Australia held a Parliamentary election on September 7. All of the seats in the House, and slightly over half the seats in the Senate, were up. Although not all results are final, Australia’s minor parties did better than they usually do.
The House uses single-member districts and ranked-choice voting (instant-runoff voting). The tentative results are Liberal-National Coalition 86, Labor 57, Green 1, Australian Party 1, independent 1, four seats not yet determined.
The Senate uses proportional representation. The new Senate will apparently be: Liberal-National Coalition 33, Labor 25, Green 10, Palmer United 2, and one seat each for these parties: Liberal Democratic 1, Xenophon Group 1, Family First 1, Democratic Labor 1, Motoring Enthusiast 1, Sports Party 1. No party has a majority in the Senate. For more about the election, see the wikipedia story.
According to this story, 21% of the voters cast a ballot for a party other than one of the two major parties.
This story explains that the Green Party victory in the House was unexpected, because the Liberal-National Coalition and Labor each recommended to their voters and supporters that the voter’s second choice vote be given to the other major party, not the Green.
This story, which is intriguing but not very clear (to me, anyway) talks about the Senate results and the small parties that each won a seat.
Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks Party did not win a Senate seat; see this article.
The Motoring Enthusiast & Sports Party sound fun.
No surprise that the WikiLeaks party didn’t get a seat. The party basically fractured and had big infighting issues.
Instant runoff: zero help for third parties.
Proportional representation: is help for third parties.
This is true even though the methods are the “same”, irv using the same algorithm, but only with 1 winner per seat instead of several.
SMD = minority rule and political death and destruction.
P.R. = majority rule and life.
Thus – Aussie land = half life and half death.
The article on the micro parties is not available to me. But here is how it works. In Australia, voters are required to express full preferences, that is, rank all candidates.
If you have 20 candidates this is hard to do. So parties began distributing “How To Vote” cards, which simply suggested the ranking order for the candidates. This was eventually formalized, and voters were given the choice of voting “above the line”, where they simply adopt a party’s ranking order which are published in advance. This attracted additional “parties” since they could then supply a list of candidates. They would rank their candidates 1, 2, and then rank the other candidates, presumably based on whether they might support your issue.
In New South Wales, there were 110 candidates and 44 party groups. It is much easier to vote for one of the 44 party groups, than rank 110 candidates, and around 99% of voters do that.
Each state elects 6 senators, so under STV there are 7 quotas (1/7 of the total vote).
In New South Wales, Liberal&Nationals had 2.42 quotas, meaning their 1st two candidates would be elected, and the 3rd would have .42 quotas. Labor had 2.23 quotas, so will elect two candidates, and have .23 for the 3rd candidate.
So after the first four were elected, the Liberal Democrats had .62 quotas, the Greens .54 quotas, the Liberal&Nationals .42, Palmer United Party .25, Labor .24, and the remaining 38 parties sharing .92 (the best of these parties had .12 quotas). 2 more candidates are to be elected, and trailing candidates are eliminated one by one. If you can get a lot of the micro parties to transfer to you, you might be able to get ahead of PUP and maybe have them then transfer to your party.
So you have to get other parties to rank your party relatively high, which might require you to do the same for them (this could either be based on some common ideology, or maybe a political deal).
It is also imperative that the major parties be ranked relatively low, since a transfer to one of them will likely be locked up until the final few rounds.
And you must finish ahead of the other micro parties that you want to gather votes from. So if you receive .08 quotas, and another party has .10 quotas, you may get another party that gets .03 quotas to transfer to your party. This would happen first, and put you ahead of the .10 party, and then you get their transfers.
For example, the Wikileaks party in NSW, ranked the Greens 57-62, Labor 63-68, and Liberal&Nationalist 73-78. Since most micro parties only nominate the minimum of two candidates, this meant they could rank 27 parties ahead of the major parties, and another 15 or so below the majors.
The dust up between Assange and the other party leaders appears to be over where the Greens were ranked. The Greens ranked Wikileaks 9 and 10, which was just after The Greens 6 candidates and 2 Pirate Party candidates.
Re: Green Party
There is a truism in football, that you win games by moving the pile, which means if the offensive line pushes the defensive line back, the running back will gain a few yards consistently and eventually result in touchdowns.
The same thing is true in politics, and particularly in STV. You win elections by getting more of your voters to the polls, than getting voters to switch candidates to rank you 3rd ahead of your main opponent.
Adam Bandt, the Green candidate in Melbourne, was running for re-election. In 2010, he trailed the Labor candidate 38% to 36% on 1st preferences, but was strongly favored on transfers 20% to 5%, as Liberal voters ranked the Labor candidate below the Green candidate. Bandt ran about 13% ahead of 2007, mostly at the expense of Labor, which pushed him into 2nd place and able to win on transfers.
In 2010, neither Labor or the Liberal/National coalition had a majority, but Labor depended on support of the minor party MPs to form a government.
So in 2013, Labor sought to gain the seat back by encouraging Labor voters to rank the Liberals ahead of the Greens in exchange for the Liberals ranking Labor ahead of the Greens.
But Bandt got 43% of first preferences, a gain of 8%, mostly at the expense of the Labor candidate who drops 11% to 27%. So even though transfers to Labor were somewhat favorable (18% to 12%), it was nowhere close enough to overcome a 16% lead.