I’ve posted analysis on the impact and maps of the changed areas below.

The ACT Legislative Assembly has existed in 1989 and since 1995 has been elected by voters in three multi-member electorates. These three electorates have been barely changed since the first drawing of boundaries before 1995. The redistributions before the 1998 and 2004 elections proposed no changes, while changes for 2001 and 2008 were very subtle.

Overall the structure has remained steady: a 7-seat electorate named Molonglo covering central Canberra, including South Canberra, North Canberra, Lake Burley Griffin, and the district of Gungahlin in the north; a 5-seat electorate named Ginninderra covering Belconnen in the north-west of the Territory, and Brindabella, covering Tuggeranong and the far south.

I have just expanded my collection of electoral maps to cover the 1995-1998 boundaries and the 2001-2004 boundaries, in addition to my map previously produced of the 2008 boundaries.

Since 1995, the major population shift in the ACT has been the growth of suburbs in the Gungahlin area at the northern end of Canberra.

The ACT Electoral Commission is currently conducting its redistribution in anticipation of an election in October 2012.  The original draft dealt with the growth in the Gungahlin area by shifting more of Gungahlin into Ginninderra while leaving the boundaries mostly untouched.

These changes produced an outcry, with most submissions criticising Gungahlin being divided between the two electorates.

Today Elections ACT announced the report of the Augmented Electoral Commission’s report, which dramatically redrew the boundaries, ignoring both the original draft and 15 years of local electoral history.

Brindabella has been left untouched in the redistribution. In the north, Ginninderra has expanded dramatically, and is now a seven-member electorate, while the remnants of Molonglo will only elect five members. All of Gungahlin has been transferred to Ginninderra, as well as a number of suburbs in the inner north of Canberra, including Turner, Lyneham and O’Connor. Ginninderra now almost reaches Canberra’s city centre.

While the northern district of Gungahlin is now completely united with the neighbouring district of Belconnen, North Canberra has been split down the middle, with Northbourne Avenue now the border.

The new district of Molonglo Valley has been transferred from Ginninderra to Molonglo. While this area has a very low population at the moment, it is expected to take much of Canberra’s new population growth in coming years.

The main effect of the changes is to make it almost impossible for the Greens to maintain all of their four seats in 2012. In 2008, the Greens won a seat in Ginninderra and Brindabella, and won a second seat in Molonglo, increasing their numbers from one to four.

The new boundaries make the Greens seat in Ginninderra safer by adding strong Greens areas in the inner north and lowering the quota, but reduce the Greens vote in Molonglo to less than 1.2 quotas, which is far too low to elect a second Gree.

The Greens vote is lower in Ginninderra than in Molonglo, even after the redistribution, and the Greens would require a large swing to them to have a chance of gaining a second seat in Ginninderra.

On my calculations, these are the quotas in Ginninderra and Molonglo before and after the boundary changes:

While Labor and the Greens would lose a seat each in Molonglo, Labor  would gain a third in Ginninderra. The final seat in Ginninderra is unclear, but the favourite would be the Liberals, not the Greens, producing a result of 7 Labor, 7 Liberal, 3 Greens.

2008 was a very good result for the Greens, with a big swing and good luck in the Molonglo count. The best the Greens could have hoped for in 2012 would have been to solidify their hold on the seats they won in 2008. It seems very unlikely they would gain the large swing needed to win a second seat in Ginninderra.

It is hard, however, to know what would happen in the Hare-Clark system, where personal votes for individual MLAs is very important. None of the Green MPs had any experience in the Assembly in 2008, and you’d expect all of them to have developed personal votes, whereas in 2008 all were elected largely on the Greens party vote.

In particular, Caroline Le Couteur, who was elected as the second Green in Molonglo, was almost anonymous prior to the election. The Greens campaign in Molonglo had entirely focused on Shane Rattenbury. If Le Couteur were to run as a second Green in Ginninderra, personal votes for her and sitting MP Meredith Hunter could make things interesting.

