Australia Parliamentary Election

Australia held an election on Saturday, May 18.  The House results are mostly known.  See the wikipedia article here.

Results for the Senate, which uses proportional representation, won’t be known for a while.  See this article.  It appears neither major party will have a majority in the Senate, but in the House, the incumbent ruling coalition won a majority.


Comments

Australia Parliamentary Election — 2 Comments

  1. Australia uses IRV for its House of Representativs. IRV was originally implemented by the Liberal and Country (now National) parties to keep Labor candidates from being elected by plurality. It did not work that way, but now serves to maintain a Labor-Coalition (Liberal-National) duopoly. The more rural-oriented Nationals have been squeezed in an increasingly urbanized Australia.

    Due to leakage, the two coalition parties rarely run against each other (only 11 divisions in this election), and the two parties have formally merged on Queensland.

    Australia election authorities report two-party preferred. If a voter ranks Labor 4th and Liberal 6th, they are reported as a Labor vote, just the same as if they voted Labor 1st and Liberal 9th. This is done because of the strong assumption that this will be the only meaningful distinction.

    It is conceivable that this led to polling errors, as the 25% who favored a party other than the two dominant parties may have been equivocal about later preferences. They may also missed some of the 5.5% who voted informally. A formal ballot must rank every candidate with consecutive numbers. Australia has compulsory voting, some voters may deliberaterly spoil their ballot.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.