Lots of voting happening around the shop today – The Poll Bludger has previews of both the four NSW by-elections – caused in effect by the implosion of the Iemma regime – and the regularly scheduled ACT general election. Points of interest to watch for in the counting are how many seats NSW Labor loses – Ryde appears gone – and how well the Greens do in the ACT. The Poll Bludger observes, commenting on the NT and WA elections this year:
The other story to emerge from the two elections was the strong performance by the Greens, who demonstrated an ominous capacity to siphon votes from ageing Labor governments. The Greens vote in Western Australia was up from 7.6 per cent in 2005 to 11.9 per cent, and its average vote in the six seats it contested in the Northern Territory was over 16 per cent. The one public opinion poll to emerge during the ACT campaign makes it very clear that both trends are going to be replicated tomorrow. The Patterson survey published in the Canberra Times a fortnight ago suggested that a 12 per cent drop in the Labor vote has been harvested almost entirely by the Greens.
In other jurisdictions, Labor could console itself with the thought that most of those votes would return to them as preferences – but the ACT’s Hare-Clark system of proportional representation means the shift in votes will translate into seats lost to the Greens.
Elsewhere: Lots of election goodness from Antony Green.
Bahahah! The Libs have managed a swing AGAINST them in the ACT! Not as big as the ALPs, granted, but seriously, that’s unbelievable.
I tell ya, there’s been two stories in State/Territory politics since Rudd: the end nigh for long tenured ALP regimes, and the LNPs almost superhuman capacity to maintain failure in the face of opportunity.
I believe there are a few extra ex-Libs running as independents; some doing better than others. There’s also Mark Patton in Ginninderra who, as far as I could tell whilst I was doing my pre-vote research, is banking on picking up the folks who want are swayed by a ‘the Greens are evil and hate REAL(tm) people’ screed.
There are at least two ex-libs running as independents this time, one who is very well funded which explains the swing against the liberal party. There is a big swing against labor, but as expected its pretty much all going to go to the Greens with a small part going to the libs (if you include the independents).
It is very early in the evening but in the ACT it looks like Labor 7 (32% of votes), Liberal 7 (36% of votes), Greens 3 (16% of votes). The electorate of Molonglo will probably be 3 Labor, 3 Liberal, 1 Green; Ginninderra 2 Labor 2 Liberal, 1 Green; Brindabella 2 Labor, 2 Liberal, 1 Green. A good result for the Greens, they will probably support Labor, but may be able to extract some good policies if they engage in some tough bargaining.
Incidentally, for those who are twitter-inclined, there are UC journalism students live-tweeting from the Tally Room here. I am live-snarking here.
Peter @ 4 – there’s no way that there will be a green/lib coalition and I’m sure Labor know it. Will be interesting to see how Labor intend to get funding for the GDE past the Greens though.
Excellent result for Green supporters. Shame we don’t have proportional rep everywhere.
Indeed, it does look good for Greens. Might we therefore expect a move by the major parties to change the electoral system in ACT as they did in Tassie, when those feral upstarts, began getting in the way of tree clearing progress?
Watching Brendan Smyth trying to spin the results is just boggling. He’s stopped to calling Katy Gallagher ‘shrill’ a few times, which is sadly unsurprising. He also keeps banging on about Zed’s quota v. John Stanhope’s, whilst obviously neglecting to mention that the % vote required in Zed’s electorate (Mongolo) is considerably lower compared to Ginninderra.
joe2 – Labor already did change the electoral system to make it harder for independents to get elected in the ACT. The Greens are large enough in the ACT now not to be affected though.
Speaking to the national scene for a moment if I may. ( Thanks make )
Is it possible that one day in the far-off future that daily recedes before us into Asia, might we one day wake to the roar of a mighty opposition lion?
A lion-like being whose also a staunch republican and a die-hard friend of the humble public-servant whistle-blower?
I know it all sounds like a forlorn, pipe-dream, a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, but darlings, might one day a hero such as this not appear?
Surely tis at least in the realms of possibility my dears
Thanks for the info Chris. Too bad all this Green support did not translate into a Senate seat at the Federal election to negate the pesky Fielding factor.
joe2 – yea I think the Greens getting a federal senate seat in the next election is going to depend critically on how well the local Greens use their balance of power locally. The last Green (Deb Foskey) who did not renominate this time around was not a very good advert for them but hopefully this new lot will do well.
