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 September 8 Washington Post has this lengthy story, listing all the election law changes made by the 2013 session of the North Carolina legislature. The story is useful, but unfortunately it will give readers a false impression about ballot access for minor parties. One of the subtitles in the story says, “It’ll be cheaper for third parties to get on the ballot.” The story then accurately explains that the 2013 session of the legislature lowered the number of signatures in lieu of a filing fee, for candidates who don’t wish to pay the candidate filing fee.

Unfortunately, the change in the petition in lieu of filing fee has virtually no practical significance, because it is still cheaper for a candidate to pay the filing fee than to get the signatures of 5,000 voters (the old petition in lieu of the filing fee was 10,000 signatures). Because the article’s subtitle refers to third parties, instead of petitions in lieu of filing fees, an ordinary reader will think that North Carolina recently reformed its severe ballot access petition requirements for newly-qualifying parties and independent candidates, but the legislature rejected bills to do that. North Carolina still requires 89,366 valid signatures for ballot access. The House passed a bill to at least study the issue of ballot access, but the State Senate rejected that bill also.

The story also errs when it says only four states now have straight-ticket devices. Actually twelve states still have them. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.