Many Americans, and many of those watching around the world, see American democracy cracking, freedoms being eroded and the political system breaking. Much of the blame is sheeted home to Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again followers, and the case against them can clearly and forcibly be made.

But the United States has faced such crises before: in the 1790s, with the intense standoff between Federalists and Republicans; before, during and after the Civil War; in the Jim Crow period of the 1890s, which also saw five consecutive presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote; and after the Watergate revelations. The problems inherent in the American political system are thus compounded by problems and leaders unique to each era.

Trump’s presidency clearly damaged American democracy. Just how damaged and how long-lasting the effect is up for debate (a detailed 2023 report from Brookings discusses the issues well). During his term the United States was labelled a “backsliding democracy” by International IDEA, a European democracy think tank, and for some years the Economist’s Democracy Index has ranked the United States among “flawed democracies” including Greece, Poland and Brazil.

In a recent interview for the Democracy Project at Johns Hopkins University, political scientist Robert Lieberman stressed that democracy exists on a continuum. The United States started out as a constrained democracy, with citizenship limited to white men and only property-owners entitled to vote. For Lieberman, the key question is not “whether we are a democracy, but in which direction are we headed. Are we moving forward or are we moving backward?”

The current situation is arguably more serious than previous democratic crises because there are so many concomitant threats. There’s the pervasive partisan divide; conflicts over racism, immigration and nativism; growing socio-economic inequalities; the erosion of voting rights, particularly those of minorities; lawmakers’ attempts to undermine reproductive health, the rights of LGBTQI+ people, school curricula and library books; and the endless promulgation of lies and distortions that quickly come to be treated as facts.

Some of these threats have been decades in the making. Americans have long been sceptical of the power of the federal government: trust in Washington, which began to decline during the Vietnam war and continued to decline amid the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, is at an historic low. Fewer than one-in-five Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” (1 per cent) or “most of the time” (15 per cent) in 2023 Pew Research Center polls.

Individual institutions have suffered as well. The US Supreme Court’s  reputation has been damaged by recent rulings contrary to popular opinion, and trust in federal agencies like the Justice Department, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Reserve has eroded. It’s shocking to also see declining trust in the military, police and the medical system.

These troubles pile on top of problems intrinsic to American democracy: the unusual mechanism, an electoral college, for electing the president; equal representation for the states in the Senate regardless of vastly different populations; lifetime appointments for US Supreme Court justices; and the lack of a national system for overseeing elections.

Because of their distrust of the popular vote, the Founding Fathers created the electoral college and other structural protections against what they saw as the uninformed masses. Patently, this system no longer works. Twice this century the person elected president by the electoral college had lost the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016), and it could happen again in 2024.

Because small, less-populous and mostly White states like Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota have the same number of senators as populous and diverse states like Texas, New York and California, Republican majorities in the Senate this century have never represented a majority of the population. The impact on confirmations of judicial nominees and senior executive branch appointees has been profound.

Finally, there is the deepening polarisation of the American political system. This began post-Watergate, was boosted by Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, and is today exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus, the MAGA movement and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This deepening polarisation has been marked by an intensifying shift rightwards among each new cohort of Republican legislators, echoing the widening differences between red and blue states and the growing urban–rural political divide.

Bring an ambitious, narcissistic, embittered and malevolent Trump back into this setting and the weaknesses of both the political system and the guard rails of democracy will become very apparent. Trump has schemed to overturn legitimate election results (and is likely to do so again), encouraged violence and discrimination, attacked the media and government institutions, undermined the staff and bureaucrats who worked for him, courted dictators and appeared beholden to foreign interests, lied and denied, and profited from his public office. Most egregiously, he encouraged the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Three years on, amazingly, a majority of Republicans believe Biden was not legitimately elected. Despite Trump’s multiple indictments and legal jeopardy, they are willing to vote for him yet again. Republicans in the Congress increasingly follow his wishes on key pieces of legislation, and even those lawmakers he has belittled and besmirched end up endorsing him.

If Trump is re-elected he will be much less constrained and much more able to get his way than in his previous term. His rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail — dark, violent, authoritarian and vengeful — has generated alarm. We have been warned about a Trump kleptocracy.

Some observers think the worst cannot and will not happen (see, for example, this article by Elaine Karmack). But a Brookings Institution report, Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States, warns that “the electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive”:

People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.

The most obvious preventive measure lies at the ballot box — though that can only get rid of Trump, not Trumpism. And American voters themselves display some worrying tendencies. The Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 75 per cent of Americans believe that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election” and the Democracy Fund found that more than 80 per cent of Americans see democracy as a “fairly good” or “very good” political system; but the latter study highlighted that only about 27 per cent of Americans consistently and uniformly support democratic norms across multiple survey waves. Perhaps not surprisingly, this response differs by political allegiance: 45 per cent of Democrats consistently support democratic norms but only 18 per cent of Independents and 13 per cent of Republicans.

Many voters acknowledge Trump’s true character but rationalise their actions as support for conservative judges, anti-abortion legislation, overturning unfair trade agreements, retaining tax benefits or protecting the Second Amendment. Yes, there are Republicans who consider Trump a “grotesque threat to democracy” and won’t vote for him again, but there are also former Obama voters who see Trump as “our last shot at restoring America.”

Even with Trump gone from the political stage (and that endpoint may result in further efforts to upset democratic processes), considerable effort will be required to restore individual rights and freedoms and deliver the blessings of democracy to all Americans. Ending Trumpism will require a massive effort by the Republican Party to reconfigure its base and operations and find leaders who will promote a different kind of conservatism. For their part, Biden and the Democrats must work to understand the anger and despair that has driven Trump’s MAGA supporters to adopt his bleak and autocratic views. •

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We will never be able to make even modest changes to what is a modest, institutionally focused Constitution as long as “Don’t know, Vote no” is a simple and effective go-to for opponents of change. That flaw in the rules of our democracy is, however, far from explaining the hefty loss of the Voice proposal.

Yes garnered less than 40 per cent of the vote, despite having recorded more than 60 per cent in opinion polls before the No cause assembled its grab-bag of arguments. It did so despite enjoying the lion’s share of donations and support from high-profile corporations and cultural influencers alike. (This was one reason there were no serious moves from the left to trial expenditure limits in the referendum, even while rightly clamouring for such limits for elections.)

There will be much hand-wringing about the result of this referendum. Friends and family, particularly from overseas, contacted me before referendum night was complete. They bemoaned having once been Queenslanders, or said they wanted to “hide” as Australians.

Unsurprisingly, given the long, deliberative process that gave us the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Aboriginal and Torres Strait people, taken collectively and by large margins, supported the Voice. It is for them to react to this setback: whether in anger or sorrow, and whether with a renewed push for treaties, re-engagement through existing organisations and parties, or disengagement.

For the rest of us, it is time to reflect on what the results might mean. We could, like one senior political scientist, tell ourselves that “Australian politics is at a dead end” because “Australia is a morally backward society.” (This was penned in a progressive blog for public servants and analysts.) Or we could pause to reflect on what the referendum process and voting patterns have to tell us.

On voting patterns, we must await the full results. Even then, at best we will find correlations between polling booths and local demography rather than clear causal explanations. The data will also be clouded by pre-poll voting at giant booths covering numerous localities. Early votes appear to have skewed even more than the rest, partly because younger voters are less likely to vote early and partly, perhaps, because No voters were on the whole more firm-minded than Yes.

Older voters skewed heavily No. The other utterly clear pattern is that the further from the urban, the less likely any region was to vote Yes. Of just over one-in-five seats to register a Yes majority at the time of writing, twelve were in Melbourne, eight in Sydney, three in Brisbane, three in Canberra, two in Perth and two in Hobart. The seats encompassing Newcastle and Wollongong were the only non-capital electorates to support the Voice.

Indeed, Yes electorates were almost all inner-city. The Greens’ seats of Melbourne and Sydney, the prime minister’s electorate around Marrickville, and the Labor stronghold in inner Canberra recorded between 70 and 77 per cent support. Teal seats like Kooyong, North Sydney and Warringah also voted around 60 per cent in favour. My own, diverse Brisbane electorate of Moreton broke nearly 50–50. Its strongest Yes booth was in a leafy riverside area; its strongest No in the well-to-do, but more suburban, Chinese enclave of Sunnybank.

Truly suburban electorates invariably voted No. Beyond that ring, No reached over 75 per cent in all the vast and remote electorates of South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland, topping nearly 85 per cent in Maranoa in western Queensland. Even in Lingiari, the non-Darwin based Northern Territory seat, No prevailed.

While the socioeconomic and ethnic aspects of all this have yet to be teased out, the clearest lesson is that — Indigenous communities excepted — the more distant, culturally and geographically, from the heart of the capitals, the heavier the proposal was rejected.

On the process, the potential for misinformation to swirl at gale-force speed was again shown to be a feature of the internet age. No one knows how to mitigate that. The worst elements of the No movement exploited this. If you muddy the waters, it is easier for confused electors to follow the conservative instinct of “don’t risk it.”

That said, neither the government nor the Yes movement pushed to trial “truth in political advertising” laws at the referendum, even though we are on the cusp of such a law for national elections.

Pragmatically, this was understandable. Such rules only restrain good-faith participants and campaigners with an institutional reputation, not ad hoc movements. They may have led to stories about campaign tactics detracting attention from the underlying referendum question itself. And even the Yes camp wanted to run claims that were less factually true than emotionally reassuring (for example, that such a Voice was “not about race”).

A hallmark of the Australian system, as ANU law professor Geoffrey Sawer observed sixty years ago, is that “constitutionally speaking, we are a frozen continent.” It’s a hot place, but the Constitution is like pack ice. Any change comes glacially, through High Court tweaks and the evolution of less formal intergovernmental arrangements.

This appeals to conservatives, who regard a written constitution as a bedrock document. But geology doesn’t govern sociology. Times change, and the underlying rules of governance need to evolve too. Opposition to change for its own sake is as bad as change for its own sake. Thoughtful conservatives know our 1901 Constitution is rickety, not least in its federal–state imbalances.

The other hallmark of our constitutional system is that it is a “small brown bird,” as High Court Justice Pat Keane put it. It is not a soaring eagle like the United States’s constitution or its rhetorically flourishing Declaration of Independence. Nor is it dense with rights and values, unlike the modern constitutions of, say, South Africa, Canada or Papua New Guinea.

