Before embarking on a discussion of effects peculiar to preferential voting, we must first return to the question of informal voting in Australia. The evidence generally points to preferential voting as being more responsible for informal voting than is compulsion to attend the polling booth. It is the added complexity which preferential voting brings to the marking of ballot papers that appears to induce informal votes. In order to cast a valid vote an elector must number each candidate in order of preference. An exercise comparable to that for the introduction of compulsory voting shows that prior to the advent of preferential voting the mean level of informal voting in elections for the House of Representatives had been 2.5 per cent. Since then the mean has been 2.7 per cent. Better evidence of the effect of preferential voting comes from elections for the Australian Senate where, owing to the much larger number of candidates on the ballot paper, informal voting has been consistently higher than in elections for the lower house, at times exceeding 10 per cent. Before the implementation of preferential voting the informal vote in Senate elections averaged 4.7 per cent. It more than doubled in 1919 from the previous election and since then the mean has been 9.1 per cent. Furthermore, in Senate elections held on their own - when voters have not had to concern themselves with filling out a separate ballot for the House of Representatives as well - the reduction in confusion and length of concentration time required"* is demonstrated by a mean level of informal voting of 5.8 per cent,
Colin A. Hughes, "The Electorate Speaks - And After", in Howard R. Penniman (ed.), Australia at the Polls (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise institute, 1977), p. 295, suggested that a factor in informal voting is "fatigue from filling in two [ballot] papers".
compared with 9.5 per cent for Senate elections (since the introduction of preferential voting) held in conjunction with those for the lower house. Nor is it surprising that even before preferential voting there was more informal voting in Australia than New Zealand (even for the House of Representatives), given that, with a multi-member district upper house and a lower house to vote for,
1
voting has always been a more complicated procedure for Australians.
Preferential voting was introduced in the Commonwealth of Australia, and also in the Australian states, by non-Labor governments apparently with the intention of preventing the election of members of the Labor Party on a minority of the total vote in seats where they were opposed by more than one non-Labor candidate. In general preferential voting has tended to operate against the Labor Party and
2
in favour of the non-Labor parties. it is almost certainly a factor allowing the Liberal and National parties to continue as separate organizations. One of the main advantages that preferential voting has over simple plurality voting is that it ensures that a candidate favoured by only a minority of voters in any seat cannot be elected. If no candidate has a majority of support after the counting of first preferences, the second preferences of voters who initially favoured the least popular candidate are distributed among the remaining candidates, and so on, until one candidate secures an absolute majority. Preferential voting does not, however, ensure that the
1
Hughes, "Compulsory Voting", p. 87, has presented evidence which suggests convincingly that complicated methods of marking ballot papers play a greater part in causing informal voting than does compulsory voting. See also Rydon, "Voting in Australian State and Federal Elections", p. 289; Hughes, "Electoral Behaviour", p. 174; Murray Goot, "Political Consequences of the Electoral Laws" (Paper presented to Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, Sydney, 1983), p. 8.
2
Rydon, "Voting in Australian State and Federal Elections", p. 3; Goot, "Political Consequences of the Electoral Laws", p. 3.
117
party which wins a majority of support throughout the country as a
1
whole also wins a majority of seats.
In this respect it exhibits the same weakness as simple plurality voting. Indeed, it should be stressed that it is only at the margins that preferential voting acts at all differently from ordinary simple plurality voting. Whenever a candidate at first obtains a clear majority of support the two systems operate identically. And this happens, on average, in 70 to 80 per cent of seats in Australian
2
elections. Moreover, when preferences are distributed they "change" the result (that is, the eventual winner is not the candidate who received the greatest number of first preferences) in only a quarter of the cases, on average. In other words, over a period of time, not many more than 5 per cent of seats differ under preferential voting from the final results that would have followed with first-past-the-post voting in operation.
Nevertheless the preferential system does produce features which the simple plurality system could not. For example, the non-Labor coalition parties are able to put up competing candidates in some electoral divisions without fear that the result will be to give the seat away to Labor. The more successful of the coalition candidates is assured of the great majority of the second preferences of the supporters of the other. In addition the luxury of allowing voters a second chance to influence the outcome of the election if their first choice candidates fail to attract sufficient support from others,
Rydon, "The Electoral System", p. 128, and Lakeman, How Democracies V o t e , p. 67.
There is considerable variability in the number from election to election - see Hughes, "The Electorate Speaks", p. 292.
1
means that votes are not "wasted". It also means that minor parties may attract a significant amount of support and that the preferences of their supporters have the potential to determine which of the other candidates wins a particular seat. The Democratic Labor Party capitalized on this advantage during the late 1950s and the 1960s. Generally, the preferential voting system, in combination with compulsory voting, helps "centre" parties to be influential, if not usually by letting them capture seats, then by letting their supporters, guided by the directions of the party (through "how to vote" cards, distributed by party activists at polling booths),
1