Annabell Crabb sez,

Mark Latham got into quite a lot of trouble three years ago when he went to Tasmania and announced the Labor Party’s policy on forestry.
Yesterday, Kevin Rudd was smarter. He went to Tassie and announced the Coalition’s policy instead, which seems to have gone down rather better on the whole.

I’m with you now Kim. I was going to hold my nose and vote Labor, but stuff’em. According to Acko’s argument above, it’ll still be consistent with kicking Howard out.

“At the risk of labouring the point, suppose a bunch of Labor voters decide that Kabor is too right wing for their taste and vote Green 1 Labor 2, turning what would have been an absolute Labor majority on primaries into a preference count. If their is a fourth party that runs last and they preference the Liberals strongly, then the Liberals could well win, even if Labor leads on primaries.”

You’re wrong, mate. Let Lib = % voting Liberal, FF/Lib = % voting Family First and preferencing Liberal, and so on. For libs to get in, we must have Libs FF/Libs Green/Libs greater than 50%. If this is the case, then ALP FF/ALP Green/ALP _must_ be less than 50%, so ALP can’t get in, no matter what order preferences are distributed.

Conversely, if the votes of Kim and her friends push ALP Green/ALP FF/ALP above 50%, ALP will get in, no matter what order preferences are distributed in. So Kim’s vote has exactly the same value whether she votes ALP or Green/ALP.

The flaw in your argument is that preferences have to be distributed until one party exceeds 50%. Since the total number of votes is 100%, only one party can do this, whether or not all its preferences need to be counted for it to do so.

a point which I don’t think has been clarified yet:

I think your confusion stems from the different preferential systems in the Senate and in the Reps.

In the Senate, the order of distribution of preferences is vital, as the lowest polling candidates are knocked out and their votes ditributed (at a discount rate) according to preferences. Then candidates are elected once they reach quota – and the total quotas do not add up to 100%. That’s how you can get someone like Steven Fielding elected with 2% of primaries, over the Greens’ candidate polling 9%.

However, in the Reps, all preferences are distributed until you are left with only 2 candidates and a 2PP result out of 100%. The order of distribution is thus irrelevant.

So, just repeating, if you vote 1Grn 2ALP, there is no way in the world your vote will assist a Lib getting elected.

In any case, if I recall correctly, the Coalition’s jump in support came on immediately after the World Trade Centre attacks, well before Tampa.

Fiaso da Gama way up the thread, the Tampa was 24 August, more than two weeks before S11. The Tampa came the week after Ian Macfarlane gave out 5 different stories about what he’d done with his electoral funds. Up till then there had been some lift but they were still off the pace.

But I think you are right. Tampa gave them a boost but The World Trade Centre nailed it in terms of becoming competitive.

I’d much prefer a voting system that gives results like the Dutch election of 2006. You have a better opportunity for matching your political philosophy with a party.

You’ve got to like a system that can elect a couple representatives of Party for the Animals.

Back in Oz when Rudd assumed ALP leadership I decided I’d have to vote Green in the Reps and preference Labor to let him know that there is a constituency to the left of where he is. I think there is a lot of crap written about the notion that you must have 40% primary vote to win. It’s the 2PP that is the bottom line. I’d like to see the Greens up around 15-20% to make the rightists in the ALP nervous.

We have four people on our ballot: Liberal, Labor, Green and Family First.

We have 100 people voting; the winner needs 51 votes.

Liberal gets 48 votes.

Labor gets 40 votes.

Green gets 8 votes– 6 pref to Labor, 2 to Lib.

Family First gets 4 votes, 1 pref to Labor, 3 to Lib.

The Family First votes get discarded first, and yes, this is enough to get the Liberals across the line, so technically, the Green preferences don’t “count” (although they are still actually counted in calculating the final 2-party result). However, even if the Green voters preferencing Labor had put Labor as their first preference, the results would not be enough to push Labor over the line. Even if ALL the Greens voters had voted 1 for Labor instead, it would not have been enough– the Family First preferences would still determine the outcome.