The biggest irony with this draft redistribution is that, in the process of unifying the district of Gungahlin into one electorate, the Electoral Commission has broken apart the Inner North.

In recent years there have been discussions about increasing the number of seats in the Assembly, so that all electorates elect the same number of MPs. In particular, a model where all three electorates elected seven MPs has been considered. If such a model were to be implemented, it would be possible to largely keep both Gungahlin and the Inner North unified.

It would also eliminate the inequity where one electorate has a lower quota than the others, allowing more diverse representation. If Elections ACT shifts this privilege from the centre of Canberra to the outer north, it will remain an imbalanced way to elect the Assembly.

Due to the radical changes in the boundaries, Elections ACT has opened up another period for comments and objections, until 5 August. It is yet to be seen if they will return to a more modest change or stick to these boundaries.

Elsewhere: Antony Green.

Below I’ve posted maps showing the gradual change in ACT electoral boundaries since 1995.

ACT electoral boundaries at the 1995 and 1998 Assembly election.

ACT electoral boundaries at the 2001 and 2004 Assembly election.

ACT electoral boundaries at the 2008 Assembly election.

Proposed electoral boundaries for the 2012 ACT election.

Alice Springs has an elected mayor and a further eight aldermen elected to represent the entire council area. Darwin elects twelve aldermen through four three-member wards, as well as an elected mayor.

Rather than using a system of proportional representation, NT councils use a system of exhaustive preferential voting to fill seats in multi-member districts. This page shows the counting process and results of the 2008 council election.

Under this system, the first seat is filled using a regular preferential ballot (like how a House of Representatives seat, or a mayoral race, is decided). The second seat is decided by a similar preferential ballot after excluding the candidate who has already been elected. This process continues until all seats are filled.

This tends to result in lopsided results, with a majority voting block winning most of the seats up for election. While you would win one of eight seats with a vote of 11% under a proportional system, most or all seats would go to the majority under the exhaustive preferential system.

A similar system was used to elect Senators from 1919 to 1946. Almost all elections produced a result where all three of a state’s Senators up for election were from the same party. The United Australia Party and the Country Party collectively held 33 of 36 seats following the 1935 election, and the ALP commanded a similar lopsided majority following the 1946 election.

It is also used to elect two-member wards in New South Wales. It was used to elect Wollongong and Shellharbour councils prior to their sacking in 2004, and is used for the City of Botany Bay. Botany Council consists entirely of Labor members, who were all elected unopposed in 2008.

Alice Springs is a controversial council, with a recent history of targeting the homeless and conflict between the council and communities on the fringe of the town. The area has been the centre of conflict over the federal government’s intervention on indigenous issues. In 2009, the council decided to begin fining beggars and remove blankets from local homeless people.

The paper focuses on the indigenous population who live in town camps on the outskirts of Alice Springs. They make up approximately 10% of the population of the town of Alice Springs but are socially distinct from the urban Alice population.

While this population could consistently elect a single alderman to the Town Council under proportional representation, they have been locked out of the council under the current system.

With Alice Springs Council regularly taking a hostile attitude to local homeless people and the indigenous population, it is interesting to consider the way that the majoritarian electoral system encourages neglect of minorities and locks them out of representation.

Wollongong City Council and Shellharbour City Council were both sacked in 2008 after allegations of corruption on the councils, and have been run by unelected administrators since then. Both of those councils previously were elected using a system of “winner takes all” preferential voting. Each council had six wards of two councillors each, along with a directly elected mayor. Each ward used a system that meant that the group winning a majority of votes after preferences would almost certainly gain both seats.

In contrast, most councils in NSW use some system of proportional representation, as is mandated for all wards electing at least three councils. Following the sacking of Wollongong and Shellharbour, the only councils still using the old system were Botany and Ku-ring-gai in Sydney and a number of small rural councils. There was an attempt to impose the system on a newly-created New England Regional Council last year, but the merger was scrapped and the electoral plan also went on the scrap-heap.

