Antony Green's Election Blog

Canada 2015 - Would Preferential Voting Have Made a Difference?

While I am travelling, and with results not yet final, it is hard for me to do a detailed assessment of whether preferential voting would have made a difference to the Canadian election.

While in Canada, I have given a number of lectures on preferential voting. The main point I have been making is that assessing preferential voting should look at whether it allows MPs in individual ridings to claim a mandate, not whether it changes the overall election result.

The Australian experience is that fewer than one in ten electorates see the first reference winner defeated on the distribution of preferences. Only at the closest election would the number of results changed on preferences have an impact on who would form government.

So here are some preliminary observations.

Canadian Election Coverage

15:05 - I'm shutting up shop for the night. Stephen Harper has conceded defeat. All that is to come is Justin Trudeau's victory speech.

15:00 - It's midnight in Toronto and the result is clear. The Liberal Party has won a majority, Justin Trudeau is the new Prime Minister and will soon move into the Prime Minister's residence at 24 Sussex Drive where he grew up while his father Pierre was Prime Minister. An astonishing turnaround for the Liberal Party after being pushed to third place in 2011.

Canada 2015 - The Battle for Western Canada

Canada's western provinces were not part of Canada in 1867, but as the confederation approaches its 150th birthday, the four provinces west of Ontario are increasingly the third leg of national politics along with Ontario and Quebec.

Manitoba was first created as new province in 1870, and British Columbia joined in 1871 on the promise of a railway being built to the east. The transfer of the former Hudson Bay company lands created the North West Territories from which Saskatchewan and Alberta were carved in 1905.

The politics of the west has often deviated from the Liberal versus Conservative battle in the east. The twentieth century saw the rise of the rural Progressive Party and the Social Credit Party, while Saskatchewan's Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation eventually became the base for the modern NDP.

The west also saw the birth of the Reform Party in the early 1990s as western conservatives objected to Brian Mulroney's pandering to Quebec and the introduction of a GST.

Canada 2015 - The Battle for Ontario

Canada's big central province of Ontario has its capital in Canada's largest city, Toronto and surrounding urban centres, and also contains the national capital in Ottawa. Ontario is also home to several other major population centres including London, Hamilton and Windsor.

While the the province extends north to Hudson Bay and west along the Great Lakes, the province's population is concentrated in the peninsula of land in the province's south-east, surrounded by the lower lakes and pushing south of the 49th parallel into the continental United States.

Over the last three decades Ontario has been the province where governments have been made and unmade.

The Conservatives dominate Canada's western provinces, rarely win seats in Quebec, and so cannot win majority government without a good result in Ontario.

And since the Liberals have been shut out of Quebec by the Bloc Quebecois, and in 2011 by the NDP, hopes for Liberal victory are also dependant on winning big in Ontario.

As the campaign closes, polls indicate that Ontario will deliver the Liberals a majority of seats, critical to Justin Trudeau's hopes of being the next Prime Minister of Canada.

Canada 2015 - The Battle for Quebec

After two hours of analysing the entrails of results from Atlantic Canada, broadcasters will be faced with a deluge of results as voting ends and counting begins in 261 ridings extending all the way from Quebec to Alberta.

The results will represent two dimensions of Canada, geographically from west to east, and politically from traditionally conservative Aberta to normally left-wing but politically promiscuous Quebec.

At the 2015 election, no province is more difficult to predict than Quebec. This uncertainty has two causes.

First there is the complexity created by using a first-past-the-post voting system in a province with four competitive parties. Second, no province has seen more dramatic shifts in party support over the last three decades than Quebec.

There is also the uncertainty that English speaking Canada feels in trying to interpret a campaign in one province conducted in a French and in its own media outlets.

Canada 2015 - The Battle for Atlantic Canada

Atlantic Canada has just 32 seats spread across Canada's four smallest provinces, but as the first ridings to report their results on election night, early trends in the east will be watched to see if they offer a hint of what will follow once the larger central provinces close their polls.