Now let’s consider a scenario where the Greens preferences are enough to win Labor the seat:

Liberal gets 40 votes

Labor gets 40 votes

Green gets 15 votes– 11 pref Labor, 4 pref Lib

Family First gets 5 votes– 2 pref Labor, 3 pref Lib.

In this case, there are not enough voters voting for Family First to push the Libs across the line– even if they all preferenced the Liberals. Same could be said of Labor if they all preferenced Labor.

The fact is, that if the Green vote is high enough that their preferences can change the outcome of the election (ie, turn a Liberal lead into a Labor lead), then those preferences WILL be counted– if they are NOT counted, because the preferences of Family First (or whoever runs last) are enough to push the frontrunner across the 50% 1 line, then they would not be significant enough to alter the outcome– and this holds true even if they had voted 1 for a major party.

Spiros, there is simply no way, mathematically, that the scenario you describe could occur.

Maybe it would help you to look at the results from the last federal election. Here is a list of the seats that were decided on preferences:
http://results.aec.gov.au/12246/results/HouseSeatsDecidedOnPrefs-12246-NAT.htm

Click on any of these seats, and you will see a list of options that includes “Full Distribution of Preferences”– this shows the way that ALL the votes are distributed, even after the leading candidate has their 50% 1. For instance, you can look at Bennelong:
http://results.aec.gov.au/12246/results/HouseDivisionDop-12246-105.htm

The result of the election was determined after the third count– at that stage, John Howard had over 50% of the vote. However, the preferences continued to be distributed in a way that clearly shows that even if all the people who preferenced Green above Labor and Labor above Liberal– even if all these people had put Labor first, Labor would still have ended up with only 45.7% of the vote.

Go and look for yourself through all the voting records– you won’t find one example in which Labor COULD have won, but didn’t because the Greens preferences didn’t get counted– it’s a mathematical impossibility.

If a majority prefer Labor over Liberal, and vote that way, Labor will win that seat.

Leaking to the left poses many dangers to Labor, and as you say, many Labor campaigners are aware of that fact. But what you’re trying to say will happen is not one of those dangers. The danger you describe is nothing more than more people putting the Libs ahead of Labor. That has nothing to do with what Kim is proposing to do in the post.

If you are that interested, I suggest you see if you can get a job scrutineering for Labor next election. It really helps you understand the process to see it done, as opposed to trying to visualise it.

Turning from hypotheticals to reality, Labor’s strategy of relying on sacrificing its primary vote and relying on green preferences, which began at the 1990 election, has been lamented since by labor hard heads as making its task much, much harder. First preferences are gold and second preferences are fool’s gold. Look at every election state and federal in recent and not so recent history and you will see that if a party gets a big primary vote, that is, 45% , then it will invariably win the election in a big way. This is why Labor’s recent poll numbers, showing them with a big primary vote, have been so significant. It is also why there is such a big contrast with the polls of 2004, where’s Labor’s prospective 2PP vote was built on the tissue paper foundations of preferences.

So, for the final time, if people vote Green thinking that this is a risk free exercise in shifting the centre of political gravity to the left while still fulfilling the objective of turfing John Howard and Co, they are wrong.

At the risk of labouring the point, suppose a bunch of Labor voters decide that Kabor is too right wing for their taste and vote Green 1 Labor 2, turning what would have been an absolute Labor majority on primaries into a preference count. If their is a fourth party that runs last and they preference the Liberals strongly, then the Liberals could well win, even if Labor leads on primaries.

The more candidates there are, the more complex the analysis, but these things do happen. In 1998, Pauline Hanson got more primaries than anyone else in her electorate but still lost badly because of the preference distributions.

To repeat, dragging Labor into a preference fight by voting Green 1 is a dangerous tactic for Labor supporters to adopt.

If one party gets 50% + 1 of the vote then they’re the winner. The end.

If one candidate gets 50% + 1 of the vote it is entirely impossible for further counting to find a new winner. You don’t get two candidates each getting more than half the vote unless you have seriously miscounted something.