The ACT electoral commission website has “interim distributions of preferences” for each electorate based on a smaller earlier sample. For Molonglo, they predict 3 positions for Labor, 3 for Liberal, and 1 to the Greens. When the second Green candidate Caroline Le Couteur is excluded, her votes are distributed, and the rest of successful candidates are elected soon after. Since then, the Labor primary vote has gone up by .125 of a quota, the Green vote has gone up by .125 of a quota, and the Liberal vote has gone down by .180 of a quota. This would be enough for Le Couteur’s position to be determined later, probably after the Labor Candidates Simon Corbell and Andrew Barr have been elected. A Liberal candidate could be excluded instead of Le Couteur.
This would lead to a result for Molonglo of Labor 3, Green 2, Liberal 2. I could be wrong, but if I am not then you read it here first!
Peter, I think its going to be too close to call for some time.
one for the fans
The difference a fair electoral system makes…
All pretty quiet here on the NSW by-elections. 20% swings against Labor in Ryde and Cabramatta, before the recession hits and Sydney people start losing their jobs, which they will.
A very cold climate for NSW Labor, that has to have Federal ramifications. The ACT is nice, but there are a lot more Federal swing seats in SW (especially in Sydney).
True. terry, but even with Emo Man gone, its highly unlikely those seats will shift to the Libs at the next election unless Rudd stuffs up bigtime. I thought he might for a while by getting bogged down in reviews and enquiries, but he’s rectified that with his “rescue package”.
If Turnbull can make the argument that Rudd is behaving like NSW Labor stick, he could cause Rudd real problems, but I think Rudd’s too clever for that. Mind you, I don’t under-estimate Turnbull. He’s the best thing that’s happened to the Libs in years, but I’m not sure his own RWDBs will see it that way.
Ah, this is great news all ’round. The Green vote in Lakemba has shot up and the ACT Greens have managed to gain the balance of power. I love that the Libs’ leader is trying to spin the decline in their primary vote as the public expressing confidence in the Libs. What?!
Two things bother me about the ACT electoral system, evidenced yesterday at the polling booth:
Firstly, voters in the ACT are not allowed to receive how-to-vote cards from party workers within 100 metres of the polling booth. This is an unjustifiable intrusion on our right to free speech and free association, and possibly unconstitutional.
The 100 metre rule is apparently there to “protect” queuing voters from enthusiastic party workers. What rubbish. What it does do is confuse many voters, who are used to the more reasonable 6 metre rule that applies at federal elections and in all States but Tasmania.
And its thoroughly inconvenient for the ill-prepared. I saw one woman put down her ballot paper and leave the booth to find a party worker and voting guidance some way down the street. She might not have bothered to return.
Secondly, voters in my polling booth had their names ticked off by the electoral official on a nifty little hand-held electronic device, rather than with the usual line drawn through their names on the paper copy of the roll.
Great new ‘boy’s toy’ I’m sure, but I had no idea what the polling official was doing, and could not see a thing from the angle at which I was standing. How do I know he ticked me off properly? I would much rather see that line drawn through my name on paper, even upside down – that’s what I call a transparent and verifiable process.
The ACT electoral system is pretty good at a representational level, as most commentators seem to agree, but the Electoral Commission should pay some attention to the free speech issue in the 100 metre rule, and should concentrate on maximising transparency and accountability in the voting process, rather than falling for the latest technological fix.
An increasingly electronic voting and scrutiny system is not necessarily the best pathway to democracy. Just look at the mess in the USA.
Paul
I’m half with you on this one. Frankly, after however many years of having Reba Meagher as their local member, who could barely disguise her contempt for the place, worse things could have happened to the residents of Cabramatta than to have voting situation in their electorate which forced NSW Labor to take them a bit seriously even if for purely pragmatic reasons.
Ryde, however, is a different matter. Sitting smack in the middle of Maxine McHugh’s newly-won seat of Bennelong, it is the sort of area that, if the middle classes lose confidence in Labor as economic managers, it will fall to the Libs quite quickly.
NSW Labor is a pretty constant reminder to Federal Labor of what it has to avoid – avoiding reform, cronyism, putting hacks in high level jobs, cash-for-favours etc. If/when NSW Labor falls, Sydney will be the natural base for the Libs federally to really get people and resources into the task of trying to be the alternative Federal government.
