I’m pretty sure that every kid in Australia learns this at some stage of their schooling, or is supposed to. Some may have forgotten, and many didn’t care enough (either about politics, or school) to really listen. In Britain, where minor parties are starting to make a mark, the system that Australia uses is the one often pointed to as the most suitable. It is sometimes criticized as being too complicated. For whatever it’s worth, I rather like it, and with the Australian federal election coming up in a few days, I thought it would be timely to provide a thorough explanation of how it actually works.

Let’s say you’ve got three candidates for an election: Alexis, Billie, and Casey.

Simple "First past the post" voting

A simple “first past the post” system is used and everyone just ticks one box next to a candidate’s name. Alexis gets 6 votes, Billie gets 17, and Casey gets 14 votes, so Billie wins. However, all the people who voted for Alexis pipe up and say “hey, if we had known that was going to be the result, we would’ve all voted for Casey!”. So even though more people voted for Billie, a greater number overall preferred Casey over Billie.

There are obvious implications here. Firstly, it discourages candidates from running. If you’re from a small political party, you may be discouraged to run for election because you may split the vote from the candidate who you might prefer to win. It also means that if there are a lot of candidates, a person may “win” the election with a very small percentage of the vote. It also makes all the people who didn’t vote for the winner feel like their vote was wasted.

Some countries combat this by having a second election, where the two most popular candidates from the first election have a “runoff”. I personally think that this is a very crude and inefficient way of handling the problem, and who the hell wants to have two elections?

The “answer” to this is instant runoff preferential voting, sometimes called the Hare-Clarke system (presumably after the people who came up with it, or first used it). First, an explanation of how it works in the case of candidates running for a single seat, such as in the case of geographical electorates in the house of representatives.

Same example as above, except instead of just ticking one box, we ask voters to number their candidates in order of preference from 1 to 3.

In preferential voting, you number the candidates in order of preference

So what happens now? Let us assume that the “1” voting reflects the results from before, with Alexis on 6, Billie on 17, and Casey on 14. Then what happens?

Contrary to what many people think, the numbers aren’t allocated “points” and then totalled up to determine the winner. What happens is this – the “1”s are tallied up and if any candidate has accumulated 1 vote more than 50% of the total number of voters, then the election is over and that candidate is declared the winner. If not, then whoever is last; that is whoever has the fewest number of “1”s is eliminated from the running. The votes previously belonging to that candidate are then redistributed among the remaining candidates according to those voters’ next preferences (in this case, the “2”s). This process continues until one of the candidates accumulates 50%+1 of the total vote.

If there are 6 candidates for a seat in Parliament, then this is roughly equivalent to having 5 separate elections where the last candidate is eliminated each time, then everyone votes again, until you’re left with the winner of a two-horse race. Of course, sometimes you don’t need all 5 of those elections – a candidate may accumulate a large enough number of votes long before it comes down to a two-horse race.

The Senate

The Australian Senate is composed of 12 senators from each state and two from each of two “territories” (The Australian Capital Territory, similar to DC in the US, and The Northern Territory, similar to a very large desert). They are elected according to proportional representation by a single transferable vote system (described above as preferential voting). This is where it all gets slightly complicated.

A sample ballot paper for the Australian Senate

This is an example of one of the “simpler” ballot papers, where you only have a small number of candidates and there are only two senators to pick. In your typical state, there can be as many as 80 candidates competing for 12 seats. So how does this work?

First, we take the number of voters in the electorate and divide that number by 13. We will call this number Bob. Bob is the magic number.