In that company, the Australian Constitution is a thin document. It is focused not on limiting power or emancipating people but on dividing power between branches and levels of government. This very blandness is a strength: very few people project their own fantasies onto it.

But this also means constitutional literacy in Australia is low. Such ignorance is not irrational: in truth, it reflects the constitution’s authors intention to leave the interesting questions of regulation and social norms to the political process.

Where did the Voice fit into this? As the two-pronged official Yes case put it, it fitted at two levels. One dealt with the “why?” of constitutional change? It was about symbolic recognition: actually mentioning Aboriginal and Torres Stair peoples as the First Nations, in a Constitution that effaced them.

The other, more substantive, question was “why a Voice?” Here, the argument was an institutional one about improving politics. The proposal was consciously tailored to appeal to constitutional conservatives: not a bill of Indigenous rights, but an institution to advise the Commonwealth government and parliament.

The first, symbolic element, initially appealed to the majority of Australians. The second, institutional question, elicited something between indifference and disquiet. The indifference was formally rational: why research the potential role or design of a Voice that would merely advise on policy on behalf of a relatively small minority?

The disquiet was another Achilles heel for Yes. “Politics is broke, this will help” is a good argument on its face. But coming from longstanding politicians it risked being an own goal or, worse, inviting the resentful reaction “well, why reform just for Indigenous peoples?” To deal with that reaction then required deep history and socioeconomic lessons.

In the end, it remains a folly to try to force people to have a considered view on this kind of institutional law reform, narrow in scope and topic. The Australian Constitution itself was a product of voluntary voting, and referendums for the first twenty-five years were voluntary.

Years ago, at an academic briefing for MPs on referendums, I put this view. My academic colleagues, bless them, disagreed. All we need is more education, they insisted. Well, educators would say that; but I’m not sure the overwhelmed school curriculum is really to blame.

As for MPs, Mark Dreyfus (now attorney-general) told me gently that voluntary voting at referendums was an interesting idea, worth discussing. But he reminded me that his Labor colleagues were wedded to a belief that compulsion was inherently social democratic.

It is true, as political scientist Lisa Hill has demonstrated, compulsory voting at elections is the best way to avoid politics slipping into exclusivity. If you don’t vote, your interests don’t count for most politicians. A habit of voting at elections is developed, and in the big questions that decide elections such as ideology, “do I trust Albo or ScoMo with the levers” or “are we better or worse off as a society than three years ago,” everyone’s view is equal.

Referendums, unless they engage a general social concern (like marriage equality) or an existential question (like Brexit) are not so engaging. Worse, unlike a regular election, once we say No (or Yes) to a constitutional question, that decision is all but locked-in for a generation or more.

In the end, what have we learnt? Australia is not “morally backward” even if, as a whole, it is no closer to facing up to history. Democracy is hard, and reform even harder, when reliable information is lost in a swirl of misinformation or when reform is perceived as elite-driven or remote from the concerns of the majority.

Above all, it is important not just to pose the right questions, but also not to force the rationally uninterested to wield a power of veto over reform. •

Postscript

After results were finalised, I looked for examples of extreme differences between polling booths. In Queensland, the highest Yes vote, not surprisingly, was in the Far North, where Indigenous communities are often small but tight.

More than 87 per cent of those who voted via the “Other Mobile Teams 1 and 2” wanted the Voice. Those teams serviced 102 voters at the Lotus Glen Correctional Centre, near Mareeba. Its “catchment” runs from Mt Isa in the far west through to the Torres Strait Islands. (Anyone on remand or convicted but serving a sentence of fewer than three years is still entitled to vote.)

The nearest booth of comparable size was Mutchilba, about twenty-five kilometres inland. There, the free men and women voted 90 per cent No. A similar distance away, but towards the coast, of more than 85 per cent of the 8000-plus votes cast in Mareeba were also No.

The No case labelled the referendum inherently divisive. But a more telling or poignant illustration of the existing divide is hard to imagine.

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Early polling indicates overwhelming support. Liberal opposition leaders, regardless of their personal inclinations, lack the authority to support Labor’s proposals. If a Labor government is crazy enough to hold the referendum midterm, it suffers a particularly ghastly fate.

The Voice in 2023 was almost a carbon copy of Labor’s last referendums, in 1988, with overt racism added.

The table tells the story:

The content of the question matters a little, but only a little. It could’ve been purely symbolic recognition, or putting local government into the founding document, or taking out “race” or correcting a typo. If it’s a Labor proposal, and it isn’t held with an election, it gets walloped.

On current counting, the Voice is number 21 on this table, pretty much in the middle of Labor midterm results.

What else can we say?

Tasmania underperformed against general expectations; although, as electoral maestro Kevin Bonham points out, only Newspoll consistently had the smallest state’s support at a more modest relative position. On current counting it has slipped above New South Wales (all state numbers are at the AEC here) to reach second place after Victoria (third after the ACT if we’re including the two territories), which is itself worthy of a mini-headline. Tasmania hasn’t been in third place since, as it happens, that famous 1967 referendum that took out all references to “aboriginals” and “natives.” It hasn’t been in second place since an unsuccessful 1910 proposal.

South Australia’s relative support was always a bit of an unknown, and it came in very low.

In common with the 2017 marriage-equality survey and the 1999 republic referendum, and to varying degrees all referendums back to 1967, Yes was highest around the CBDs of the capital cities, and gradually got lower the further out you went. This routine fact is being turned over and over in the media, but they have to write and talk about something.

(This table on Twitter does show “outer metro” support for marriage equality lowest of all, which can probably be sheeted to its unpopularity in electorates with high numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. For the Voice, however, there is little evidence of this cohort deviating from the rest one way or the other.)

The figures strongly show big majority support for the Voice among Indigenous communities — if nothing like that 80 per cent January figure that the Yes case cited right up to and including polling day. Several late surveys had Yes support among First Nations people dropping by about the same proportion as the rest of the country, to about 60 per cent, and that looks about right from the polling booth numbers.

(Projecting remote community statistics onto First Nations people who live elsewhere, such as in the cities and towns, is fraught.)

During Saturday night’s ABC TV coverage, federal Liberal MP Keith Wolahan (a No supporter) warned against winners’ hubris, and so far the gloating anticipated on Friday has been restrained.

Late on Saturday evening Jacinta Nampijinpa Price did get defensive when asked about the strong support among Indigenous communities in her electorate of the Northern Territory. She implied an Australian Electoral Commission–Yes campaign conspiracy, and further questions made Warren Mundine so angry he shouted at journalists before they both walked out.

Another normal day for the No campaign. Despite its repeated disarray it wins bragging rights for an outcome that the proverbial drover’s dog could’ve presided over.

The Yes campaign by contrast has announced a week of silence, and who can blame them? The hot takes alone will be more than anyone can endure. While most of us get on with our lives, those who have been involved in this attempted change for a decade or more will obviously feel devastated, and not for a short time.

Anthony Albanese doesn’t seem to be taking it well either, at least twice in the past week describing himself at press conferences as a “conviction politician,” as if this will make voters see him as such.

(Note to Anthony: if you insist on these clunky phrases, it’s best to get someone else to utter them on your behalf. Also, you only get perceived that way by making unpopular decisions and then getting re-elected.)

The prime minister is getting a media pasting. It will be character-building.

On the other side, Peter Dutton is being feted as a winner. But as opinion polls fail to reveal any sustained improvement in his and his party’s standing, the backgrounding will begin in earnest.

How long until we read and hear the inevitable Liberal source’s lament that “we can’t win with Peter”? By June 2024 Dutton will probably be an ex–opposition leader. •

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Never mind, it’ll win the vote hands down. That’s right, I refer to the official No case, which any visitor to this country with a mind unpolluted by survey results and media analysis would award very low marks indeed for its frequent drifts from covert to overt racism, its individual meltdowns, and its contradictions.

This, of course, is not how the political class sees it. They who adjudicate campaigns’ “performances” through the opinion polls — currently around 60 per cent for No — are in furious agreement that the Yes campaign has been atrocious.

This recent Nine article is a classic of the genre, with the inevitable Labor “senior figures with years of experience” proclaiming Yes “the worst [campaign] they have seen” while delivering glowing reviews to the No side, and particularly its — try not to laugh — “discipline.” (Meanwhile, in this week’s news, No leader Warren Mundine tweets of his desire to see one of the Yes identities bashed up.)

Now it’s true that the Yes side has made its share of mistakes and has its own inherent inconsistencies. We can all identify things that could have been done differently. But the No side wins the “undisciplined” crown hands down.

But the quality and professionalism of the campaigns isn’t the key issue, and it certainly isn’t responsible for the upcoming result. The scripts write themselves and the individuals are bit players, swept up by larger currents.

Why, in September 1988, some thirty-five years ago, did 62.4 per cent of Australian voters write “No” next to a constitutional referendum to “provide for fair and democratic parliamentary elections throughout Australia”? It surely wasn’t because they don’t believe elections should be fair and democratic. They would have had their purported reasons: it’s unnecessary, the government’s motives are suspect, the whole exercise is a waste of money.

And they would have had reasons for rejecting the other three questions posed at the same time, which all also got Yes support in the 30s.

The real reason was that it was a Labor referendum and it was being held midterm. That’s what always happens in these cases, and it’s happening now.

What did the huge 90.8 per cent Yes vote in 1967 tell us? It certainly wasn’t that racism was dead in Australia. That referendum’s most important consequence lay in activating the “race power” to enable the federal government to make special laws for First Nations people, but that detail was largely kept from the electors.

“Vote Yes for Aborigines” was the slogan, and the Yes campaign enjoyed the support of every member of federal parliament and every state government. Gough Whitlam’s Labor opposition campaigned energetically for it, as did Harold Holt’s government.

Today the 1967 result is steeped in mythology. The Uluru Statement was read out on its fiftieth anniversary. It was a motivator for next month’s vote.

And when the No case wins the only thing it tells us is that Labor governments shouldn’t hold midterm constitutional referendums. They go down, and badly, regardless of the topic.

Advocating for serious policy change in this country is never a fair contest. The proponents attempt to keep it simple and explain the modest benefits, trying to slide through journalists’ pesky questions without misspeaking into the evening news. They never promise nirvana, just modest improvement.