The order of preference distribution matters a huge amount. Quite often in elections (usually state) you might get a contest between Liberal, Labor and an independent (say a popular local mayor). On the how to votes, the independent and Liberal give each other their 2nd preference, while Labor gives its 2nd preference to the independent.

If Labor was second on the primaries, then the the independent’s preferences would elect the Liberal. So Labor tries to run last so that its preferences will go to the indepndent who will then win.
During the vote counting, Labor scrutineers will do all they can to make as many of their votes are disqualified to help make this happen.

It is not the case that everybody’s preferences are distributed for the purposes of calculatin a 2PP vote — certainly for the purpose of finding a winner in the electorate.

As several commentators have already explained, if I vote 1 Green 2 Labor (as I always do) and the Green candidate is eliminated before the Labor candidate, my vote is then transferred at full value to the Labor candidate. This is not affected in any way by the fact that another Green voter might vote 1 Green 2 Liberal.

To say the same thing another way: let us imagine an electorate in which the intending Green primary vote is 10,000, of whom 7500 intend to preference Labor and 2500 intend to preference Liberal. Then let us imagine that the Green candidate falls under a 4WD before the ballot papers are printed, so that the only candidates on polling day are Labor and Liberal. Of the 10,000 intending Green voters, we can assume that 7500 will now cast a primary vote for Labor and 2500 for Liberal. The net effect on the election result will be the same as if the Green candidate had lived until polling day and her 10,000 votes had been allocated as preferences 7500 to 2500 between Labor and Liberal. In other words, a 1 Green 2 Labor vote is the same, in 2PP terms, as a Labor primary vote.

Your Labor preference after having voted Green 1 would not be counted.

For the house of representatives, a two-candidate preferred count is done for each electorate so the vote would be counted.

If in a four way contest Family First is last, then the distribution of their preferences could get a Liberal candidate over the line.

Yes, that’s true. A vote that goes 1FF2Lib = 1Lib after the distribution of preferences, just as 1G2ALP = 1ALP. When a candidate is distributed 50% 1 of the vote, that means they’ve just won the outright majority of votes in an electorate. If Labor loses an election in such a situation it’s nobody’s fault but their own, for getting so few votes. Work harder, comrades, in winning back the Tory Greens!
The fallacy you’re pushing is that a Greens vote entails moral responsibility for the preferences of other Greens voters. A vote or preference for a Party in no way entails endorsement of every vote for that Party, only for the candidate/ticket—nobody is responsible for the votes that go to the Coalition but the people who have voted for or preferenced the Coalition.

any Labor supporter who thinks that they can somehow drag their party to the left by voting for the Greens has rocks in their head

Yes, while the Greens are assumed to support hypothetical Labor minorities in either House, I agree with that statement entirely.

Even without Family First Green preferences could get the Liberal candidate over the line. Suppose there are 100 primary votes distributed as Labor 35, Liberal 45 Green 20. All the Liberals need is 6 of the 20 Green preferences to win the seat.

Don’t kid yourself. Depending on your seat, by voting Green, you could be harming Labor a great deal, even if you give labor your second preference. This is especially true where there are multiple candidates and it’s not clear whose preferences will be distributed first but it’s trye generally. Primary votes are extremely important.

Of course if you want to vote Greens because you genuinely are a supporter of the Greens, that’s different. But any Labor supporter who thinks that they can somehow drag their party to the left by voting for the Greens has rocks in their head. Your gesture will be at best empty and worst will contribute to the re-election of John Howard.

“Anybody who first and foremost wants to see Howard gone but is thinking of weakening the Labor primary vote by voting Green to let them know that you don’t agree with them is playing with fire. ”

I’ve voted Greens for years, but my preference vote has always gone to Carmen Lawrence because it’s a safe Labor seat – so no “playing with fire” there. If a Green were elected and held the balance of power I have no doubt they would support the ALP to be the government, but perhaps extract a price in environmental and social justice decisions that I would probably approve of. Here in WA we’ve had the Greens holding the balance of power in the upper house – no problem for anyone on the left.