The new Coalition government has decided that the Illawarra councils will move away from the majority-rule system to the proportional system used in most NSW councils.

Firstly, they have decided that the two councils will face election this September, a year before all other councils in New South Wales are up for election. Secondly, they are making changes to councillor numbers and ward systems in both councils.

In Wollongong, the state government has decided that they will continue to have a directly-elected mayor and twelve more councillors, but they will be elected through three wards, each ward electing four councillors. This will mean that, rather than the majority winning all seats in each ward, a councillor will need to achieve a 20% quota to win a seat in any ward. This reflects many other councils in urban NSW, with 3-member or 4-member wards being the most common model.

In Shellharbour, the number of councillors will be cut to seven, with the mayor to be elected from amongst the councillors. No wards will be using, allowing candidates to win election with 12.5% of the vote in the council area. This is an extremely low number of councillors for a reasonably large council. Most urban councils in the Sydney, Hunter and Illawarra regions have between nine and fifteen councillors each. Kiama Council, immediately to the south of Shellharbour, has less than one third of Shellharbour’s population, but has nine councillors. The only councils in Sydney with less than nine councillors are Burwood (approximately 33,000 residents), Strathfield (approximately 35,000) and Hunter’s Hill (approximately 15,000). They each have seven councillors. Shellharbour, in contrast, has approximately 67,000 residents.

The Coalition government has made the argument that “Fewer councillors has shown that council can effectively focus on the bigger picture and seek whole of council outcomes”, but I don’t really see any evidence for that argument. Considering that councillors are paid very little money for their role, and considering the large size of Shellharbour Council, it seems like halving the size of their council brings little financial benefits while substantially reducing the link between the community and their representatives.

I have previously argued that councils in Sydney should be designed so that there are more councillors on each council, not less, and that bigger councils have more councillors. While the government’s decision makes these councils’ electoral systems far more democratic, the unnecessary reduction in councillor numbers in Shellharbour reduces democracy.

A note on my local government maps: New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland will all be holding local government elections in 2012. The ward maps I have on my maps page are for the 2008 council elections in those three states. At some point when I have time I will go through and identify which councils have redistributed their ward boundaries and produce new maps. Obviously I will have to produce a map of the new Wollongong City Council wards once they have been announced, which will be added to the 2012 ward map for New South Wales when it is produced. Sorry Western Australia and South Australia, I don’t think I’ll have time to do yours.

The cities of Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro have all introduced preference voting recently, and it will be used for the first time in 2010.

Voters in the City and County of San Francisco have been using preference voting for local elections since a ballot initiative in 2002.

The system is similar to optional preference voting in Australia, except preferences are limited to three options, due to the system of scanning and counting ballots which is necessitated by the dozens of electoral contests to be counted at each election. The ballot design is also very different.

Attached below is a copy of the leaflet showing how US ballot papers are designed in order to conduct a preference ballot that can be read by a machine. Click to enlarge the image.

Yet there is another fascinating contest going on, where the majority Democratic establishment is pitted against a grassroots movement for electoral reform.

Like most US states, California’s electoral districts are brazenly drawn to achieve partisan results, for both the State Assembly and the 53 House of Representatives districts (more than any other state). This can be done to achieve a partisan advantage for the majority party over the minority, although in California it generally works to ensure that both parties’ seats are much safer and limits the electoral competition to a very narrow area.

I did some brief analysis of the results at the 2008 election in California’s 53 House districts. The average margin of victory worked out at 44.4%. That’s right. In a two-candidate race, this works out to roughly 72-28. In six races (five Democrats and one Republican) the winning candidate faced absolutely no opposition from any officially nominated candidate. In two other seats, the main opposition to the Democrats came from a Libertarian candidate, with no Republican standing.

In the largest state in the United States, with over 200,000 voters casting ballots in nearly every district, the Republican party failed to field candidates in seven districts. Only five districts had margins of less than 10%, and only two had margins of less than 5%.