Opponents are not so constrained. Free to exaggerate and scream disaster, they fly a variety of kites, and if one crashes they simply send up another. All they have to do is sow doubt and confusion. They might cover themselves in mud in the process, but it doesn’t matter.

“If you don’t understand it, vote No.” It worked for Paul Keating against John Hewson and the GST in 1993 and it works today.

In reality, most change is never actually voted on. Instead, governments announce and implement changes (the Senate willing) within a term, and by the next election voters are largely used to them and the caravan moves on. When a party is unwise enough to take something substantial to an election, it influences some votes, sometimes enough to make a difference. Two stand-out cases are 1993 and 2019.

Constitutional referendums occupy a sub-category of their own. It’s not about who will form government. Australians, barely aware of the Constitution’s existence, are reminded that it is dangerous to tamper with the founding document of a country that, as we all know, is the “envy of the world.” The term “lawyers’ picnic” always gets trotted out.

We can all recite — let’s put it to music — that bipartisanship is a necessary but not sufficient condition for referendum success. The counterargument that bad proposals are unlikely to receive bipartisan support has some merit, but is let down by the fact that the non-Labor parties (the Liberals and Nationals and their earlier iterations) have sometimes opposed a change in opposition and then attempted to get the same thing passed in government.

The clearer pattern is that Labor government referendums are particularly prone to failure, and that’s largely because Liberal opposition leaders simply lack the authority to support them. Peter Dutton’s decision earlier this year was based solely on his desire to survive as leader; to grasp this we only have to try to imagine the opposite: Dutton ordering the party room to campaign for Yes. He’d probably be an ex-leader by now.

In the end, driven by the shocking Aston by-election result to seek comfort from the party base, Dutton opted for a particularly harsh No stance. Until then, total freedom for the rest of the party room — like the republic vote in 1999 — seemed an option.

Liberal prime ministers, on the other hand, usually possess the ability to ride roughshod over the party room — certainly that was true for Malcolm Fraser when he held referendums in 1977 and for Harold Holt ten years earlier. Both had massive election wins under their belts. Labor oppositions led (both times) by Gough Whitlam gave their full support, because Labor in its DNA believes in constitutional “reform” whereas the Coalition parties are innately suspicious of it. Out of the Coalition’s six proposed amendments in those two years, four passed, one received a majority of votes but not states, and one was badly beaten.

So if you want to know why the Liberals opposed a simultaneous elections referendum in 1974, proposed exactly that in government in 1977 and then ran against it again in 1984 (when it was more accurately referred to as “terms of senators”), that’s the reason.

And (I know I’m repeating myself) Labor mid-term referendums suffer a particularly harsh fate. This chart, colour-coded with mid-term elections in white and ones with concurrent elections in yellow, tells the story.

The dynamic holds true largely regardless of the actual proposed amendments. If a proposal is inherently ambitious (as the Voice could be characterised) it presents a juicy target; if it’s trivial, the apparent gratuitousness of the exercise becomes an issue. And there’s always some former judge or lawyer on hand, or at least someone with a law degree, to supply quotable words.

Recall also Tony Abbott in 2013, having agreed with the Gillard government to support recognition of local government, jumping ship at the last minute after a party-room revolt.

So any purported analysis that assumes agency on Dutton’s part — that he thought it would be good politics or was acting with sincerity — is just theatre. He did what he thought maximised his chances of being Liberal leader at the next election; his personal inclinations, whatever they were, barely mattered.

Like this year, 1988’s set of four questions started with very high support that whittled down (and eventually halved) by voting day. Yet two referendums run just four years earlier, with the 1984 election, did much better. Barely remembered today, and little thought about at the time because they were swamped by the election proper, they received Yes votes of 50.6 and 47.1 per cent.

A loss is a loss is a loss, but some losses come closer to succeeding than others. Labor government referendums held with elections have historically received much higher support, four of them managing national majorities and one actually passing (in 1946). The average Labor government midterm referendum Yes vote is 37.9 per cent; with elections it’s 49.3.

(Incidentally, with tiny Tasmania set to break with referendum tradition and deliver a higher Yes vote than the national average, the likely space for a sixth “double majority” loss shrinks substantially. Electoral maestro Kevin Bonham uses survey data to put it at 50 to 51 per cent. That is, anything more than 51 per cent nationally would probably pass. This is of less relevance to the 14 October vote, which will struggle to even get into the 40s, than to the road not travelled of a referendum held with the next election.)

The Voice proposal came not from the Albanese government but from the Uluru Dialogues. But it was the government’s decision to hold the vote midterm. It presumably believed bipartisanship would be difficult to achieve with a general election — that a midterm vote would facilitate an uncluttered national conversation — and it was encouraged by the early surveys into believing that this time bipartisanship mattered less.

Tick, tick and tick, all just like 1988. Labor, the party that obsesses over its own history, seems determined not to learn this particular lesson. •

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It was “completely outrageous,” the opposition leader thundered to Fordham. “Australians want a fair election, not a dodgy one.” That turned a storm in a teacup into mainstream news.

Soon enough, the Australian Electoral Commission felt obliged to point out that “the formal voting instructions for the referendum are to clearly write either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ in full, in English.” In the 1999 republic referendum, said the AEC, a tiny 0.86 per cent of votes were informal (the accompanying constitutional preamble question got a slightly higher 0.95). Given that there are obviously many ways of voting informal, these numbers represent the very maximum number of ballot papers discarded because they were marked with a cross.

The current interpretation of ticks and crosses was adopted in the late 1980s. The Coalition has never expressed any concerns about it, and certainly didn’t this year when many of its MPs voted to pass the Voice referendum legislation in March. The interpretation isn’t in any legislation, but it’s in legal advice obtained by the AEC.

This sudden kerfuffle is of course part of the No side’s grievance campaign: the government and other elites, it says, are pulling a swifty on ordinary voters. One likely outcome of the beat-up will be more ticks and crosses on ballot papers than would otherwise have been the case.

An irony of all this is that when jurisdictions across the country count ticks and/or crosses as formal, they are deemed to mean the same thing: a vote for whatever party or candidate they are written next to. In the Senate, for example, a tick or cross is taken to mean a “1.” It’s the same in NSW elections: a cross or tick next to a candidate or party is interpreted as a “1.”

The last twenty constitutional referendums (there have been forty-four since Federation) have used the current ballot paper design. It might be reasonable to wonder, soberly, whether the legal advice should be overridden by legislation. It could be done: parliament sits this month. But sowing confusion — “If you don’t know vote No” — was the real purpose of the exercise.

The evolution of the referendum voting paper illustrates two features of Australian elections: that instructions for one ballot paper can have a negative impact on how voters mark another paper they must fill in on the same day; and how the AEC uses “savings provisions” to deal with some incorrectly filled-in papers.

A well-known case of the unintended crossover arose when the Senate ballot paper was redesigned in 1984. This was the first outing for two new features: group voting tickets and the above-the-line option of simply putting a tick (a cross was also accepted) next to a group. The chief purpose was to reverse the explosion in informal Senate votes, which had reached 9.9 per cent in 1983. The above-the-line option worked a treat, cutting Senate informality by more than half to 4.7 per cent.

Unfortunately, some voters applied the Senate instructions to the House of Representatives ballot paper as well, and informal votes for the lower house more than tripled, from 2.1 in 1983 to 6.8 per cent. Oops.

(Thanks partly to a voter-education campaign, lower house informality subsequently decreased, but it has never again been as low as 1983’s 2.1 per cent. The lowest in the past four decades was 3.0 per cent in 1993. These days the main causes of informal votes — not necessarily in this order — are increasing candidate numbers, more voters from non-English-speaking backgrounds, the confusion created by optional preferential voting at state or territory level, and a rise in the number of people deliberately voting informal. Group voting tickets were abolished in 2016.)

The savings provisions, meanwhile, allow the AEC to count a ballot paper filled in incorrectly — with ticks or crosses against candidates’ names, for example — so long as the voter’s intention is clear.

People of a certain age might recall what became known as the Langer vote, a savings provision introduced in the 1980s for House of Representatives elections. Despite the stated requirement that voters number all candidates, the AEC accepted ballot papers where a voter appeared to have inadvertently failed to fully comply with preferencing (by numbering 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, for example).

Like most savings provisions, the difference this made to the count was tiny, but it wasn’t long before interested parties cottoned on to the fact that a voter could use it, in effect, to make a full allocation of preferences optional. Most importantly — at least from the major parties’ point of view — you could cast a valid vote without your preferences ending up with either Labor or the Coalition. Parliament’s first response was to make it illegal to urge anyone to vote in this manner; after a series of court cases, and after an activist called Albert Langer did time in the slammer, parliament got rid of the Langer vote altogether.

Several Australian jurisdictions have laws against advising voters to avail themselves of savings provisions. During a NSW campaign, for example, it is illegal to “print, publish, distribute or publicly display any electoral material that encourages any elector to place a tick or a cross in a square on a ballot paper” even though, as described above, it would still in many cases be counted as formal.

The current referendum ballot paper, which has just one square and instructions to write Yes or No inside it, was first used for the 1967 referendums. Since the 1980s the AEC has acted on legal advice to accept ticks as “Yes” but throw crosses onto the informal pile. I haven’t been able to find out how the commission and its predecessor treated ticks and crosses at referendums from 1967 to 1984.

A sketch of the journey of referendum ballot papers goes like this. The first ones, created and used in 1906, contained two boxes, next to the words Yes and No, and voters were instructed to put a cross inside the box next to the option they wanted. Referendums in that first decade of federation were held with general elections; voting for both houses of parliament also required putting crosses in boxes (one cross for the lower house, three for the upper) and that left little potential for confusion.

(Those three referendums, in 1906 and 1910, still had rather high informal votes, much higher than the accompanying elections.)

In 1918 the federal government replaced first-past-the-post with full preferential voting, requiring the ranking of all House candidates with numbers, like today. (At the next election, in 1919, informality for the House increased only slightly, but this was masked by the fact that voters who persisted in writing a cross next to their desired candidate benefited from savings provisions that counted their vote as formal if only two candidates ran in their electorate, which was the case for 64 per cent of those votes.)

The two referendums held with the 1919 election used the 1906 ballot paper, and average informality was a very big 13.6 per cent. Two midterm referendums in 1926 averaged a low 4.5 per cent informality. So it seemed reasonable to surmise that running referendums with elections caused some confusion.

