Australia’s Senate is elected by proportional representation. On April 8, the Senate passed a bill altering the proportional representation method somewhat. See this story. One effect of the bill, if it becomes law, is that the very smallest parties would be less likely to win a seat.
Party Seats = Total Seats x Party Votes / Total Votes
redo math if a Party gets no seats.
Exact – Each winner will have a voting power equal to the final votes he/she gets (directly from voters and from losers – pre-election rank order lists).
Difficult ONLY for ANTI-Democracy minority rule gerrymander monsters from Hell.
Oops. PropRep is flawed – just like every other election system used to implement “democracy” which always devolves to mob rule sooner or later.
Sorry — current ROT — nonstop gerrymander OLIGARCHS since 1776 in the various rigged pack/crack gerrymander districts.
1/2 or less votes x 1/2 pack/crack gerrymander districts = 1/4 or less indirectly CONTROL = OLIGARCHY.
Some results of the nonstop oligarchy regimes in the USA since 1776 –
GENOCIDE of the American Indian tribes
SLAVERY until 1865
Nonstop undeclared WARS
Nonstop destruction of the ecosystem – i.e. Mother Earth
INSANE government debts and future unfunded liabilities.
The 1860 gerrymander oligarchs directly caused Civil WAR I to happen with about 750,000 DEAD on both sides.
P.R. is used by various DEMOCRACY regimes – Germany, Israel, New Zealand, etc. etc.
AREA based representation is DARK AGE stuff — started in the DARK AGE in the 1066 DARK AGE regime in England.
Prior to the 1964 SCOTUS gerrymander cases the minority rule in the USA House of Reps and in all State and local district based legislative bodies was much worse than the 1/4 (25 percent) indicated — roughly 5-15 percent.
P.R. has been around since the 1820s-1840s — a mere 160 plus years.
I.E. political *science* has advanced since the DARK AGE like other science stuff – math, physics, chemistry, etc.
I’m sorry but your article is wrong. The Bill does NOT alter the proportional method at all i.e. there are NO changes to calculations or the quota to win a seat. And the article you link to does not say that either.
What it does alter is the ending of old system where the parties had to rank all the other parties in the ticket vote for the Above The Line part of the ballot. That meant that e.g. the Liberals would have to rank the Labor party somewhere in its ticket vote (and vice versa). What will happen now is voters will be asked to rank 6 (or more) parties in the above the line box so they choose how their preferences get allocated rather than the parties. (note there is a ‘savings’ provision so that if a voter only gives preferences to 1 or 2 parties their votes will still count but will exhaust sooner in the count)
The story that you linked to was about passage by the Senate on March 18. The bill had already been approved by the House of Representatives, but had to be voted on again to consent to senate amendments. House approval came on the same day, on March 18. Assent was given on March 21 (in Australia this is done by the Governor-General on a pro forma basis).
Each state in Australia has 12 senators, ordinarily elected by halves, but in the case of a double dissolution where early elections are called for both House of Representatives and Senate, all 12 are elected at once. Part of the impetus for the bill was that Australia is facing a double dissolution this summer, and when 12 senators are elected fewer votes are needed for each one. The headline of “green light for July 2 election” was in reference that the new bill made it more favorable for the government to call a double dissolution.
Historically, Australia has required full preferences, meaning that a voter had to rank every candidates. For a House race with only a half dozen candidates, with one elected, this ensure that the winner would receive a majority of votes cast (and make it less likely that a 3rd party candidate would win with a plurality). In the last New South Wales senate election there were 110 candidates. To prevent a voter who made a mistake from having their ballot discarded, there were rules that would let preferences count up until a duplicate or skipped number. But then someone started publicizing how to do it deliberately – for which they were prosecuted.
Parties would print “How to vote” cards which would recommend preference rankings for their supporters, and this was later formalized as an above the line vote. A ballot is divided into two sections. Below the line, individual candidates would be arranged in columns by party, and a voter could rank all of them without regard to party. Above the line, there was a box above each party column. By marking one of those boxes, the voter would adopt the party’s sequence for all the individual candidates.
For example in New South Wales there were 106 candidates in 44 columns numbered A-Z, AA-AR, plus 4 individual candidates. A voter could rank all 110 candidates, or they could vote for one of the 44 party groups. Each party group supplies their list so a voter could conceivably find a list that matches their political beliefs. There is a lot of deal-making (I’ll rank your party higher, if you’ll rank my party higher). Under STV, these sorts of deals end up being one-sided, since the party that is eliminated first will transfer to the other party. A party with a clever agent could sometimes manage to make enough deals so that they could survive and eventually force elimination of larger parties.
The big change by the new bill was the elimination of the party group ticket. Now a voter may either number individual candidates below the line, or parties above the line. A ‘1’ above the Happy Party is equivalent to ranking the Happy Party candidates 1, 2, …; then a ‘2’ above the Grumpy Party, is equivalent to continuing the sequence following the last Happy candidate.
Individual voters are unlikely to rank parties in the same order, so the parties lose control of transfers. The larger small parties probably won’t be hurt because voters are unlikely to completely ignore them.
Australia does not permit an Independent Party, nor does it permit use of “Independent” with the name of another registered party.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.