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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   21332 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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...Australia allows campaigning at the polling place? That's an absolute no-no in Finland, you can't even walk in to vote wearing your preferred candidate's pin.

There's a 6 metre buffer zone outside the actual school hall/whatever that is being used as a polling place. So it's routine to run a gauntlet of campaigners trying to shove paper in your hand as you walk through the gate. It annoys a lot of people.

There's an old Chaser sketch exploring different ways to try to get through unscathed.

Only six meters? In Texas the electioneering exclusion zone is the same as the exclusion zone for guns, and people are regularly sent to the bathroom to turn political shirts inside out before being allowed to vote. Political action committees produce lists of endorsed candidates on unofficial letterhead(that is it doesn’t say ‘vote for real true conservatives’) so they can be carried into the polling booth.

Yeah, only six metres. And you're allowed to take party political material in with you - it's routine for parties to give out "how to vote" cards recommending an ordering of candidates (e.g. us first, our allies second, weirdos and fringe candidates in the middle, and our enemies at the bottom) to voters walking in.

We have ‘how to vote’ cards too, they’re just plain black and white with no letterheads or logos of a political party or advocacy group of any sort. It would be illegal to carry a flier into a poll booth but you can have a list to remind yourself.

(I know you specifically don't need to know this, but for non-Australians reading, I hope this is helpful.)

I'll add that the how-to-vote cards do have a practical function. Firstly, Australia's voting system is relatively complex compared to countries like the US, so having a little more advice on how to correctly fill out a ballot seems reasonable. Secondly, we have preferential voting, and one of the purposes of how-to-vote cards is to explain how the party would like you to vote.

Let me give a specific example - here's a Labor how-to-vote card for the 2015 Canning by-election. For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count. However, there are twelve candidates in Canning! Twelve! Is the average voter really going to research every one of them and rank them in order? The how-to-vote card tells you how the Labor Party would like you to rank all the candidates. If you already know you want to vote for Labor, why not follow their advice?

Canning is an extreme case - there usually aren't twelve candidates. But anecdotally, I find that in my electorate it is usually somewhere between five and seven, and that's still a lot. Thus every party gives out cards like this.

The better cards, in my opinion, also give a little bit of information on the candidate's or party's platform, but that's up to the party. Still, they do have a useful role in educating and streamlining the voting process.

That said one worthwhile sidenote is that because a lot of voters just follow the order that their preferred party says, the people who decide the orders on the how-to-vote cards can have a lot of influence - this is where so-called preference deals can have a big influence. Often the parties will negotiate with other behind the scenes a bit for their preferences, and it can have a significant impact.

Obviously none of this matters for a referendum, because there aren't any parties and a referendum is a straight Yes/No question, but it is an interesting quirk of the way the Australian electoral system works.

For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count.

Whoa really? Where I live there have been occasional rumblings about switching to preference voting, and I've mostly been agnostic about it. But this part seems like a negative, to me. If it's clear who someone meant to vote for, the vote should count.

I'm curious what the reasoning is here? Is this specific to Australia? Something to do with mandatory voting?

That's just how it works in Australia. To my knowledge, when preferential voting is proposed overseas, as in the UK Alternative Vote referendum in 2011, the proposal has been for optional-preferential voting, rather than our mandatory full-preferential system. Likewise I believe New York uses optional-preferential rather than full.

As to why that's the way it works here, I don't know specifically.

We adopted preferential voting with the Commnowealth Electoral Act of 1918, after WWI - the intent was that, since politics of the day were a relatively unified Labor Party which would likely win a plurality vote every time against a gaggle of competing alternative parties, preferential voting was necessary to ensure fair representation. In 1918 the Nationalists were in power, and there had just been a by-election which Labor won with only a third of the vote, against two conservative candidates who split each other's vote. Preferential voting was intended to prevent travesties like that. Naturally Labor opposed it at the time, but today both major parties are solidly behind it.

(Interestingly, the general dynamic of Australian politics still mostly holds today, in that Labor is consistently the biggest individual party, and it's opposed by a rough coalition of not-Labor parties, which today are called the Coalition. The general structure of Australian politics has been the interests of labour, represented by the Labor party, against the interests of capital, represented by the National/Country/United Australia/Liberal/Whatever party. That said, this might be changing as over the last few decades, Labor have been increasingly losing touch with their earlier working-class and union base, and both major parties are seeing their primary votes collapse, as voters leave the big parties for more ideological alternatives.)

Anyway, I don't know why we chose full-preferential voting in 1918. For better or for worse, we did, and no one seems to want to risk touching the electoral system today. So it's likely to stay.

(We did not have mandatory voting in 1918 - that was introduced in 1924, after the 1922 election only had 60% turnout, which at the time was considered extraordinarily low, and indeed too low to give the government a real mandate. I realise that sounds quaint now with countries like the United States usually showing sub-60 turnout - I guess it just goes to show what a different time it was.)

I use the how-to-vote cards to triangulate minor parties' and independents' positions based on the patterns of how major parties rank them. I'm a relatively-high-information voter as regards the major parties' positions (for 2022, once my single-issue-voting plan failed due to hearing crickets from all parties, I went through all the online platforms - or at least, four of them, since I seem to recall the UAP not even having one, and I don't think I checked the Nats since for some reason Bendigo gets Libs), but minor parties and independents are harder and I usually don't bother.

One thing I will note about preference deals is this: there used to be a cordon sanitaire against preference deals with One Nation (I recall the Libs putting One Nation last under Howard), but it collapsed and the Liberals now preference One Nation second.

It is hilarious that preferential voting which was a Reddit fan favourite of 2010s and was surely going to herald true democracy…. ended up creating more backroom politics

What’s the problem with it though. In effect some uninformed voters voluntarily hand their preferred parties the power of their residual votes to use as they see fit, along with the main one. If the voter himself says : ‘I’ve seen all I wanted to see, go to the backroom’, it’s not really backroom politics.

It also succeeds at doing the thing it is meant to do - preventing vote-splitting from making third parties counterproductive.

E.g. the seat of Pumicestone in the 2017 Queensland election gave the most votes to the left wing Labor candidate (the amusingly named Michael Hoogwaerts), with 35%. The right wing vote was split between the Liberal National candidate with 30% and the even more right wing One Nation candidate with 23%.

FPTP would have given the seat to Labor, despite most voters voting for a right wing candidate. Instead, the Liberal National won it on preferences.

Under FPTP almost all conservative voters would have voted for National. UKIP didn’t win a parliamentary seat for that reason.

Yeah but that's a bad thing. It's good when people aren't locked into supporting establishment parties that they hate.

For what it's worth I do think preferential voting is superior to first-past-the-post, but you're right that it does not end or remove backroom deals. I don't believe there's any form of democracy, or even of government entirely, that's immune to scheming and dealing behind the scenes.

In this specific case, alternative vote (i.e. not requiring every box be filled) would be an alternative to Australia's mandatory full preferential voting that would significantly weaken the power of preference deals.

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