In 1928, two months before an election at which a referendum would also be held, the ballot paper was radically redesigned. Referendum voters were still presented with Yes and No with a square after each, but now they had to put a “1” next to their choice and “2” next to the other. No more mentions of crosses on any ballot instructions (although — hullo savings provision! — a ballot with a single cross was still counted as if it was a “1”). Relative to the pair of referendums held with the 1919 election, informality dropped dramatically to 6.6 per cent.

This referendum ballot design remained through to 1965, when the Menzies government changed it to what we have today: just one square, with instructions to write either Yes or No. Country Party MP (and future party leader) Doug Anthony told parliament it would be “a more positive and, I believe, a more correct form of voting at a referendum.”

Anthony also noted that the “present provisions which provide that a ballot paper marked only with a cross or marked only with the figure 1 constitutes a formal vote will no longer be appropriate.” Back then, of course, a cross was accepted as indicating support for either Yes or No. Did this influence the later legal advice to the AEC regarding crosses? I’m no lawyer.

In 2023, it’s not even clear that most people who put a cross inside the referendum box are expressing opposition. Many times — in banks, at hospitals — they will have been asked to mark their preference with a cross. A more responsible party leader would have politely declined the invitation to buy into this ridiculous circus, but we are where we are, with ticks and crosses in the news and the commission having to devote resources to answering questions about them, sincere and otherwise. •

Update: Kevin Bonham covers similar territory, in parts in greater detail.

The post No diversion unticked appeared first on Inside Story.

Its population was ethnically mixed but with a strong dominance of Ukrainians, who made up 73 per cent of the people. Russians constituted a significant minority of 22 per cent, followed by people identifying as Jews, Belarusians and Moldavians, all making up just under one in a hundred. Other nationalities of the Soviet empire, from Bulgarians and Poles to Azeri, Koreans, Germans, Kyrgyz and Lithuanians, made up the remaining 3 per cent.

Regional differences in political outlook were strong. Although all regions voted in favour of separating from the Soviet Union in the December 1991 referendum, some were more enthusiastic than others. In Lviv, in the west of the country, 95 per cent of the people voted and 97 per cent of them approved the declaration of independence, which had been made in late August in response to the coup attempt in Moscow. In Crimea, an ethnically strongly Russian region at the other extreme, only 68 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, with 54 per cent of them voting in favour.

Donetsk, an industrial region in the east of the country with strong economic ties to Russia, stood somewhat between these extremes. There, 77 per cent registered their vote and 84 per cent of those people voted for independence.

With the partial exception of the three Baltic republics, all post-Soviet nations have struggled with three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an economic crisis and corruption. Outside the three Baltic outliers (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the relatively well-performing Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all resource-exporting economies. Everybody else is struggling.

In terms of wealth per person (measured by GDP per capita), Russia is about at the level of China (US$10,500), while even the rich Baltic countries are nowhere near the United States (US$63,500) or Australia (US$51,800).

The comparative poverty of the region is partly a legacy of the Soviet economy’s poor performance, and partly a hangover from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. In Ukraine, agriculture continued to be run by the disastrously unproductive collective and state farms until 2000. Other economic reforms were also slow in coming.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of the integrated Soviet imperial economy, the economic burden of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, ageing and inefficient equipment, and dependence on Russian oil and gas were problematic legacies.

Moreover, Ukraine’s state apparatus had controlled no more than 5 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP before 1990 (the rest was under the direct control of Moscow). Officials thus “lacked the experience necessary to take quick and effective control” of the economy, as the writer Marco Bojcun puts it. The quick expansion of the share of the economy controlled by Ukraine’s officials — reaching 40 per cent on the eve of independence — only added to the problems.

Together, these issues combined to create a disaster: between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine’s economy contracted every year by at least 10 per cent and as much as 23 per cent. Overall, it had contracted to 43 per cent of its 1990 level by 1996 — a decline worse than the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The main reason nobody starved after 1991 was similar to Russia’s: the existence of private gardening, a legacy of the Soviet period. “The overwhelming majority of workers have out of town kitchen gardens,” wrote a worker from the Dnipro region in 1996. These were “little patches of land given them by the factory management under an agreement with the agricultural authorities… People work five days in the factories and two days on their plots.” According to official statistics, by 1996 some 80–95 per cent of fruit, vegetables and potatoes came from such plots. Even a quarter of all livestock were raised in private gardens.

Ukraine’s economy has not recovered nearly as much as that of resource-rich Russia, and its economic growth has stagnated since 2009. Russia’s war by proxy in Donbas since 2014 again stunted economic growth: between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine’s GDP halved.

The current war will have catastrophic consequences for this overall picture. In early 2022, the World Bank predicted a contraction of the economy by 45 per cent. In the same year, 47 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians reported that they did not have “enough money even for food” or had money sufficient “only for the most basic items.”

Post-Soviet countries are not only poor, they are also among the world’s most corrupt. Among European countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are all known as deeply corrupt societies. Of the 336 politicians whose secret offshore financial accounts were leaked in the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, thirty-eight came from Ukraine, among them president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was the largest number of any country in the world. Russia’s figure was nineteen.

Over time, however, Ukraine has improved its record. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a higher score means less corruption. Ukraine initially improved significantly after 2004. While this progress was undone after a few years, improvement has been steady since 2009. Meanwhile, Russia has stagnated since 2012 and is classified today as more corrupt than its neighbour.

Corruption and economic crisis do little to embed democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the societies that succeeded the Soviet Union are ruled by authoritarian regimes. (Nine out of fifteen of them, or 60 per cent, according to the 2021 classification by Freedom House, an organisation that measures democratic performance.) Only the three Baltic states, which are members of both NATO and the European Union, are classified as consolidated democracies. Three others, Ukraine among them, are hybrid regimes, where authoritarian elements compete with democratic ones.

Within this general context, Ukraine is doing relatively well. Between 2017 and 2022 it was classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, its score oscillating between 60 and 62 on a scale out of 100, where the higher number indicates a higher level of civic and political liberty. Such numbers do not indicate that Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, however, either in the region (where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stand out as the freest countries, with scores of between 89 and 90) or around the world (the troubled United States scored 83 in 2021, while Australia stood at 97).

But Ukraine contrasts positively with Russia, which has been categorised as “not free” with a score of 20, falling to 19 in 2022. And Vladimir Putin’s state, in turn, still compares favourably with other dictatorships in the region, which are even more repressive: Belarus with 11 and Tajikistan with 8. For comparison, China scored 9 in 2021 and North Korea 3.

To a significant extent, the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space is a Soviet legacy. “In all parts of the former Soviet empire,” write two legal scholars who studied this problem in detail, “the socialist party-state structure left a shared legacy of an executive-dominated state.” Change depended on whether a postcolonial or neocolonial mindset won the day.

In other words: did people want to stay in the Russian orbit or not? If not, the obvious choice was an orientation towards Europe, which came with mixed constitutions stressing checks and balances, weakening the executive; if yes, the constitution would be modelled much more closely on Russia’s “crown presidentialism,” further entrenching the centrality of the executive. In Ukraine, the former tendency won out, but not without political struggles.

One rather basic aspect of democracy is that governments are changed peacefully by elections. Ukraine is doing quite well in this regard, particularly if compared with its two autocratic neighbours. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; in Russia, Putin since 1999. Ukraine, meanwhile, has seen seven presidencies since 1991: of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14), Oleksandr Turchynov (2014), Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) and now Volodymyr Zelenskyy (since 2019).

The majority of these presidents were elected to office and left when they lost elections or decided not to contest them. Two were removed through revolutions, one peaceful (the Orange Revolution of 2004–05), one violent (the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan, of 2013–14). But both revolutions resulted in elected governments again, not the imposition of revolutionary dictatorships.

Ukraine’s presidents ruled in competition with parliament, at first the one elected under Soviet conditions in 1990, then, since 1994, a post-Soviet one. This competition was formalised in the 1996 constitution, which put the directly elected president next to a one-chamber parliament that limited presidential powers to a much larger extent than in Russia.

Its unusually strong parliament became an issue because of the fragmented party system, however. First, there were too many parties; second, the existing parties were not based around major ideological positions or clearly elaborated political philosophies; third, there were many socially influential groups competing for power. As one observer puts it, this system was based “not on ideological factors, but on the competition of financial and industrial groups and regional elites” interested “in dispersing power in order to control at least a small segment of it.” The result was “political instability.”

Ukraine’s political system, then, constituted something of a unique case, both within the post-Soviet space and in the world at large. Its huge number of parties — more than 120 were officially registered in 2002 — were often internally divided as well. In the words of one observer, this fragmentation was “unprecedented for a modern democratic republic.” For another, it “hindered democratisation” by making it “difficult for the population to orient itself politically.” But the diversity also made it more difficult for would-be autocrats and their networks of clients to consolidate power.

The same can be said for the much-quoted regional fragmentation of Ukraine. On the one hand, regionalism has defined voting behaviour and hence fragmented the political system. In both parliamentary and presidential elections until 2019, voters in the more Russian and Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea voted for one set of parties, while those in the more Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine preferred a different set. “No party managed to elect candidates across Ukraine,” writes political scientist Paul D’Anieri. Presidential elections show a similar regional pattern.

At their extreme, regional divisions can define conflict lines within Ukraine, including the threat of secessionism and ethno-political conflict. On the other hand, regional identities and political networks also help balance power within the broader political system and prevent any one group of elites from monopolising power. Ukraine’s regional, cultural, religious and economic diversity can be seen as an asset as much as a liability. For historian Serhii Plokhy, it is “one of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy.”

Of the three main regional power groups, one is based in Kharkiv in the northeast; the second in the industrial heartland around Donetsk in the east; and the third in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the heart of the Soviet Union’s defence and space industries. These were already part of the political structure of late Soviet times, and they led to a specific form of “patronal democracy” in which clans competed for political power within a republican set-up.

At the same time, winners often tried to replace this competitive structure with a single hierarchy of power. The first attempt came under Leonid Kuchma, who built a “patronal autocracy,” but the Orange Revolution of 2004 destroyed this system and reverted to dual competition between president and parliament on the one hand and multiple power networks on the other.

