really is it that difficult to follow?

It is so people can genuinely choose who they want, and not have to second guess what everyone else might be doing.

In the USA, the UK and other so called “democracies” if you don’t vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee you are throwing away your vote and being disenfranchised.

I understand it perfectly well. What you seem to fail to understand is that the majority actually want ‘Tweeledum or Tweedledee’, and the fact that minor parties such as the Greens are happy to exercise power far beyond their electoral mandate (as is the case in the ACT), means that reforms are needed.

Here is who exercises far too much power power:

Labor and Liberals both with only 38.9% of the vote but each with 47% of the seats.

Neither deserve to have government in their own right

The Greens got 10.7% of the votes to only get one seat and they get to be voted down by Labor on most issues.

rubaiyat said :

justin heywood said :

switch said :

….weighted voting so your 2nd preference counted as only half a vote etc..

Now that is a good idea.

For heavens sake.

You are not getting “extra” votes, it is the same vote, just your first choices are being eliminated if they don’t get enough to count.

Really is it that difficult to follow?

It is so people can genuinely choose who they want, and not have to second guess what everyone else might be doing.

In the USA, the UK and other so called “democracies” if you don’t vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee you are throwing away your vote and being disenfranchised.

I understand it perfectly well. What you seem to fail to understand is that the majority actually want ‘Tweeledum or Tweedledee’, and the fact that minor parties such as the Greens are happy to exercise power far beyond their electoral mandate (as is the case in the ACT), means that reforms are needed.

….and I’m not surprised the Green Lefties are against reform. Under the current set up, they wield an awful lot of power for a fringe outfit on 10% of the vote.

Single member electorates work best for the single conservative candidate campaigning against a number of “progressive” candidates. The conservative (representing the dogmatic views of a small proportion of the population) only needs 1 more vote than the next contender. This isn’t hard to arrange, as shown in our last election with the Liberal facade “Animal Justice Party”.

It is Democracy itself, not any particular voting system, which is the Xanadu fantasy based on the delusion that all voters are informed, can make a rational decision, and care enough to do so.

justin heywood said :

switch said :

….weighted voting so your 2nd preference counted as only half a vote etc..

Now that is a good idea.

For heavens sake.

You are not getting “extra” votes, it is the same vote, just your first choices are being eliminated if they don’t get enough to count.

Really is it that difficult to follow?

It is so people can genuinely choose who they want, and not have to second guess what everyone else might be doing.

In the USA, the UK and other so called “democracies” if you don’t vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee you are throwing away your vote and being disenfranchised.

switch said :

….weighted voting so your 2nd preference counted as only half a vote etc..

Now that is a good idea.

Optional preferential voting, so your vote exhausts before voting for a major party. Ban “above the line” in the Senate election. Or weighted voting so your 2nd preference counted as only half a vote etc. You’d need computer voting for this one to work, and no doubt endless committees to work out a suitable weighting system, so don’t expect it any time soon.

rosscoact said :

dungfungus said :

rubaiyat said :

I was unaware that God was responsible for the Act Electoral System, if so I must take out time to personally thank him.

I have noticed, I just can’t help it, that with the existing system we have ended up with endless Liberal/Labor ministers! That was a good idea, wasn’t it?

But from your piece I take it that you much prefer that Party hacks be pre-selected for Individual seats because that will stop the electors actually choosing whomever THEY want?

Then they can go to the person they didn’t vote for, or want, in the hope that they will be sympathetic to their cause?

Hmmm. Not sure about that one John.

Wrong!
MInister Rattenbury is neither Liberal or Labor, he is Green.

I’m not sure that ‘endless’ can be construed as ‘exclusively’ Dungers

Well if that’s the case, before Rattenbury was a Minister it couldn’t be referred to as “endless” either.

Looking at our electoral results since the early 1900s, there has only once been a decisive majority [only just over 50%] who voted in favor of a party on first preferences. Basically, in my opinion, that means that we have only once had a government that a majority of Australians voted for. Every other time we had a government who represented the minority. Do you call that a fair system, when decisions made by our leaders are for the benefit of less than half of the voters? It has gotten so low that less than a third of the voters got who they voted for.
Presently we have a Liberal government, elected by only 30.08% of the country on first preferences and only in power because they allied with the Nationals. On their own they would have lost, but thanks to our “second chance” system, they hold the reigns. In the A.C.T we didn’t even have a candidate for the Nationals and 42% of us wanted Labor in power. Yes, we may have ended up with them locally, but federally we have whom 58% of Canberra and 69.92% of Australia as a whole didn’t want.
I just don’t understand a system where the loser ends up winning the election, only because they keep on counting till the preferences run out. Eventually a voter will run out of “preferences” on their ballot paper and have to vote for the “other guy”, or party’s preferences get allocated on their behalf, still eventually giving the other side points. With this system the numbers can be stacked to give a party a winning edge.
This present democracy has given us a dysfunctional government, incapable of following through with its plans due to the numbers opposing them being greater. Nobody wins, we all lose.
It’s time for something fairer, something not designed by English centuries ago that doesn’t work properly. Dictatorship as an example would at least give someone power enough to make changes, because without that power the leader and their party is useless, rendering the entire country useless.

dungfungus said :

rubaiyat said :

I was unaware that God was responsible for the Act Electoral System, if so I must take out time to personally thank him.

I have noticed, I just can’t help it, that with the existing system we have ended up with endless Liberal/Labor ministers! That was a good idea, wasn’t it?

But from your piece I take it that you much prefer that Party hacks be pre-selected for Individual seats because that will stop the electors actually choosing whomever THEY want?

