Latest news with #preferentialVoting
The Guardian
17-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Attacks on Australia's preferential voting system are ludicrous. We can be proud of it
The Coalition's lopsided defeat in the 2025 federal election has been followed by a new round of attacks on preferential voting. No longer do anti-preferencing campaigners have the excuse that Labor 'lost' the primary vote, with Labor currently 2.6% ahead. Nor can they say preferences won Labor the election, with Labor leading the primary vote in 86 of 150 seats. The latest complaint is just the scale of Coalition casualties. The Coalition will win at most 44 seats (29.3%) off a primary vote of about 32%. This will be the first time since 1987 that the Coalition parties' seat share has been substantially below their primary vote. An article in The Australian on Tuesday bemoaned the defeats of past Coalition frontbenchers (including Peter Dutton and Josh Frydenberg) and supposed future frontbenchers (Amelia Hamer and Ro Knox) who had topped the primary vote in their seats but lost after preferences. David Tanner said 15 seats at the 2025 election (including 13 Coalition defeats) 'would have had a different winner had a first-past-the-post voting system been in place'. The Australian Financial Review mounted a similar argument on Wednesday. This, however, assumes voters would have voted the same way and parties made the same campaign decisions if Australia had first-past-the-post. I cannot overstate how unsound this underlying assumption is. In seats where the Greens are uncompetitive, many Greens supporters would vote Labor to ensure their votes helped beat the Coalition. Preferential voting is one of the reasons why the Greens maintain much higher vote shares in Australia than the US, UK and Canada. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Furthermore, parties would make tactical choices about where to run to avoid losing seats through vote-splitting. An example of this came in the 2024 French elections. The far-right National Rally polled the highest primary vote in the first round of a runoff system. In many seats the leftwing NFP and centrist Ensemble alliances both qualified for the runoff round, but one or the other withdrew to avoid splitting the anti-National Rally vote. In the second round, the National Rally topped the popular vote by 11.2% but won fewer seats than either NFP or Ensemble. Such withdrawal pacts have far greater impacts on results than Australian how to vote cards (which hardly any minor party voters follow anyway), so the idea that scrapping preferences would stop 'backroom deals' between parties is naive. Removing preferences would probably have changed very few seat outcomes at recent elections, at a massive and grossly unfair cost to the ability of those not supporting major parties to effectively say what they are really thinking at the ballot box. There are also some Coalition wins (at this election, Longman) that could be lost under first-past-the-post, because minor right party voters would be less willing to vote strategically than minor left party voters. In recent years I have seen some supporters of minor right parties opposing preferences too, claiming that preferences are a 'uniparty' plot against the little guys. Preferences were actually introduced by the conservative parties in 1918 to stop Labor from scoring undeserved wins in three-cornered contests. In the past 35 years of federal, state and territory elections, preferences have been almost nine times more likely to help non-major-party candidates beat the majors than the other way around. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion In the 2025 election at least five independents and one Greens candidate have beaten major parties from behind, while Adam Bandt is the only non-major-party candidate to lose after leading on primary votes. It is baffling that anyone who opposes major party domination would want a system that renders voting for minor parties pointless. If voters for minor right parties want to see their parties win more seats they should support proportional representation. Anti-preferencers, as I call them, also claim the UK system is the global norm. Actually just a few dozen countries use it alone to elect their lower houses. Most protect minority voting rights in some way – proportional representation, runoff voting, mixed systems or preferences. We should be proud of the way all voters get a say at all stages of our counts and not seek to import failed and primitive methods from countries that have not overcome their roadblocks to electoral reform. Kevin Bonham is an independent electoral and polling analyst and an electoral studies and scientific research consultant
The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
We may be waiting weeks for a result in the seat of Calwell – the most complex ever counted in an Australian election
The winner is clear in most House of Representatives seats, one week after the election. But with a record number of votes for minor parties and independents, Australia's preferential voting system has been under increasing strain, with the full complexity of the counting system needed to determine the last few seats. One seat, Calwell, may take weeks to determine and has been described by the acting deputy commissioner of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as 'one of the most complex distributions of preferences we've ever done'. The House of Representatives electoral system involves a series of rounds of counting. The lowest-polling candidate is knocked out first, and their preferences are distributed among the other candidates, adding to their total vote. The same happens with the next lowest-polling candidate, and so forth. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Eventually you are left with two candidates, one of which has a majority of votes. But those are not necessarily the two that receive the most primary votes – where some candidates are very close on primaries, the preferences of eliminated candidates can change the picture as the count unfolds. The final distribution of preferences usually happens long after the gaze of public attention has moved on, with the winners already clear. The AEC picks the two candidates likely to come first and second, and on election night it distributes all preferences between those two. Usually the commission gets it right, and those results can be called very quickly. But the increasing presence of minor parties and independents polling a substantial share of the vote has made it harder to work out which candidates will end up as the top two, and in a number of seats it remains unclear after election day. In the Victorian seat of Calwell, Labor's Basem Abdo won 30.6% of the primary vote, with the Liberal candidate second on 15.6%. If this was a standard Labor-Liberal contest, Abdo would win comfortably with 66% after preferences. But that may not be the result. There are two independents not far behind the Liberal on the primary vote, with 12.1% and 11.3% respectively. Then there are a further nine candidates with over 30% of the vote between them. It is entirely possible that one of those two independents will gain enough preferences to overtake the Liberal candidate and make the final two, but we don't know which one. We also don't know how they would perform in a head-to-head race against Abdo. The full distribution of preferences cannot commence until all postal and absentee votes are returned next week. The AEC's acting deputy electoral commissioner, Kath Gleeson, said of Calwell: 'That's going to go to a complete distribution of preferences, and we anticipate that's going to be one of the most complex distribution of preferences we've ever done. 'I fully expect that will go well into week five depending on how we track through. We'll have absolute guns on that count given the complexity.' Calwell – with four candidates still capable of finishing in the top two – is an extreme outlier in this election, but there are numerous other seats where the order of the top three remains unclear. To help clarify matters, the AEC has begun conducting 'three-candidate-preferred' (3CP) counts, where all preferences are allocated between the top three candidates. The AEC used this process for the first time in 2022 in just two seats. This time around it has needed to apply it in at least 10 electorates. In the Queensland seat of Ryan, the Greens MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown was leading her Labor rival for second place on the 3CP by less than 700 votes as of Tuesday morning. Whichever candidate makes the top two will then gain the other's preferences and easily win the seat over the LNP. In the seats of Flinders, Fisher and Grey there is still uncertainty about whether Labor or an independent will make the top two against the Liberal. If the independent comes second there is a chance they could win, although they would need an exceptionally strong flow of preferences from Labor. If Labor comes second, the Liberal will win. There is only one seat uncalled due to a close race between just two candidates: Longman in south-east Queensland, where the sitting LNP member was less than 200 votes ahead on Tuesday, with a few thousand special votes left to be counted.