Yanukovych then tried again, and successfully neutralised competing clans — until ordinary citizens intervened to stop this usurpation of power. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity not only undid Yanukovych’s dictatorial slide but also led to an election labelled by two experts as “probably the fairest one in the country’s history.” This transformation of the political system was one-sided, however: while it did constitute a redemocratisation, it didn’t eliminate regional and patronal politics.

It was only with Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 that things began to change in this regard. Zelenskyy was “no chief patron and [had] no patronal pyramid” but instead gathered strong support from the new middle and creative classes, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. He mostly spoke Russian during his campaign, which helped overcome regional differences between Russian speakers in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west. He achieved what many thought impossible: his election was the first in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where voting did not follow regional patterns. •

This is an edited extract from Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story, published this month by Melbourne University Press.

The post Ukraine’s struggle for democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

Thanks to three Trump-era appointments, the nine-member court is dominated by six conservative justices. While it has repudiated aggressive conservative litigation on immigration, tribal rights and the ability of states to control elections, in each case with the three Democratic appointees as part of the majority, it has also responded to the conservative agenda in decisions on affirmative action, gay rights and student loans. Divided along partisan lines — with the court’s three Democratic appointees in strong dissent — those decisions will have a significant impact on the rights of protected population groups in the United States.

The dominant news, and a cause for progressive celebration, is the court’s decision to reject the radical independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, a case brought by a group of Republican lawmakers from North Carolina. The theory rests on a relatively recent interpretation of the US constitution’s elections clause, which says that state legislatures can set the rules for national congressional elections in their states.

According to proponents of the strongest form of the theory, no other organs of state government — courts, governors, election administrators or independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s decisions about how federal elections are run. Trump lawyers used this theory in 2020 to argue, unsuccessfully, that Joe Biden’s victories in key states were illegitimate and that state legislatures could unilaterally reverse the outcome.

In the latest case, the court ruled that state legislatures can’t make decisions that ignore their state’s supreme court or violate their state’s constitution. This six–three judgement, which applies to all states, is being hailed as a major win for democracy and voting rights.

But the tireless efforts of hardline conservatives will mean further attempts to challenge the court’s ruling and invoke the independent state legislature theory are likely in 2024. And the decision will not change the commitment of the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature to the undermining of federal election processes and voting rights.

The genesis of the case was a gerrymandered electoral map drawn by the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature after the 2020 census. After it was rejected by the state’s supreme court, Republicans passed an emergency application in February 2022 asking the US Supreme Court to intervene. That court rejected the request for immediate intervention, and the election last November was conducted under a map drawn by experts appointed by a state court.

The result was a fourteen-member congressional delegation evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — a reasonable result in a state where 34 per cent of voters are registered Democrat, 30 per cent are registered Republican and 36 per cent are unaffiliated.

But the 2022 election changed the composition of the North Carolina supreme court, which is now dominated by Republicans with a five-to-two margin. The new court’s majority reversed course, saying the legislature is free to draw gerrymandered voting districts as it sees fit — as it is already doing. A political fight is developing in North Carolina over voting rights and what has been described as “headline-grabbing confrontations over nearly every lever of the electoral apparatus.”

Moreover, the US Supreme Court’s decision contains what some see as a time bomb. In his majority opinion, chief justice John Roberts reaffirmed his court’s capacity to overrule state courts when it so chooses. Importantly, he persuaded the three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, to go along with a version of judicial review that some experts fear could allow the court to meddle in future elections.

It is interesting to note that the justices pointed to Bush v. Gore, the 2000 Supreme Court opinion that stopped Florida’s recount and confirmed George W. Bush’s presidential victory, as a template for resolving election disputes, despite the fact that the court’s opinion in Bush v. Gore explicitly stated that it was not intended to create precedent.

A series of other just-released decisions reflect the court’s conservative leanings and seem part of a broader effort to overthrow long-supported rights and benefits for minority groups. Two decisions saw the six conservative members of the court invalidate admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that use race as a criterion, effectively ended race-oriented affirmative action admissions programs at public and private colleges and universities across the country and tossing aside yet another well-established federal right.

It is ironic that the justices ruled that the admissions policies violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to the constitution — an amendment that was ratified in 1868 to enable the federal government to deal with the profound racial discrimination against Black Americans that continued after the Civil war.

The majority decision was written by Roberts, a long-time critic of affirmative action programs. At both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, he wrote, the programs “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

As if to acknowledge these programs’ importance to ensuring greater diversity, though, Roberts stressed in a footnote that military academies are exempted from the decision. “No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context,” he wrote. “This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The only two Black members of the Supreme Court — Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson — openly traded barbs in their widely divergent opinions.

“As [Jackson] sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” wrote Thomas, himself a beneficiary of academic affirmative action. “The panacea, she counsels, is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field,’ all as judged by racial metrics. I strongly disagree.”

Thomas also accused Brown Jackson of ignoring the oppression of other groups, including Asian Americans and “white communities that have faced historic barriers.” (It’s worth noting that Thomas and his conservative colleagues don’t take issue with the legacy programs that perpetuate elite access to Ivy League universities.)

Justice Brown Jackson, who led the liberal dissent, didn’t mince words either, calling the decision “a tragedy for us all.” She defended the use of race-conscious programs to ameliorate the pervasive, present-day effects of America’s history of state-sponsored racism. “Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and wellbeing of American citizens,” her dissent began, and went on to argue that allowing colleges to consider applicants’ race has “universal benefits” because it helps to close those gaps and thereby promotes equality.

Not surprisingly, these US Supreme Court decisions have generated strong condemnation. Critics are concerned about the impact on Black Americans and on the diversity that is so needed in the healthcare workforce.

More is at stake than affirmative action in university admissions, including the central question of whether the law can be used to fix longstanding racial inequalities. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her strong dissent, “The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.”

Conservatives, long wary of race-based programs designed to benefit minorities, will be emboldened to leverage these decisions into attacks on affirmative action programs in other areas such as corporate diversity. “In the broadest sense,” wrote political analyst Ron Brownstein in the Atlantic, “the Republican-appointed justices have moved to buttress the affluence and status that allow white people to wield the most influence in society, and to diminish the possibility that accelerating demographic change will force a renegotiation of that balance of power.”

Disadvantaged students will also be affected by the court’s decision, in Nebraska v. Biden, to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan. This was a 2020 election campaign promise to deliver financial relief to up to forty-three million student loan-holders, including cancelling the full remaining balance for roughly twenty million, with these relief dollars targeted to low- and middle-income borrowers. Advocates argue that both student loan forgiveness and affirmative action are racial justice issues.

In a major win for Republicans, who had vehemently opposed the plan, the court’s six conservatives ruled that the Biden administration lacked the power to forgive loans for more than forty million borrowers. Facing Republican opposition to legislation to implement this commitment, Biden had used the HEROES Act, which was authorised in 2003 after the 9/11 attacks as a means of giving loan relief during times of war and other emergencies.

The plan’s hefty price tag also meant it had major economic implications. In striking down the plan the court thus relied on the “major questions doctrine,” which says that Congress must give direct authorisation for the executive branch to implement a policy that has major economic and political impacts on the country. The doctrine was first invoked in 2022 in a decision about the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Republicans and advocates of limiting the power of the federal bureaucracy cheered this most recent court decision, but the liberal justices and many legal experts are concerned it could prevent the government from taking decisive action on climate change, healthcare and other urgent problems.

“The Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have,” Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It violates the Constitution.” Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute was even blunter: “They created out of whole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

Another recent decision puts a question mark over the court’s decade-old judgement establishing the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In this latest case, the court decided that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law violated a web designer’s free speech rights under the first amendment, raising fears that the right of LGBTQI+ Americans to non-discrimination (including the right to marry) is being eroded.

The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, rests on several hypotheticals. Web designer 303 Creative is owned by Lorie Smith, who opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. But the company has never been asked to create a website for a same-sex wedding, and Colorado has never tried to force it to design such a website. In fact, Smith didn’t design wedding websites for anyone at all when the suit was filed.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion for the conservative justices, called the message conveyed by any websites Ms Smith designs “pure speech,” as if no services were being provided and the primary point of the websites would be to express the designer’s views on matrimony. The court’s three liberal justices disagreed. “Today,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

The decision came at a time when Republican legislators in many conservative-leaning states are targeting the rights of transgender and other LGBTQI+ people. In strongly criticising the decision, President Biden expressed a fear that the ruling could invite more discrimination. “In America, no person should face discrimination simply because of who they are or who they love,” he said in a media statement. “More broadly, today’s decision weakens long-standing laws that protect all Americans against discrimination in public accommodations — including people of color, people with disabilities, people of faith, and women.”

Not only do these recent decisions highlight the impact of the three conservative justices appointed by Donald Trump; the majority and minority opinions also highlight how divided the US Supreme Court has become. Observers have detected a new contentiousness during oral arguments and within justices’ opinions. The highly personal attacks in the affirmative action rulings are a far cry from the expected dispassionate legal interpretation.

In dissenting from the decision to strike down the student debt plan, for instance, Justice Kagan wrote that “in every respect, the court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our nation’s governance.” Chief Justice Roberts retorted: “It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticise the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.”

Moreover, when court decisions continually divide along the same lines as the divergence of political opinions — as has happened in most of these big cases — it is very hard for the public to see the distinction between law and politics.

A growing number of critics worry the court is losing its legitimacy by overturning abortion rights and using disingenuous legal reasoning to advance a reactionary political agenda. At the same time, public revelations of the close ties between Justices Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas and wealthy benefactors with business before the court have met with official indifference from the chief justice. Small wonder the court’s popularity has plunged to record lows as the public increasingly sees the court as a political body.

Biden is facing increasing pressure from Democrats to embrace far-reaching reforms to the nation’s highest court, including expanding the number of justices and imposing term limits and mandatory retirement. While he has harshly criticised the court’s sharp pivot to the right, calling it “not a normal court,” he has declined to endorse any of proposed reforms.

Together with abortion, these most recent decisions will be an ideological divide along which Republicans and Democrats — and voters — will line up for next year’s elections. The conservative push to erode rights for women and minority groups will galvanise both those who agree and those affected.

Biden is signalling he will run against the court and Republican lawmakers on a host of judgements, including abortions rights and student loans, hoping to appeal to women, people of colour and young voters. For this to be a winning strategy, he must get voters who are disappointed by the lack of action on these and other issues — including stricter gun rights and more liberal immigration laws — to see that their only hope of remedy lies with him and the Democrats.