Turnbull’s promise of being socially liberal while knowing something about economics is a real threat to Rudd, although he has as many problems dealing with his own ranks as he does withe the ALP. That said, he is making a meal of things by: (a) constantly being on TV even when he doesn’t have anything much to say, (b) continuing the Coalition’s trait since it has been in opposition of denying that Labor has any right to govern and make policy, and (c) being negative for its own sake and attributing all good news back to the previous government.
While the Emo Man effect was to make the Rudd Gvoernment look like it was more effective than perhaps it was, the Emo Man effect is also to make Turnbull look lake a better – or, to use a Glenn Milneism, more ‘resurgent’ – opposition leader than he may in fact be.
grace, I must admit I’m rather ambivalent about the 100m rule, but that’s probably from being ridiculously prepared for elections – I go into the federal elections with a prepared list of how I was going to number the senate ballot, and honestly, I kinda like not having folks outside the polling places because it means I don’t get so tempted to punch the Liberal/Family First/One Nation folks. But that’s just me being snarky about having to exercise restraint, not a serious complaint.
In terms of the electronic roll ticking off; I think there’s a way to use the PDA system without losing accountability, and actually having better accountability. I was always a bit uncomfortable about the fact that I could see a whole page of the list, and if one chose to, anyone who could read upside down could pick off other people’s votes. I don’t know how the program they use works, but if there’s a way for them to do what they did (ie, ask you for your name and address without you being able to see the list), then show you an on-screen display of your details and get you to tick the box on the touch-screen, etc. Whether that would happen, I dunno, but I suspect that shouldn’t be too difficult to manage.
Sam @ 20 – for a more accurate look at the liberal party vote, I think you’d have to include ex-lib independents like Richard Mulchahy and Helen Cross and I’d assume we won’t see accurate preference flows for a little while. It’s been a pretty unusual situation in the ACT with the breakdown of the liberal party and they’ve done surprisingly well given almost everyone had a go at the leadership!
Grace @ 21 – I find the 100m rule rather refreshing compared to other elections – its really nice not to have to navigate my way through a bunch of over enthusiastic people. Probably much better on the environment too with a lot fewer pamphlets distributed.
I don’t know if they do it yet, but the handheld unit if networked could make the voting accountability much better. At the moment there’s nothing stopping someone going from booth to booth voting multiple times – they’ll only pick it up afterwards when its too late to fix (short of re-running the election). And even then how will they really know it was you who tried to vote multiple times? And mistakes happen with the paper system anyway so its not necessarily more error prone – in fact with a good UI it would be much less so.
I did like to see the encouragement of electronic voting – should lead to faster results with the complex counting system in the ACT and also allows for privacy of voting for more people (blind people for example can now vote without a helper).
What I don’t like about the ACT system is the way the Labor party changed things to make it harder to get party registration and lumped all the independents in one column. It potentially makes the voter form narrower, but it makes it much harder for independents to get attention.
Jennifer, good on you for being so organised on polling day, but many are not, and need that last minute access to information and advice.
At one large polling booth I saw the party workers so far distant from the access paths used by the voters that they had no chance of interacting at all. All they could was wave from a distance. (How the dills in the Legislative Assembly allowed the 100 metre rule through is beyond me!)
Meanwhile, a number of charity stalls had been erected around the door of the polling booth, merrily selling their wares (and of course, not giving any political advice) to queuing voters.
This is not right. Much as it pains me to say at times, political parties are a legitimate part of the democratic process and should not be unduly impeded from interacting with the voting public on polling day. Its part of the theatre of the event anyway, and one that I have always enjoyed.
On the PDAs (is that what they are called?), you would have to be a very quick study to scan a voting list of hundreds of names for one or two likely names to impersonate (if you were silly enough to think this would work)….and I am not sure its possible to move to a position where voters mark off the certified lists themselves. Someone has to be responsible in law, that the marked lists are correct, and individual voters cannot do that.
Perhaps transparency can be enhanced with some tweaking of the current model, but my general point remains. Let’s not travel down the electronic voting road, step by sneaky step, without seriously considering recent experience in the USA. Its just too risky. Many American States are now urgently legislating for paper ballots to provide an audit trail for the November 08 election. They had better hurry up.