It produces elections where voters’ ballots rarely matter, and most members of Congress are returned without any real competition. It is unclear whether gerrymandering actually results in a greater number of Democrats, but it certainly limits the number of marginal seats, and therefore real democratic competition, in the largest American state.

Comparing the current make-up of California’s House delegation, the State Assembly and the State Senate to 2001, the last group elected on the previous boundaries, you find that in that time the Democrats have gained two House seats and one Assembly seat, and lost one Senate seat. The Republicans have lost one House seat and one Assembly seat, and gained one Senate seat. This demonstrates how effective California’s politicians have been at legislating themselves out of any electoral danger.

The seat that covers San Francisco, the 8th District, is an exception to this general rule. Held by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the 8th is constrained by San Francisco’s position on the end of a peninsula, and is relatively compact. But you can see the bizarre drawing of boundaries in other parts of the Bay Area on the following map.

The 14th, 15th and 16th districts all cover parts of Santa Clara County, and you can see the elongated, unusual electoral boundaries. You can also see an arm of the 18th district (label not appearing on the map) jutting into the 11th district, and the way districts on the northern side of the Bay snake around each other.

Similar redistricting processes happen in most other US states. The effect tends to be particularly severe in larger states, where a larger number of districts allows trickier boundaries to be drawn. You can download the Google Earth maps for all US House of Representatives districts from my maps page. Apart from California, other states with particularly bad gerrymandering include Florida, New York and Maryland.

The left-wing electoral blog Swing State Project has been renowned for how its participants have produced electoral maps that produce severe biases towards Democrats, as part of a push to counter the Republicans’ effectiveness in skewing electoral boundaries in their favour. One blogger managed to produce an electoral map that would elect 28 Democrats and not a single Republican from New York state.

This is a key reason why state legislature elections and gubernatorial elections are so important in 2010. The once-in-a-decade redistricting process will kick off following this year’s Census, to be implemented in time for elections in 2012. Parties that control state legislatures and elect Governors will be able to gain extra seats in the House of Representatives.

While most states engage in this partisan gerrymandering, a limited number of states have attempted to move towards a model of independent drawing of boundaries that attempt to maintain communities and avoid gerrymandering, in the way that boundaries are drawn in Australia.

In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 11, by a slim margin, creating an independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. This commission has been tasked with the responsibility of redrawing boundaries for the State Assembly and State Senate, and would carry out this operation prior to the 2012 elections. The commission would include Republicans, Democrats and nonpartisan figures, and would also be required to draw boundaries that are “compact” and follow a “community of interest” (the same criteria used in Australian redistributions).

On this year’s ballot, there are two further initiatives in this area. Proposition 20 would expand the authority of the Redistricting Commission to cover California’s federal districts, as well as state legislative districts. The passage of this would probably result in a massive redrawing of boundaries, producing a wider range of marginal districts and forcing a scramble for seats as incumbent members of Congress see their seats completely redrawn.

Another initiative, Proposition 27, would instead abolish the Commission entirely, giving the power to draw boundaries back to the state legislature. The proposal is supported by a number of Democratic politicians and unions. The two proposals are counterposed, so if both receive majority support, the one with more votes will be successful, with the other defeated.

While most coverage will focus on who wins Senate and Governor’s races, the possibility of new, fair electoral boundaries for the largest American state in federal elections is an exciting prospect. Most Californian newspapers have endorsed Proposition 20, and it will be interesting to see if the success of Proposition 11 can be replicated.

Last Tuesday, Keneally announced that she would be proposing campaign funding reform legislation before the impending state election. While the details were vague, they included a cap on donations of $5000 and a cap on spending of $100,000 per electorate. Pretty weak, but a step in the right direction.

Hidden in her plans was a vague reference to plans for a “tiered” funding system.

