Preferences are counted as fractions o f a vote (i.e while a first preference is worth one vote, a second preference is counted as half a vote, a third preference as a third o f a vote, and so on).

4 However as detailed in the following Chapter, another South Pacific state, Fiji, will hold its future elections under an AV system.

different institutional incentives, both tend to be classified as ‘majoritarian’ systems in the electoral studies literature. Lijphart, for example, states that AV and FPTP are both “a perfect reflection of majoritarian philosophy: the candidate supported by the largest number of voters wins, and all other voters remain unrepresented” (1984, 150). While indeed similar in many ways, the effects of these two systems in terms of the incentives they provide for accommodative political behaviour are sometimes very different — in fact in some ways they can be seen as polar opposites when applied to a highly- fragmented social and political structure such as that of PNG. This chapter will examine how these two electoral systems have encouraged very different types of election campaigning and political behaviour in PNG.

The Alternative Vote in Papua New Guinea

The introduction of AV to PNG was a straightforward example of a colonial ‘institutional transfer’ described earlier, in which both the metropole and colony were happy to persist with familiar institutions rather than experiment with something new. Hughes noted that the first report of the 1962 Select Committee on Political Development, which was charged with making recommendations on the Territory’s future representative institutions, had favoured AV as “giving the fairest result” (Hughes 1965, 36), declaring that four-fifths of witnesses to the Committee had supported this option. The recommendation was readily accepted by both the colonial administration and the Australian government (Hughes and van der Veur 1965, 406).

AV was first used to elect members of the (largely-appointed) Legislative Council in the early 1960s under what was known as the ‘College Electoral System’. This involved electors physically queuing up behind the candidate of their choice in what the Chief Electoral Officer called a system of ‘open preferential voting’:

If, on a count, no candidate had an absolute majority, i.e. more than half the voters present lined up behind him, then the candidate with the least number o f voters behind him moved away and his supporters redistributed themselves amongst other candidates ... this physical act o f distributing one’s person to the candidate o f one’s choice and, if he be eliminated, to one’s next choice, was simple and understandable in the eyes o f the voter (1968, 32).

While simple, such a system ignored the basic precept of the secrecy of the ballot, and was not practical for mass-suffrage elections. PNG’s first three national elections in 1964, 1968 and 1972 were therefore held under the ‘optional preferential vote’ (OPV),

based on the ‘full preferential’ AV method used for federal elections in Australia. Electors were required to express a first preference (defined as the number 1) for a candidate, and as many further preferences (2,3,4 etc) for other candidates as they so chose. In practice, low literacy rates meant that most electors were not capable of independently numbering preferences themselves, so the institution of the ‘whispering ballot’ — electors verbally expressing their preferences to a polling officer, who would mark the ballot paper for them — was extensively used.5 In a further departure from Australian practice, it was reasoned that it would not be necessary to compel voters to express preferences for all candidates (hence the description of the system as ‘optional preferential’), as a direct imitation of the Australian system would have seen numbering mistakes render a ballot paper invalid — which would have had dramatic ramifications considering PNG’s low literacy rates.6 Similarly, the Australian system of compulsory voting was not introduced “because of the novelty of the elections and the problems of terrain and climate” (Hughes and van der Veur 1965, 406). With those important exceptions, the remainder of the Territory’s Electoral Ordinance 1963 was a direct copy of the Australian Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. In no sense was the transfer of AV an example of conscious ‘constitutional engineering’; as Wolfers noted at the time, the principal raison d ’etre for the introduction of the preferential system was that it was the system used in Australia (1969, 29). By 1970, however, official documents were arguing that AV was particularly well-suited to PNG’s fragmented social structure, arguing that if voters

are unable to gather enough votes to have their ‘local’ man elected then their next preference is a man who can adequately represent them in the House because he is literate, articulate and able to move freely throughout the electorate. In addition they feel that such a man would represent all groups without prejudice, something they fear will not happen at this stage if a man is elected from another language group (Electoral Commission o f Inquiry into Electoral Procedures 1970).

The adoption of AV in PNG was thus an example of the law of unintended consequences at work: in many ways, the social conditions present there were, as we shall see, almost uniquely well-suited to the use of a system which aggregated fragmented political choices to produce an overall winner. Nonetheless, the complexity of AV was an ongoing source of concern. For the first election in 1964, neither the