Then they can go to the person they didn’t vote for, or want, in the hope that they will be sympathetic to their cause?

Hmmm. Not sure about that one John.

Wrong!
MInister Rattenbury is neither Liberal or Labor, he is Green.

I’m not sure that ‘endless’ can be construed as ‘exclusively’ Dungers

justin heywood said :

Can you give me an example where you or any other member put the will of his/her electorate first – that is where a member went against his own party and his own personal view to champion the cause of his/her electorate?

Well to be fair Zed Seselja did want a pool in Lanyon valley while running in the last ACT election, but he showed just how much he supported the valley and quit ACT politics to chase his own dreams and ambitions. But yes the electorates are basically there to make the voting forms smaller in the ACT, which I don’t have a real issue with.

There is a definite problem of electing people to serve the people, but ultimately serving themselves in this country. I’m not sure there are any viable alternatives except for a system that makes it fair to all who stand for election vs just the two major parties.

The ACT system generally works well in that its hard for a party to gain a majority and that means working with independents and other parties. Which is needed for a single house government.

But for every stone thrown at how a senator gets elected from a minor party on preferences, that same stone can be thrown at a political party as well, with many members of both houses getting elected on preferences also.

rubaiyat said :

I was unaware that God was responsible for the Act Electoral System, if so I must take out time to personally thank him.

I have noticed, I just can’t help it, that with the existing system we have ended up with endless Liberal/Labor ministers! That was a good idea, wasn’t it?

But from your piece I take it that you much prefer that Party hacks be pre-selected for Individual seats because that will stop the electors actually choosing whomever THEY want?

Then they can go to the person they didn’t vote for, or want, in the hope that they will be sympathetic to their cause?

Hmmm. Not sure about that one John.

Wrong!
MInister Rattenbury is neither Liberal or Labor, he is Green.

I was unaware that God was responsible for the Act Electoral System, if so I must take out time to personally thank him.

I have noticed, I just can’t help it, that with the existing system we have ended up with endless Liberal/Labor ministers! That was a good idea, wasn’t it?

But from your piece I take it that you much prefer that Party hacks be pre-selected for Individual seats because that will stop the electors actually choosing whomever THEY want?

Then they can go to the person they didn’t vote for, or want, in the hope that they will be sympathetic to their cause?

Hmmm. Not sure about that one John.

Correct me if I misunderstand the issue John, but it seems to me that doing away with proportional representation would require either much smaller electorates or many fewer politicians.
In a tiny jursisdiction like the ACT, is there a point to having electorates at all? Why not do away with the largely arbitrary electoral boundaries and elect the 20 or so people who score the most votes?
In the ACT, the reality is;

– the senior people in whichever party is elected make the important decisions, and they tend to think well beyond the boundaries of the various electorates
– once elected, it appears to me that members primarily think in terms of what is best for their party first, their personal predilections second and their actual electorate a distant third.

Can you give me an example where you or any other member put the will of his/her electorate first – that is where a member went against his own party and his own personal view to champion the cause of his/her electorate?

These tiny electorates serve no purpose. They are an anachronistic relic of the days of horse and cart and the wireless telegraph.

Until we have complete reform of our antiquated British system into something that doesn’t give a losing candidate a second, third, fourth and fifth chance to get in, we will see forever the two major parties with most of the power. The independents will come and go, having a little sway, but as is the case right now nobody will have the power to fulfill their election promises. Perhaps the problem is that with only two parties to choose from [apart from the silly one-off and the Greens] in your local electorate, the odds are that one of those will ultimately be in charge. The numbers are stacked to favor either major party. The other parties don’t have enough seats and never will with our current system, so we will always have either Labour or Liberal, neither of which has a great deal of difference in their policies anyway. You can see why voters are becoming more and more apathetic about governance and voting. The numbers across the country rarely see a great swing to give either one any real credibility and never enough that a majority of the population isn’t opposed to the elected leader.
There it is! The system where the winner is disliked by more people than actually voted for them. The winner actually got less than 50% of the votes. A party that has so many obstacles to get a simple change through parliament, that it becomes absolutely useless and cannot govern the nation.
Reform is definitely needed, but there needs to be a candidate or a party which also has policies that appeal to more than half the country, or otherwise they will always be doing the wrong thing by the majority of the people they lead.

It depends if you support party politics or not. I personally find no party reflects my views and I often feel for elected party members serving in government being told to vote a certain way.

So its entirely possible to have issues where both liberal and labor do not support it because the party power brokers don’t support it, yet a significant portion of the public do, but still vote for one of the major parties.

The current federal government are very good at complaining about the senate, but at the same time they are pushing some pretty extreme right wing policies. Now i bet they’d have been happy when the senate blocked some of the more extreme left wing policies in the past.

What I think we really need is the ability to not preference every party/candidate. If we only had to vote for 5 people at the next ACT election and the top 5 vote getters are elected, that would be fairer system. It would hurt political parties though who both rely on the quota getting of high profile candidates. Zed at the last election won 2 liberal seats in Brindabella. If it had of been the top 5 vote getters it would have been 2 libs and either 3 lab or 2 lab and a green. Similar thing happened in the other 2 seats. the five most popular candidates didn’t get elected.

We’ll never change the preferential voting though, because the two major parties are at most risk of losing out, but the current house of reps doesn’t necessarily represent the voters and more than the senate does. I don’t think a system exists except maybe 1 vote per person, but this would lead to the current political power mongers losing way too much power. Politicians rarely do things for the good of the people.