JSCEM Report 2013 Australian Federal Election

JSCEM Final report of the 2013 Federal Election has been published.

http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Electoral_Matters/2013_General_Election/Final_Report

Missing is the much needed review of the method of counting the senate election.

The need for

1. A Weighted Surplus Transfer system.
2. A reiterative system of distribution of preferences from excluded candidates where the count is reset and restarted on each candidate(s) exclusion
3. The scraping of the Droop quota and the adoption of a pure proportional representative model (x/y)
4. The retention of Above-the-line (ATL) Group voting with the allocation of ATL voting to be equally distributed to each candidate within the group. The group maintaining the right to determine the order of exclusion within the group.

The guiding principle being

“That votes from excluded candidates should be redistributed and counted as if the excluded candidate(s) had not stood

The current system is disproportionate and favours minor parties/Candidates and does not reflect the voters intentions.

A full value vote should always be allocated to the first available continuing candidate without skipping and jumping.

A reiterative counting system would also allow of the adjustment of the quota for election on each iteration, facilitating optional preferential voting..

The current outdated system of counting the vote was designed to facilitate a manual count.

With the use of computer based technology there is no excuse or justification to maintain the outdated flawed system of counting the Senate vote.

Poll: Voting System

Essential Research

Comment: 48% to 44% of voters favour a preferential voting system over a first past thial te post ballot.   Those favoriong an Optional Preferential ballot do not realise or undertand the impact of optional preferential voting on the counting of the results of the election.  In 2010 the Victorian Electoral Commission advocated that voters only number one to five below-the-line.  The commission should be advocting that voters allocate a preference for all candidates in order of the voters' preferred choice.  In advoctaing the minimum the Commision devalued the value of the vote and became an active particpant in the electiion outcome as oposed to being independent and unaligned.



Q. Which of the following voting systems would you prefer when voting for the Federal House of Representatives.

• A preferential voting system where voters rank all candidates in order of preference.
• An optional preferential system where voters can rank one, some, or all candidates in order of preference.
• A “first past the post” system, where voters only vote for one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins.

	Total	Vote Labor	Vote Lib/Nat	Vote Greens
Preferential	22%	31%	18%	30%
Optional preferential	26%	26%	24%	33%
First past the post	44%	40%	53%	31%
Don’t know	7%	4%	4%	6%

Of the three voting options given, 44% favoured “first past the post”, 26% optional preferential and 22% the current preferential system.
Optional preferential was most preferred by those aged under 35 (35%) while older groups strongly favoured first past the post (50% of aged 35-54 and 54% of aged 55+).