Oh, and apologies for my shorthand error in my first post. The line is marked on the paper voting list beside my name, not through it.
grace @ 21: personally, I’d like to replace the 100 emtre rule by a 100 km rule. Like jennifer @ 23, I don’t want to be harrassed by a cloud of human blowflies, and I agree with the environmental point raised by chris@24. I tend to stomp through the gauntlet scowling and snarling at them all to leave me alone. The way to make an informed choice at an election is not to have propaganda pamphlets waved in your face at the last minute, but to read up on candidates and parties beforehand. And if people can seriously become ‘confused’ walking 100 metres between the last load of propaganda and the polling station, then I’ll seriously start questioning the universal franchise.
The handheld thingies? After seeing the debacles in the USA over the last few years, I’m in favour of good old-fashioned paper trails wherever possible. Chris’s points in favour of electronic registration as a voter and electronic counting are good (the latter only after entry of preferences from hardcopy ballots!), and likewise electronic voting for those who would otherwise need assistance, but the default vote should be hardcopy pen or pencil mark on paper.
I handed out for the Greens in Lakemba, not my usual stamping ground, but next door, and I was struck by the calm graciousness of most voters in this richly multicultural working class electorate. They seemed to expect – and enjoy – that there were a range of parties represented on this day by ordinary human forms naturally part of a given electoral process.
The 12 per cent plus vote in Lakemba for the Greens was remarkable. Up from a previous 4 per cent.
I had the following poignant exchange with an ALP booth worker. I asked, by way of conversation, if Morris Iemma may now move away from Roselands and Lakemba now that the world was his oyster, etc.
Oh, no, he really likes it here. Besides, he never has to work again.
What? The man is what, 46-48, surely he will be looking to other work?
Why would he want to work? He has a 100,000 plus lifetime pension. And what would he do? Work for Macquarie Bank? C’mon!
Well, he could do anything, surely. He could be a teacher, I suggested.
A teacher?! Why would be f*king demean himself by doing that?
But it is not demeaning to be a teacher, I protested. It is one of the most socially useful and important things anyone could do!
Yeah, well, I’m a teacher, a TAFE teacher, came the reply. But neither Labor nor Liberal care about public education. We lost that one a long time ago.
grace @ 25 – aren’t electoral rolls publicly available? So people can plan ahead if they want to.
andyc @ 26 – there are many many issues to be considered around electronic voting and it has been done very badly in the US. And people shouldn’t confuse electronic voting with internet voting. The issues were carefully looked at in the ACT and we have had electronic voting for the last 3 elections without the sky falling in. The code used for the voting system was Open Source which anyone can inspect (not sure if that is still the case). One other advantage of electronic voting is that you only get informal votes when people actually want to vote informal.
btw I believe electronic counting is used in the ACT (double entry to reduce the probability of operator errors) and merged with the electronically submitted votes.
Re people getting confused after 100m – I wonder what would happen if candidates were not allowed to put their party affiliation on the voting form
Act Labor need to dump Stanhope and Cossey for running a little Johnny rodent fear don’t risk it campaign, at least the liberal voters used the Hare Clarke system to its best advantage and unloaded their dud candidates not so the Labor voters who were seeminly not so disenchanted with theirs.
honestly, I kinda like not having folks outside the polling places because it means I don’t get so tempted to punch the Liberal/Family First/One Nation folks.
Jennifer, I hear ya. They are hastening my decline into an Insane Muttering Older person- last local by-election (Williamstown) I couldn’t resist lecturing the teenager from Family First who’d been parachuted in from the Eastern suburbs to (hopefully) rule over us unwashed Westies in a socially conservative manner, about how prattish that was, and the Labor volunteer on what a slimeball campaign Labor had waged and Stephen Newnham was a sleazy ratbag. Next time they’ll be backing away slowly. I do regret chewing out the FF teenager, she was only ignorant and didn’t stand an electoral chance anyway.
I think it be prudent to request ID at the same time as one supplies ones name that would certainly reduce fraud add a little time to the process but safer all round
I’m all for electronic voting if done honestly and competently, as I would expect the AEC to do. Done right it should be much more reliable and fraud-proof than traditional systems, results will usually be known at the close of the booths, its easier to audit so challenges will be fewer and it makes complex but fair electoral systems (eg Hare-Clark with Dobson rotation) more feasible.
I think US experience is a poor guide. Over there voting arrangements are determined locally by political appointees; that’s why they are so often rigged as well as simply bungled. And that’s true whether they use paper or computers.