Trump will certainly tout his success in stacking the US Supreme Court, and his Republican presidential rivals will presumably claim they will do more. This approach has deep appeal for the rusted-on Make America Great Again base but is unlikely to garner sufficient votes to gain a victory in the general election.

It is no accident that Trump, even as he takes credit for the decision to abolish legal abortion, has been dodging questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion bill into law — something many within the conservative movement see as the next frontier in this fight. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, his chief rival in the Republican presidential primary, has sought to outflank him on the issue by embracing it as a key feature of his campaign, as has former vice-president Mike Pence.

What the United States is seeing in 2023 — in Supreme Court decisions, state actions and the failure of Congress to enact any meaningful legislation — is a clawing back of the rights of Americans, especially those in minority groups, in a way previously unseen in modern times. This must surely be a key election driver next year. •

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Kudos if you said that those countries cap the amount anyone may donate to a political party or candidate. Double the kudos if you know that the entire eastern seaboard in Australia also has such caps, not just for state parties but for state electoral purposes too.

It is forty years since the Hawke government begat the regime that still essentially governs the funding of campaigns for federal elections. That regime still rests on twin pillars: public funding for parties or candidates that attract above 4 per cent of the vote, in return for disclosure requirements whose lack of timeliness is redolent of the paper-and-pen era in which they were hatched.

True, the federal “transparency register” has been widened to include lobby groups that campaign at national elections. But the national electoral laws don’t drill deeply into the financial affairs of parties. Compare Britain, where parties’ audited financial accounts must be published annually — and parties there don’t receive public funding for electoral purposes like their Australian counterparts do.

Whether in an absolute sense, or relative to our usual democratic comparators, the electoral funding and disclosure rules in the Commonwealth Electoral Act remain lax. This state of affairs may align with liberal philosophy in the abstract, but it is not merely passé in terms of developments in the field in the last forty years; it is also corrosive of faith in the integrity and political equality in Australian elections.

With a Labor government ostensibly driven by social democratic norms and an expansive crossbench of Greens and independents committed in principle to more fairness in electoral participation, what are the prospects for renewal? To discuss this, we need to consider the three main dishes on the regulatory menu — disclosure, donation caps, expenditure limits — and then ask if reform is imminent after all these years.

Disclosure is broke: time to fix it

Disclosure at the national level needs to be tighter and more timely. Parties must declare “gifts” — donations earmarked to fund national electioneering — only after the end of each financial year. Their declarations don’t then need to be published by the Australian Electoral Commission, or AEC, until February of the next year. So resources given to parties in the lead-up to the May 2022 federal election need not have been made public until between eight and twenty months after they were received.

In addition, parties need only disclose individual gifts above an indexed threshold that now sits at $15,200 per annum. (Donors are meant to keep tabs on whether a series of gifts exceeds that threshold and, if so, disclose the fact annually.) It gets worse: given our federal structure and history, parties can consist of up to nine registered entities — their national secretariat plus their mainland state and territory divisions. The disclosure threshold applies to each of those entities, not to the party as a whole. So the effective threshold for gifts for national electioneering can be well over $100,000 per party.

You might think, “Well at least this annual ‘disclosure dump’ gives the media a deliberative focus.” It is true that having “real-time” disclosure — say on a weekly basis — and at too low a level could simply snow investigators. The answer to that is to improve the presentation of the data by including tools to easily aggregate and map disclosures across time spans, related parties and entities, and geography.

It is also important to bear in mind the inherent limits of any disclosure system. Disclosure is essentially a kind of freedom-of-information tool that allows the media and rival political players to ask questions. By itself it is no guarantee of integrity, let alone a means to political equality. It can even heighten cynicism or normalise unlovable donation practices. Companies may think they need to keep up with the largesse of competitors seeking to ingratiate influence; party treasurers can hit up donors to a rival party and say, “What about us?”

Regardless of such considerations, the national disclosure system is clearly broken: that much has been known for years. But the major parties have also increasingly driven a truck through the system, and the AEC hasn’t stood in their way.

How? The major parties operate business-oriented fundraising arms under names like the Liberal Party’s Australian Business Network and the Federal Labor Business Forum. These outfits charge huge subscription fees: not to be a member of the party proper, but to belong to a kind of exclusive networking club. To magnify the exclusivity, fees have been tiered across “platinum,” “gold” and “silver.” The fee for the highest tier has reportedly inflated from $110,000 to $150,000 in recent years.

When these fundraising arms organise notionally come-one, come-all dinners (like Labor’s $5000-a-head budget dinner hosted by PwC or a $5000-a-head “boardroom lunch” with treasurer Jim Chalmers), the ticket cost is set below the disclosure threshold. This is an old practice; the scandal today is that these large, tiered subscription fees are not being disclosed.

Under electoral law, a political donation is something given for “inadequate consideration.” But the parties happily encourage subscribers to claim they are receiving more than adequate consideration. Quelle surprise! As Woodside Energy’s CEO explained some years back, this leaves it up to people like him to decide whether to make “voluntary” disclosures.

Despite being armed with significant forensic powers, the AEC has taken such assertions at face value. It told the ABC recently that it leaves it up to the subjective — and conflicted — view of those paying for access to the parties. Donations up to ten times the disclosure threshold can therefore be hidden in plain sight.

All this ignores the objective nature of value in most real-world dealings. Parties are hardly in the events industry. The AEC could demand to be informed of the events held by each forum/network and then commission experts to assign an upper market value to the event-as-an-event (including an allowance for the attendance time of ministers or MPs). The AEC could also inspect the accounts of these fundraising arms to see what surplus they generate, per average subscriber, for the party coffers.

In short, the major parties are nakedly soliciting revenue, with a nod-and-wink as to anonymity, in return for selling premium access — and the regulator is standing by. Selling access corrupts basic public law values: politics as a public trust and the franchise as an emblem of the equal worth of all people. Why on earth would an ordinary person voluntarily join one of the major parties today when they are seen as largely superfluous to the electoral machine? As if rubbing salt in the wound, last year the major parties convinced the courts that any membership rights contained in their own rules are legally unenforceable.

Capping donations

Presently, the only “real” limit on national political donations is a ban on “foreign” donors, a recent development driven by concerns about Chinese money. I put “real” in quotes, since nothing is more fluid than international finances. That means the law is not really enforceable offshore, and so assumes that receipts are careful screened by Australian political actors. While the parties have been willing to twist and stretch disclosure law, the opprobrium for breaching a “foreign” donor ban is probably sufficient for the parties to self-police the source of gifts.

That leaves non-foreign, ridgy-didge Aussie donors: a residual category that ranges from citizens (wherever located) and permanent residents through to businesses incorporated here or simply possessing a principal place of activity here. Unlike in the sample of countries listed at the start of this piece, they face no donation limits. Is this a problem?

It may be, for political integrity and equality. If disclosure requirements were more meaningful, and if the new National Anti-Corruption Commission performs to its potential, we might be right to leave political integrity to those regimes.

What then of political equality? Political donations are partly acts of political association. This means they cannot, constitutionally, be banned outright. But they can be limited — in their size and in who makes them. Generally, we should welcome donations from a wide range of sources to help keep parties connected to a broad social base. Indeed, donations to parties and candidates of up to $1500 per annum are tax-deductible for individuals. On the other hand, big donations, even those made on the basis of mateship or ideology, undermine political equality.

Given this pervasive effect on political equality, why are donation caps not more prevalent in Australia? One clue lies in two countries absent from the list of those with caps: Britain and New Zealand. Like Australia, they have a longstanding Labor Party (albeit they spell it properly, as “Labour”).

“Surely these parties of the ordinary worker would support caps?” you say. Well yes, in principle. But when caps are introduced, the law is confronted by the problem of how to deal with the affiliation fees paid by the trade unions that formed those parties and still prop them up in the lean times of opposition. (Modern Labo(u)r parties do okay from corporate donations when they are in power or on the verge of power, but less well when facing the wilderness, thanks to their pragmatism and that of business donors.)

A second hurdle for caps is whether new political forces may need an injection from a sugar daddy in order to challenge the might of the existing major parties. This is less relevant for an eponymous self-funded party like the former Palmer United Party (now the United Australia Party) but very important for a more genuine movement like the teal independents who were turbocharged last year by Climate 200 support.

The key figure behind Climate 200, a progressive entrepreneur who inherited part of the vast mining and corporate raiding fortune of Australia’s first billionaire, has even written a book celebrating the movement. It may be no coincidence that teal candidates did much better in the 2022 federal election — without caps on donations or expenditure limits — than in this year’s NSW election, where both are capped.

Limiting spending

The third option on the menu is expenditure limits, which constrain how much parties, candidates and lobby groups can spend on certain electioneering costs. These limits are now common for state elections in most of Australia, as this table shows. (Victoria and Western Australia are the odd ones out, Tasmania only has them for its upper house elections, and in South Australia they are nominally “opt-in” as a condition of public funding.)

Limits on expenditure drive the British and New Zealand systems, and are a feature across Europe and the Americas. (They cannot be mandated in the United States, and opt-in spending limits there have fallen by the wayside.)

In principle, expenditure limits do several jobs. They squarely address the “arms race” problem, which Mr Palmer has reignited in Australia. In constraining the parties’ demand for money, these limits free up them and their leaders to focus on genuine public business and may reduce demand for dodgy donations. They may also help deliberation by making campaigns less cacophonous, something that is a turn-off for many electors.

Expenditure limits should also be easier to police than donation limits. While donations are inherently behind-the-scenes, campaigning needs to be public to be effective. That remains the case even with the advent of highly targeted online campaigns, although that development requires transparency from social media companies.

When it comes to expenditure limits, the devil lies in the legislative detail. With no fixed terms for federal parliament, the capped period is not easy to define. (At Westminster, it is up to a year ahead of an election.) Exactly what is covered by “electoral expenditure” also needs careful design and definition. And the coordination of campaigns — between trade unions or corporate groups, for example — needs to be controlled to keep caps from being rorted.

Most vexed of all is the question of what limits should be put on lobby group electioneering — not least with some members of the High Court suggesting, in 2019, that the idea of a level electoral playing field limits differential treatment of parties/candidates and lobby groups. If so, this is an odd heresy. Representative elections are necessarily focused on parties and candidates; parties have ongoing reputations to protect, and party leaders and MPs are publicly accountable in myriad ways that lobby groups are not.