This process is slightly more complicated than the system for a single candidate. It begins in an almost identical manner to the above until a candidate gets enough “1”s to win a seat, that is, the number of “1”s exceeds Bob. Then it gets tricky. Let’s say Bob is a number like 12,000, and candidate A gets 16,000 “1”s. If this happens too often, we’ll run out of votes to count before we’ve filled all the senate seats. Something needs to be done with those excess 4,000 votes, and that something is this – candidate A’s 16,000 votes get redistributed according to their second preferences (same as if the candidate was eliminated from the bottom) except each one of those votes is worth . That way, the preferences of the voters for the senate are still honoured, and we manage to keep (or 4,000, a.k.a. the correct number of) votes still in the system. Once those preferences have been redistributed, we check to see if there are any candidates with more “1”s than Bob. If there are, we repeat the process for awarding a seat, then redistributing the votes according to next preferences multiplied by the fraction of the excess primary vote over the total number of primary votes. If there aren’t, then we eliminate from the bottom as before until a candidate has more votes than Bob.

In the Australian Senate elections (which generally take place at the same time as the House of Representatives elections) about 6% of voters actually bother to number 1 through to 80-ish. Instead, a voter can opt to vote “above the line” where they simply put a “1” next to the box of a major party, in which case their preferences will follow a predetermined order set by that political party. This is unfortunate because not only do many people not know what those preferences are, the major parties often do preference-swap-deals and this can have unforeseen bad side-effects, like Steve Fielding being elected.

Dutch election results by municipality

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like to be nasty to people. While it is certainly true that I have a pugnacious side to my nature, I am a generally peaceful and conflict-averse individual. The day that I departed the Netherlands also happened to be election day (I somehow timed my departure from my brief trip to the UK to coincide with their election as well). In this election, Geert Wilders’ party, the Party for Freedom (Dutch pronounciation – partee for de fry-hide) won 24 seats, up from 9 in the previous election, making him non-trivially powerful in a parliament where government is formed by coalitions of many small parties. Geert is a particularly interesting figure because he is regarded as controversial owing to his strong anti-Muslim stance. Recently discussions I’ve had with friends who live in the Netherlands has revealed that part of his popularity stems from his perceived straight-talking nature, and because he says things that “everyone is thinking, but is too afraid to say”. Of course, most of these things turn my stomach, so I’m going to take this opportunity to read between the lines for all of those out there who have either been too lazy or too stupid to do so yet.

Geert Wilders

First off, this guy’s a fucking idiot. Unfortunately, he’s an idiot in a way that isn’t easy for ordinary people to detect, which makes him that very worst kind of idiot – the type that people take seriously. Sadly, these types are increasingly common in politics. The main thrust of what he says basically revolves around some rabid anti-Muslim sentiment with a bit of racism thrown in. This is really the main sticking point for me – regardless of what he actually says, and how sound his policies may sound, what he’s basically saying is “I am a racist, a xenophobe, and I hate Muslims” (even though he has been known to explicitly state the opposite, I’ll believe him when he gives me good reason to). If you vote for him, you are, by extension, saying the same things. A lot of people, at this point, accuse me of being some kind of liberal, leftie, hippie, apologist, appeasement nutcase who’s too afraid to face up to the horrible truth, or other such nonsense like that. While I would certainly agree that I am fairly left-leaning, I’m certainly no bleeding heart, and I’m not afraid of facing the truth. In this case though, I would say that I have a clearer perception of the truth than most.

What he’s basically saying is “I am a racist, a xenophobe, and I hate Muslims”. If you vote for him, you are by extension, saying the same things.

There is a very real issue here; that of the identity of a nation. These old white guys, who are used to being in charge of everything, feel threatened by all of these very different-looking, and different-behaving people. They don’t like their culture, customs, habits, and especially their religion. They don’t want them coming into their churches, their houses, or (god forbid) marrying their daughters. Obviously, enacting divisive social policies is going to fix all of this. If the concept of the Dutch national identity is based on some kind of ideal of a homogenized society based around a single religion, ethnicity, and culture, then obviously there is a problem. I would go so far as to say that, without realizing it at a conscious level, a large number of Dutch truly do perceive their national identity in those terms. There’s nothing very wrong with that, it just means that society needs to grow up a little bit and realize that things that are ordinarily viewed as traditions, and norms, are not immovable, fixed concepts that have been around for time immemorial (which is what conservatives always seem to imply with their “traditional values” nonsense), but they are dynamic and increasingly-rapidly changing things.