A Sydney  Morning Herald article on Saturday revealed that this plan is to fund a proportion of each’s candidate’s expenditure, with a greater proportion for candidates receiving a higher vote. This scheme would massively increase funding  to major parties, while slashing it for smaller parties, and forcing political parties, particularly smaller parties, to rely on even more donations to supplement the limited public funding.

In addition, it’s now been revealed that the Keneally government also plans to introduce a new scheme for funding of administrative party activities outside of election periods.

In New South Wales we currently have the “Political Education Fund”, which gives funding to all parliamentary parties for non-election work outside of election periods, based on the number of Legislative Assembly votes received at the last election. While it is meant to be spent on ‘political education’, all parties use much of their funding for general costs of running a party outside of campaigns.

The new administrative scheme would be based on the number of Members of Parliament each party has elected. It doesn’t need to be said that this would also massively assist the major parties, due to the current electoral system disadvantaging smaller parties by locking them out of the Legislative Assembly. It doesn’t seem clear to my why a party with more Members of Parliament, with all the extra resources that provides, needs a disproportionately greater amount of public funding to run their party.

But back to the election funding model.

At the moment, all candidates and parties who receive  over 4% in an electoral district are entitled to public funding. The formula allocates how much each candidate is entitled to based on how many votes they receive. A candidate with 10% of the vote would be entitled to half of what a candidate with 20% would be entitled to.

This is all very similar to the federal system. The difference is that federally you receive all money you are entitled to without needing to demonstrate that you actually spent that money. In the NSW system, you need to show receipts. If you could receive $10,000, but only spent $7800, the remaining $2200 stays in the pool.

Under the Keneally plan, this is all thrown out the window. If you poll between 4% and 8%, you will be entitled to 25% of your spending being paid back. If you poll between 8% and 20%, this will increase to 50%. Candidates with over 20% of the vote will be paid 75% of their expenditure.

There does not appear to be any limit on how much expenditure could be funded. Under the Keneally plan, parties are entitled to spend $100,000 per electorate in which they stand, and another $9.3 million in the Legislative Council, adding up to $18.6 million, even more than the obscene $16 million spent by the ALP in 2007.

If a party spends $100,000 in an electorate, and poll over 20%, they would receive $75,000 in public funding, much more than would be currently allocated.

This system would seriously damage small parties. Analysis by the Greens shows that, in the Legislative Council at the last election, the ALP was entitled to $3.4 million, the Coalition $3 million, the Greens $800,000, the CDP $387,000, and the Shooters $244,000.

Under the new model, the ALP would have been entitled to almost $7 million, with the Coalition also increasing substantially their funding. The Greens would get less than a third of what they were previously entitled, as would the CDP. The Shooters would get nothing. A similar situation would take place in the 93 lower house races.

It’s obvious enough that a system where the ALP and Coalition gain millions of dollars each in extra funding while slashing funding to smaller parties is clearly to their partisan advantage, but it’s worse than that.

The previous system encourages fiscal restraint. If you’re a small party without the ability to rake in massive amounts of donations, the previous system encouraged you to limit your spending to whatever you would be entitled to. If you spend under the cap, then you can get every single dollar refunded. Under Keneally’s model, if you conserve two dollars in spending, you lose a dollar in public funding. The more you spend, the more you get back, right up to $100,000 per seat.

It also makes it impossible to run campaigns without massive amounts of donations. Much of the discussion around campaign finance reform has focused on the need to allow parties to run campaigns almost entirely reliant on public funding. Morris Iemma and Nathan Rees both discussed designing a system that would result in campaigns being 100% publicly funded.

The Keneally model means that all parties, regardless of how fiscally conservative they may behave, would require a large proportion of their funding to come from donations. For smaller parties that generally conserve their spending in order to fund most of their campaigns from public funding, they would run at huge deficits that would quickly bankrupt them.

It’s difficult to avoid the impression that this is a system cynically designed by Sussex Street backroom boys to cripple smaller parties, particularly the Greens, while not seriously impacting on spending levels by major parties.