 

The polling stations close first in Newfoundland at 8:30 local time, which is 7:00pm in central Canada and 10am in eastern Australia. Ridings in the rest of Atlantic Canada also shut at 8:30 local time, half an hour behind Newfoundland or 7:30 in central Canada and 10:30am in Eastern Australia.

NSW Federal redistribution

The draft federal electoral boundaries for NSW will be released between 11:30 and 12:30 on Friday 16 October. I'm writing this post on a train on the way to Toronto Airport and will be Ottawa all day Canadian time, so it is unlikely I will be able to do any analysis of the new boundaries. Once the boundaries are published, they will be linked from the front of the Australian Electoral Commission's website at www.aec.gov.au

Canadian Election Background

This column is the first of several I’ll be writing on the upcoming Canadian election

I’m currently in Toronto where I will be giving several lectures in coming days on Australia’s various implementations of preferential voting, in both single member and multi-member form.

I’ll also write several columns on the Canadian election and will cover the count next week. Polling in Canada is on Monday 19 October, with the results being reported in Australia on Tuesday 20 October.

Ballot Paper Instructions, iVote Preferences plus Nick Xenophon's Senate Proposal

An article in the Irish Times today has inspired me to write a post on the impact that instructions and ballot paper format can have on how voters complete their ballot papers.

This is a useful lead in to revealing the latest finding of my NSW election ballot paper survey that shows a clear difference between how voters completed their ballot papers depending on whether voters use the iVote electronic ballot paper or the traditional paper ballot paper.

All this leads me on to providing some commentary on Senator Xenophon's proposals for changing the Senate's electoral system.

Polwarth and South-West Coast By-elections - 31 October

Voters in Victoria's western districts go to the polls on 31 October for by-elections in two Liberal held seats.

The electorate of South-West Coast is based on Portland and Warrnambool. The by-election has been caused by the resignation of former Premier Denis Napthine, who has represented the local area in state parliament since 1988.

Joining Dr Napthine in retirement is former Transport and Roads Minister Terry Mulder. His seat lies between South-West Coast and Geelong and has been held by Mulder since 1999.

The Nationals have decided to contest both electorates, but Labor has chosen to sit out the by-elections, though the former Labor candidate for South-West Coast has nominated as an Independent.

Eight candidates have nominated for Polwarth and 11 for South-West Coast. Pre-poll voting starts next week and polling day is Saturday 31 October.

Background on both by-elections can be found at ABC Elections. Full coverage of the results will be provided on 31 October.

A Minimalist set of Changes to the Senate's Electoral System

If the government and Parliament do not go ahead with abolishing group ticket voting as part of changing the Senate electoral system, there are several smaller changes that can be introduced without major administrative difficulty and without having to change Senate counting software.

I think the best solution is the proposal put forward by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) to abolish group ticket votes but allow optional preferential voting for parties above the line.

However, these changes would take time for the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to implement and so require early legislation. This would leave the government at risk of having other legislation blocked in retribution by the Senate cross bench who oppose the electoral changes.  

If the government chooses not to take on the cross bench, it would need a set of changes that could be implemented relatively late in the life of the current parliament. Hence the proposals in this blog post.

These changes would partly deal with the two major problems in the Senate's electoral system, namely -

• That voters do not have an easy option to express their own preferences, the only current alternative to voting for a ticket being to number every square.
• That the ballot papers are being swamped by candidates and parties, few of whom have any hope of being elected, yet as a consequence the Electoral Commission are forced to print ballot papers that voters cannot read and where voters cannot find the parties they do know from amongst the flood of unknown candidates.

If people keep wondering why I bang on about ballot paper size, it is because I think it is wrong that in 2013 voters had to be issued with magnifying sheets. to read their ballot papers. The ballot paper cannot be made bigger because it would not be possible to print the required number of ballot papers in time. In addition, the larger the ballot paper, the greater the confusion for voters, as was clearly evident in 2013.

I hold it as a fundamental principle that voters should be able to read the ballot paper when they vote, and that is a principle that will be broken if it continues to be so easy to get on Australian Senate ballot paper.

Here are my suggestions.