There are also secondary issues. Like the freedom to practice religion in general, and whether or not we can really place value judgements on the validity of religions in the world today. Various friends of mine assert that there is something fundamental about Islam that makes it more dangerous, or in some way inferior to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Without going into too much detail of the arguments for or against religion in general, as opposed to a completely secular society, and having read all of the Bible and most of the Koran, as well as religious texts of various other major world religions, I would say that none are particularly superior to any of the others. Wilders once said that Muslims should tear out half the Koran before coming to the Netherlands, which may be a valid point, but a great deal of the Bible would have to be removed as well if we were to be consistent in our application of religious discrimination.

The real problem is that while most of the very visible Christian extremism in the world today involves crazy people in the US getting their knickers in a knot over gay marriage and trying to repeal Roe vs Wade (and Sarah Palin, did I mention her?), the visible examples of Islamic extremism involve large fiery explosions. There are various reasons that the extremism has taken on the form that it has, and most are related to the fairly random distribution of wealth and, in particular, wealth inequality that exists around the world today. It is my opinion (and you’ll find that I have very strong opinions about this) that religion, at least as far as the belief in God is concerned, has absolutely nothing to do with the reprehensible behaviour of those who supposedly act on their God’s behalf. Religion has always been a convenient tool for wealthy, powerful people to use poor people to kill other poor people for profit; in all religions.

But the dirty world of politics is diluting these important issues. The “debate” isn’t about what’s really going on at all. It’s posturing about terrorism and national security. It is playing to the politics of fear, because using fear is a much easier way to control people than using rationality. Aristotle recommended two parts logos, one part ethos, and one part pathos, but modern politicians seem only to ever use pathos in their rhetoric; it’s cheap. The slightest logical scrutiny of the arguments involved quickly reveals them to be quite nonsensical. But why should that matter to the electorate? They don’t want to hear that there is a very important difference between the statements “all terrorists are Muslims” and “all Muslims are terrorists”; no, they want to believe that their scary brown neighbors who speak a different language are dangerous but it’s ok because the government is going to do something about it, thereby improving national security.

Everyone seems to want an excuse to be nasty to everyone else, so a religion, and now anti-a-religion has become the tool of choice. The power-hungry are simply trying to create an pitched battle where only small misunderstandings exist. Perhaps they truly believe all of what they say, in which case they are simply very stupid, but I don’t buy that; I think they know what they are doing, and that is more morally reprehensible than any of the crimes that they accuse the “other” of committing. But we must not allow ourselves to be sucked into this ridiculous game of political point-scoring based on ill-founded emotional appeals. Very real and complex issues that require considerable thought and introspection are being simplified and externalized and one of the world’s major religions is being used as a scapegoat. We could be level-headed about this, or we could slip into blame-game finger-pointing reminiscent of the world of playground bullying that most of us (but not all politicians) grow out of. People don’t want to think, and they’re giving that responsibility to their “leaders”. The world “leader” seems to imply that some kind of progress is being made, but in the case of Geert Wilders, anyone foolish enough to follow him is only being lead off a very steep cliff.

Wilders calls his party the party for freedom, but I say he is offering the opposite. Aung San Suu Kyi once said, “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”. If you really want a free country, the first thing you must do is free your mind from fear, and the first thing that the Dutch should do, is free itself from Geert Wilders.

It’s election time once again here at Melbourne University and I’ve become increasingly disillusioned by the whole process. Student politics is a mucky business these days, especially since the young Liberals (the conservative party here in Australia) took control of the student union and basically melted it. What’s left is basically a joke, so I thought I would make a joke out of the joke and print my own flyers to hand out. They were generally very well-received.