We’re yet to see whether Barry O’Farrell’s Liberals will go along with Keneally’s ploy.

Electoral analysis has shown that preference voting would favour Labour and the Liberal Democrats, whose voters already employ tactical voting to defeat Conservative candidates by voting for whichever candidate is in a stronger position. Rather than producing a proportional result, it would have resulted in an even larger Labour majority in 1997 when they did not come close to winning a majority.

Unsurprisingly, the Conservatives have come out strongly against the proposal and continue to support the first-past-the-post system, while the Liberal Democrats have argued that the proposal does not go far enough.

The Conservatives have a solid lead in polls for the election, which is expected in May or June, but the electoral system means that a large lead is needed for the party to win a majority, suggesting a strong possibility of a hung parliament with the Liberal Democrats and parties from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland sharing the balance of power. This means that it is plausible that negotiation following the election may revolve around kick-starting the electoral reform process, with Labour now committed to a first step and the Liberal Democrats insisting on proportional representation as a key priority.

The legislation will be passed before the election, which would mean the referendum could go ahead regardless of who won, although it is conceivable that a Conservative government could call the referendum to a halt or a deal with the Liberal Democrats could see the scope expanded.

They also carry an article from NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell pushing the proposal and a petition for a referendum at the next election to “reclaim your vote”, something completely bizarre and pointless, since such a referendum would not hasten the end of the current Labor government and O’Farrell has promised a referendum in his first term.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea of including a recall provision in our constitution, but it is a hugely costly and ineffective way of achieving greater accountability from our state governments while the Herald and O’Farrell ignore far easier and more effective ways of holding bad governments to account.

Surely the push for recall elections comes from a sense that state governments are too distant from the people and that we need to restore accountability in government. If you want to achieve that, recall elections only create an illusion of accountability while keeping the power of government locked up in one-party government.

Recall elections are extremely costly and ineffective. As O’Farrell admits in his piece, only two governors in US states have been recalled in the last century. While recall elections can very rarely provide accountability in the case of incredibly unpopular and incompetent governments, most run-of-the-mill governments completely avoid any fear of the public being able to bring them into account. Don’t even get me started on the idea that we would model our system of government on California, one of the most dysfunctional political systems in the developed English-speaking world.

The problems of bad government usually can’t be solved by holding an election. It’s widely agreed that the Labor government was already acting appallingly on many public policy issues before the 2003 and 2007 elections, yet they were reelected in landslides at both elections.

Most of the time the public are disengaged and won’t act politically to deal with day-to-day issues of bad government. The recall process means ‘business as usual’ until the public are willing to rise up en masse and throw out a government.

If you want to have real accountability, there are a few ways you can do that. Firstly, we should surely be talking about reducing parliamentary terms from four years to three, as they were until the 1980s. Barry O’Farrell engages in the idiotic meme blaming NSW’s current woes on the ‘fixed term’ system:

They argued that fixed terms would end community frustration with the calling of early elections and allow government the certainty needed to get on with the job of governing.

But at that time no one foresaw how a NSW Labor machine could, and would, pervert the fixed term system to protect maladministration, political inertia and incompetence.

Of course, if we didn’t have fixed terms in New South Wales, nothing would have changed. We still would have an ageing state government because, as O’Farrell acknowledges later in his piece, they know they would lose and they would not call an election. Isn’t it interesting that O’Farrell doesn’t promote three-year terms? Indeed, his proposal of keeping four-year terms but abolishing fixed terms would increase the power of the Premier when he takes office.

The other solution that would genuinely increase government accountability and would see bad governments like our current government terminated mid-term would be to introduce proportional representation in the Legislative Assembly. By doing so, one-party majorities would only be won in rare landslides, and most Parliaments would not be controlled by a single party. A major party would need to convince minor parties and independents to give their support and possibly govern in coalition in order to rule.