Reforming the morass

Fifteen years have passed since the states began modernising the law of money in electoral politics. Yet substantive change has been absent nationally. If inertia had its way, this dual track of state innovation and national enervation would be unlikely to change.

As we have seen, the national transparency net has widened to rope in electioneering lobby groups but has simultaneously frayed. Observers are optimistic, however, that federal disclosure rules will be tightened to include a lower disclosure threshold and more frequent disclosure obligations. None of this is rocket science. Models exist aplenty, from New York City to Queensland, for something approaching continuous disclosure in the internet era. On the question of which income will need to be disclosed, we must pray that the Greens and crossbenchers lean on Labor to deal with the “business forum” loophole it helped manufacture.

Tasmania is on the verge of becoming the latest (and last) subnational jurisdiction to update its law in the area, and its bill is instructive about what not to do. Across 265 pages it weaves an intricate web of registration and accounting requirements. Yet it does little more than bring in a regular disclosure regime, sweetened with generous public funding for elections and for party administration. The Liberal government wants to set the disclosure threshold at $5000 per annum: pretty high for a small state.

After self-inseminating his party with over $200 million over the past two national elections (mostly via Mineralogy Pty Ltd), Mr Palmer’s recent forays into electoral politics may leave one main legacy: some form of donation cap. To have any effect, it will need to include a suturing of that business forum/network loophole.

Any federal cap is likely, I suspect, to be set at a high level. The major party treasurers — along with otherwise “progressive” electioneering groups like Get Up! and Climate 200 — will baulk at setting donation caps anywhere near as low as some states have. (Victoria is the most parsimonious — just $4320 currently over the four-year term.)

This leaves expenditure limits as the main new item on the menu. Again, the shadow of Mr Palmer looms large; but not just his. Finding himself outspent by a teal rival in a previously blue-riband Sydney seat in 2022, a Liberal MHR complained that his opponent’s spending had been “immoral.” Is it too cheap to note that his party could have swallowed its economically libertarian instincts at any time during its three terms in government and legislated limits? Better late than never! Temperance bandwagons were mostly full of recovering addicts; and, as St Augustine ironically put it, “Lord, make me chaste and celibate, just not yet.”

Federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, a multi-party committee with fourteen members, has held public hearings, including on electoral finance reform, over a seven-month period. (MPs, even more than public lawyers, seem fascinated by electoral law.) Its report is due soon enough. The mix of compromise, competing principles and self-interest manifest in its recommendations will make for compelling reading. •

This article first appeared under the title “Money in Australian Electoral Politics: Reforming the Morass” in AusPubLaw.

The post Follow the money appeared first on Inside Story.

Colorado has also done almost everything election experts recommend to protect its electoral system from hacking. County clerks are combating disinformation about the security and reliability of the system and refuting false claims of potential fraud in the wake of last year’s presidential election.

A large majority of Colorado voters have opted to be placed on a permanent mail-ballot list maintained by the state. As an overseas voter, I received an email link to the ballot papers from the office of the clerk and recorder of  Summit County (my district of residence) at the beginning of October. I needed some personal details to unlock these papers and a little tech savvy to fill them out and submit them. I returned my completed voting paper, along with an affidavit attesting my eligibility to vote, by email a few days later.

I have since received an email from Colorado BallotTrax to inform me that my ballot was received. A phone number and an email address are given for any questions I might have, and a link to the GoVoteColorado.gov website operated by Colorado’s secretary of state. Another email will let me know when my vote has been counted.

I voted in the same way in the Democratic primary races earlier this year (the results are here) and in every presidential and midterm election since I became an American citizen. A highlight was voting for the 2020 presidential primaries, in person this time, at the old County Courthouse in Breckenridge, using an unwieldy electronic voting machine. But it wasn’t very celebratory; although “I Voted” stickers were available, democracy sausages were nowhere to be seen.

In this election I could vote for one of the state’s two federal senators (incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet or Republican Joe O’Dea); for the representative for the second congressional district (incumbent Democrat representative Joe Neguse or Republican Marshall Dawson); for a state senator and a state House of Representatives member; and for thirteen state-wide offices, including governor and lieutenant governor (with Democrat incumbents Jared Polis and Dianne Primavera seeking re-election), attorney-general, secretary of state, treasurer, and four representatives each for the State Board of Education and the State Board of Regents, which oversee state spending in schools and universities respectively.

Voters who hadn’t run out of energy by that point could also say yes or no to eleven state ballot measures on public school funding, alcohol licencing and other matters. No judicial positions were on the ballot, but I could register whether or not I wanted those in current elected judicial positions to remain. (Full details of what was on the ballot are here.)

Colorado is a blue state with pockets of more conservative voters, including ranchers concerned about gun rights, petrol prices and more. (One rancher is currently spending US$11 million on anti-Polis billboards.) It also has five military bases, home to some 60,000 people, as well as military retirees and evangelical church members. But the political demographics are changing, with young, college-educated suburbanites making up a rising percentage of the population. After voting primarily Republican from 1920 to 2004, the state has voted with the Democrats in the last four presidential elections; Biden won in 2020 with a 13.5 per cent margin.

The Democrats hope that the 2022 midterms will defy historical precedent and enable them to retain control of the Senate and perhaps even hold the House. In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet holds a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent and has done well in fundraising, but it is critical that this low-key senator is able to stave off his Republican opponent, Joe O’Dea. O’Dea’s moderate positions on issues like abortion, his rejection of former president Donald Trump and his endorsement by former president George W. Bush make him a very real threat.

Controversial Republican Lauren Boebert, who represents Colorado’s third congressional district in the House of Representatives, is backed by Trump and has earned notoriety for her inflammatory remarks. She has positioned herself as one of the most far-right members of Congress. One poll has her in a statistical tie with her Democrat challenger Adam Frisch, and there are hopes that he has the momentum to make this a competitive race.

Boebert won in 2020 with just 51 per cent of the vote, in a district that includes the wealthy ski centres around Aspen and the middle-class cities of Glenwood Springs and Pueblo, and where 43 per cent of voters are unaffiliated. But the nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report rates this district as solidly Republican. This race matters, not just because it contributes to controlling the House of Representatives but also because more wins for Trump-endorsed candidates will boost his kingmaker status and increase the likelihood he will run for president in 2024.

In contrast to Boebert’s high-profile contest, the second congressional district where I vote remains a solidly Democratic seat. Our local congressman, Joe Neguse, who is running for a third term, is the son of Eritrean refugees (a significant number of whom have settled in Summit County) and the first African-American man elected to the US Congress from Colorado.  His Republican opponent Marshall Dawson is so low-profile I had to research him on the internet, and I still don’t know much about him.

Neguse, who is on House leader Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team, is one of the co-chairs of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. He was also chosen as an impeachment manager for Trump’s second impeachment trial. In recent years, this seat has been a strong jumping off point for politicians seeking higher office: of the last four to hold it, two went on to the US Senate and one (Polis) to the governorship.

Neguse has already marked himself as a man to watch, and he is expected to play an enhanced role in the House leadership as old hands like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer step aside.

State elections are an increasingly important feature of the American political landscape. State governors and legislatures oversee the drawing of electoral boundaries, determine voting rights, decide who is eligible for Medicaid, and now— after the recent decision of the US Supreme Court — make decisions about abortion access.

In this, too, Colorado is in a better position than most other states. Since 2020, the state’s legislative and congressional districts have been drawn up by two separate independent redistricting commissions created after the state’s voters resoundingly approved ballot provisions in the 2018 elections.

The state has also set up an insurance marketplace (as outlined in the Affordable Care Act) to help make health insurance more accessible, and more than half a million Coloradans are covered under Medicaid Medicaid expansion. Low-income undocumented pregnant people and children will gain eligibility by 2025. It is ranked in the top ten states for healthcare.

In April, Governor Polis signed into law the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which codifies protections to ensure that abortion and choice remain legal in Colorado; in July he signed an executive order further protecting reproductive health rights and clarifying that Colorado won’t cooperate with other states’ criminal or civil investigations of health decisions that are legal in Colorado.

Polis has a good track record: he has provided full-day kindergarten and universal preschool and he is entitled to tout his management of the pandemic. FiveThirtyEight’s poll average has him ahead of his Republican rival Heidi Ganahl by a widening margin of 14.3 percentage points.

The political climate has seen secretaries of state — who oversee elections and maintain voter registration files — become increasingly important. Colorado incumbent, Democrat Jena Griswold, made a name for herself in 2020 when she pushed back on national television against election disinformation and challenged Trump’s assertions that mail ballots are less secure. She has subsequently faced death threats from Trump allies.

Griswold successfully went to court to bar Mesa county clerk Tina Peters, who faced criminal charges for allegedly compromising voting equipment and election security, from overseeing both the 2021 election and this year’s midterms. Undeterred, Peters ran in the Republican primary but was beaten by Pam Anderson, a former head of the Clerk’s Association who has made standing up for the state’s election model central to her campaign. No polls are available for this race, but Griswold has to be seen as the frontrunner, although Anderson is a plausible opponent.

Voter turnout — always a problem in the United States and especially so in midterm elections — will be crucial for Democrats if they are to retain the seats they need to hold power in Congress. Campaign staff aim to keep the spotlight on abortion and women’s anger over the Republicans’ curtailing of their rights to reproductive health. Colorado’s progressive stance on abortion issues might turn out to be a two-edged sword, though, if voters don’t feel their reproductive health rights are under threat and aren’t motivated to vote.

Polling suggests the key issues for the state’s voters include inflation and the cost of living; housing shortages and homelessness; climate change, with the state exposed to wildfires and drought; and the cost of childcare. Still, protecting abortion rights and addressing racism and discrimination are in the top ten.

As voting begins around the nation, the FiveThirtyEight forecast has Democrats slightly favoured to win the Senate and Republicans slightly favoured to win the House — and the evidence is that all the races are tightening. Ten states in particular will play a significant role in deciding the balance of the US House and Senate and shaping the map of governorships: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

While Colorado doesn’t appear on that list, every race is important, never more so than this year. The United States is facing rising threats from domestic extremists and those who would undermine the sanctity of the right to vote. As vice-president Kamala Harris says, “everything is on the line in these elections.” •

The post American democracy at its best? appeared first on Inside Story.