Where a government acts terribly and the cries for an early election grow loudly, or where a party replaces their leader with an unknown or unpopular figure, it is possible for their support parties to withdraw support and either form a different government or force an early election, and they can do it much easier than a mass petition of hundreds of thousands of voters.

The current Labor government would not have won a majority under proportional representation. The balance between the two major parties would be better, and Labor would have had to rely on the Greens and independents in order to govern. I would expect that, if the government was still as bad as it is now, their support parties would have pulled the plug early and forced an election. At the very least, they would prevent the party governing as an elected dictatorship. The best thing about PR-fuelled hung parliaments is that you have democratic accountability of all governments, not just those on the brink of death. It is far more effective and useful than a recall petition.

Indeed, the Canadian province of British Columbia introduced the recall election in 1995, yet this did not help introduce any more accountability into the political system, and in recent years the province has considered the question of proportional representation as a solution to the problem of massive government majorities blocking accountability.

If you want to reduce the power of governments to continue to govern without the support of the public, you don’t need recall elections. You need proportional representation in the lower house and fixed three-year terms.

In addition, submissions will close on November 27 for those interested in commenting on the Green Paper. I plan to put in a submission, and hopefully I’ll be able to post some ideas later this week, but I thought commenters might have their own suggestions about what to put in submissions to the Green Paper.

In addition there are candidates for the Liberal Party, Greens, Australian Sex Party, One Nation, Liberal Democrats, Democratic Labor Party, Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, Climate Change Coalition and five independents.

The implications of this are dire for the conduct of the by-election. Compulsory preferential voting means that all voters will need to express a preference for every single candidate, including expressing a candidate between all nine Christian Democrats and many independents and political parties that few Bradfield voters would have heard of.

Voters who failed to express 22 preferences or make mistakes can have their votes declared informal, even if they express a clear preference. These voters may have voted for the Liberals or Greens, and their votes would never be passed on to another candidate, yet these votes would be thrown out for an irrelevant error.

I believe there is a rule which allows 10%  of preferences to make mistakes, which would allow a voter to make two mistakes in the Bradfield by-election. (Update: turns out you are only allowed to make one mistake. The 10% rule only applies to the Senate). Even still, you can expect a huge informal vote.

At the 2005 Werriwa by-election, there were sixteen candidates, and this election produced an informal vote of over 13%. The informal vote was higher than all candidates other than the winning ALP candidate, Chris Hayes, who polled 55%. No other candidate polled over 10%.

It’s not unreasonable to think that the informal vote could break 20% in the coming by-election. In addition, it will be extremely difficult for parties to produce how-to-votes that allow people to vote easily. Take the Greens for example. Do you use principle in preferencing, by putting One Nation last and trying to distinguish between all of the right-wing minor parties and independents, or do you simply produce a donkey vote HTV to ensure your voters have their votes counted?

The solution is very simple: some sort of optional preferential voting. I personally think that there is no justfication for tossing out a vote for expressing an invalid lower preference. If we cannot achieve full optional preferential voting, there should be at least a cap on the number of preferences that need to be expressed.

If it was said you had to number at least five preferences it would encourage parties to preference and would ensure preferences flow when there are a small number of candidates, whilst avoiding high informal votes in situations like Bradfield and where large numbers of candidates run in a general election (fourteen candidates ran in Greenway in 2007).

In addition, of course, another reform suggested by Antony Green should be adopted. This would be that, while parties are permitted to nominate multiple candidates, any additional candidates would be required to go out and get signatures from voters, just as independents are required to do.

I haven’t really delved here into the question of whether it makes sense for the Christian Democratic Party to run nine candidates. While it could result in a slightly higher total CDP vote due to each candidate getting the support of their own community, it’s undoubtedly going to hurt them.

They would have needed to spend $5500 $4500 on nomination fees, and it seems impossible that any candidates could individually poll the 4% needed to qualify for public funding. In such a large field of right-wing candidates, all of whom will be competing with an official Liberal candidate, you can’t see any of them doing particularly well.