A record 33 per cent were “pre-poll ordinary” votes. This option, available since 2010, essentially replicates the election-day experience but can happen anytime during the two weeks before. (For the 2016 and 2019 elections the period was three weeks.) Another 4 per cent voted early, in person, by “declaration,” meaning their ballot was submitted inside an envelope with a signed form (usually because their name couldn’t be found on that portion of the roll).

And a record 14 per cent voted through the mail — an almost doubling of 2019’s 8 per cent, which was a drop from the previous election. This year’s figure was, of course, a result of the pandemic. And like many Covid-induced behavioural changes, the extent of any snapback to previous modes of behaviour remains to be seen.

What does the electoral class — experts, parliamentarians and others interested in the running of elections — think about these evolving voting methods? Should we all relax and go with the flow, or would it be better to insist that as many people as possible turn up on election day to immerse themselves in its binding rituals?

The answer so far has been to accommodate demands for convenience gradually, repeatedly drawing a line before yielding a little more several years later.

In the medium term, the explosion has been most obvious in pre-polls. Eighteen years ago, pre- and postal voting each accounted for around 5 per cent of turnout. As figures quoted above show, even in 2022 pre-polls were more than double postals. That’s due to the 2010 changes, and a commission that publicises pre-polling’s availability almost to the point of encouragement. Postal voting, on the other hand, is treated more like a necessary evil. (See, for example, electoral commissioner Tom Rogers explaining to a parliamentary committee just before the 2022 campaign why the commission prefers pre-poll.)

And yet, according to the electoral law, if you meet a criterion for one you meet it for the other; indeed, criteria for both are stated in the same schedule. Postal voters must sign a form or tick an online box declaring they meet one of those conditions. The pre-poller verbally affirms it to an electoral official. (The long schedule of reasons obviously isn’t read out; instead there’s a conversation along the lines of “Do you qualify to vote pre-poll?” “Yes.”)

What’s wrong with postal voting? To most election watchers its greatest sin is that it can hold up the election result because postal votes are not counted until the following week. (It really needn’t be like this; the Brits manage to count theirs on election night. If we really tried we could include most of them in the Saturday evening tally.)

A random voter, if asked, might offer that postal voting is more vulnerable to abuse. Letterboxes can be stolen from and postal workers might be tempted to interfere. Anecdotes — or sometimes versions of the same anecdote — abound of postal voting applications going unanswered. (It certainly happens, as two people I know found out in May.)

Perhaps people worry about postal delivery times. Letters take much longer to deliver than they used to, potentially missing the cut-off two weeks after polling day.

But there’s another problem. It doesn’t tend to worry the average voter, but it does concern many in the electoral law class: postal votes are not truly secret.

Why do we have the secret ballot? In Australia and other “advanced democracies” we tend to see it as a “right” — and so, by implication, an add-on. But secrecy was actually an integral part of the “Australian ballot” right from the beginning. It had to be, because if people were bribing or threatening others to vote a certain way (including at polling places), opt-in secrecy alone wouldn’t eradicate it. The state had to ensure a person had no way of proving to another how they had voted.

And postal voting isn’t compulsorily secret. Voters could be filling out their ballots in the visual presence of family, friends or anyone else. That was why voting by post came so long after the move to the Australian ballot in the 1850s. If postal voting had been available in the nineteenth century, bosses could instruct their employees, and landlords their tenants, to (a) apply for a postal vote and (b) fill it out the desired way, show it to them and let them to put in the mail. It was obviously a tractor-sized loophole.

In democratic countries with less-developed economies, such as our close neighbours East Timor, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, postal voting is either non-existent or limited to tiny classes of people — for example armed forces overseas — for this very reason. (In the case of East Timor at least, the absence of a postal system is an overriding factor.)

In Australia, though, anyone can vote postal as long as they sign the form claiming they qualify. Does this loose arrangement matter? The logistics, expense and likelihood of getting caught render the risk of this potential absence of privacy tiny, but we might still envisage, for example, one spouse (most likely the husband) instructing and supervising the other. Nursing home staff voting on behalf of residents is a possibility. Maybe the question is whether it would happen enough to worry about.

Earlier this year, as a Covid measure for a set of by-elections, the NSW electoral commission skipped the application process and sent postal votes to everyone on the roll. Voters could use them, or they could cast their vote in person. A touch under half of the turnout, 49 per cent, was postal.

In Switzerland they do this as a matter of course for national elections, and about 90 per cent of voters mail their ballots back. Estonia has for many years made internet voting available to all, and around a third of the electorate uses it. Some Australian local council elections are postal only. Is our third tier of government so unimportant that enforced secrecy doesn’t matter?

This, then, is a question for the future of voting at national and state elections: should remain hung up about secrecy?

There’s one other complicating factor: how private is in-person voting anyway? The Electoral Act says votes must be cast privately, but no penalties seem to apply for breaches. Australia’s booth layout sits at the more relaxed end of international practice. It’s easy to peek at your neighbour, especially if they’re willing to show you. (A couple of visual examples.) Few eyelids are batted. Electoral officials would probably intervene in egregious examples — but it would be too late in most cases.

And if I filled in my ballot and then, on the way to the ballot box, shouted out who I was voting for and held it up, I would likely receive a stern admonition but little else. Even if the official reached me before I got to the box, would they throw my ballot away?

Contrast this with rules during the counting of votes: if you put your name, or anyone’s name, on the ballot it is rendered informal because it supposedly breaches secrecy. (This rule really is an unneeded remnant of a bygone era, if for no other reason than that officials really have no way of knowing who wrote the name.)

Let’s step back and imagine elections were just invented and we were setting up an apparatus to conduct them. What might the arrangements look like?

We would create and maintain the electoral roll largely as we do now. A decade ago, with direct enrolment, Australia embraced modernity, using various government agency databases to do most of the work, complemented by elector-initiated activity.

And voting itself? Would it really be in person, on a single day? Or would it mostly be via the internet, including by email — security, and perceptions of security, allowing? A lot more work would be needed; NSW’s Ivote, which has been wound back to its original use by vision-impaired voters, provides a cautionary tale.

People who can’t access the internet would need some form of postal voting. And voting in person? In a big country like Australia, the fewer people who vote on election day the less easy it is to justify having six or seven thousand polling places scattered across the continent. (Switzerland, mentioned earlier, has a population density around sixty-six times Australia’s.) But decreasing the availability of Saturday voting would further encourage other voting channels.

The most recent ACT election, conducted during the pandemic, was framed by that jurisdiction’s electoral commission as a five-week “election period.” This might provide a partial template.

The early forms of “postal voting” in this country, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, actually involved people visiting their post office and doing the deed there, in front of the postmaster (but without he or she seeing how they voted!). The postmaster then posted an envelope containing the ballot to the returning officer. Gradually the class of people who could take votes in this way was widened. (Federally, it wasn’t until 1918 that electors began posting their own ballots.)

The mid-twenty-first-century version might see people voting at various government agency offices during the voting period.

And would something like MyGov have a place? In terms of perceptions of integrity, something might be said for people possessing evidence of how they voted. But see notes on secrecy, above.

Around the globe all manner of vote-taking can be observed. In America alone, the 3000-odd counties provide a rich tapestry, not just for their own but also for state and national elections. Some of that international experience is worth considering.

My crystal ball is no less murky than the next person’s, but change is already happening thanks to evolving social expectations and the contradictions inherent in current laws governing convenience voting: yes it’s allowed, but floodgate’s hinges remain intact by making people claim to have a good reason, even if it’s with a wink and a nod.

And much of the change will depend on decisions, explicit or otherwise, about mandated secrecy. •

The post How will we vote in the future? appeared first on Inside Story.

Any discussion of this topic needs to first extract itself from a fallacy that befalls so many debates about voting rules (compulsory voting is a fine example): that the United States is the only other country in the world. And look at how terrible things are over there!

Voter ID has a long and ugly history in America, and has become deeply embedded in the ideology wars. Australian partisans tend to inhale these battles as if they’re happening here. But the world contains many functioning democracies.

Yes, America has a ridiculously decentralised voting system (state legislatures decide rules for national elections; local councils do their own thing) that’s riddled with partisanship. Australia does not. In fact, with a permanent national body that conducts elections — the independent Australian Electoral Commission — we are at the opposite end of the spectrum. (Most liberal democracies have national election laws administered by public servants and local government employees.) So let’s leave America out of it.

Our centre-right parties have been itching to introduce voter ID for decades (although John Howard didn’t when he had his 2005–07 Senate majority). While some current advocates of voter ID spend too much time on American right-wing websites, the reaction from opponents of the idea can actually be worse. No less than Labor’s national secretary, former treasurer Wayne Swan, has tweeted that it involves “rigging elections.” (He accuses the Coalition of “Trumpist” behaviour, but claiming your opponent will steal the election is actually part of the Trump playbook.)

But it’s true that Australia doesn’t have a problem with voter impersonation. In Antony Green’s much-quoted words, voter ID is a “solution in search of a problem.”

And yet…

The fact is that most countries do have voter ID laws, including most of those we would compare ourselves to: longstanding liberal democracies with advanced economies. But then, most of them are in (western) Europe and have national ID cards that people must carry around anyway. Of the more comparable nations — New Zealand, Canada and Britain — all without civic registers, only Canada requires voter ID for national elections.

Still, being in the minority is not a good reason to change. In this case, there is really only one good one: public perceptions. Most Australians support voter ID because it just makes sense, and it seems strange you don’t do it already. In the pre-Netflix era, advocates would point out the apparent incongruity of needing ID to rent a video but not to employ that precious possession, your vote.

The answer then and now is that enabling nearly all people to exercise this right — as might be the case with voter ID — is not good enough. As a society we don’t want voting to be restricted to the 80–90 per cent who have no trouble producing ID. Elections are supposed to be the big leveller; all our voices should count equally.

But the public confidence factor can’t be dismissed.

The last federal election’s jaw-dropping outcome, dramatically contradicting all published opinion polls, produced a dollop of social media conspiracy theorising — but no more than that. Virtually everyone accepted that it was a genuine result. We want to keep it that way. Perceptions matter.

When Queensland’s Newman government brought in a voter ID law in 2013, I gave it a single thumb up. If we were going to have such a thing, this one seemed pretty innocuous. If you didn’t have ID you would fill in a declaration vote to be checked later. It was used at one general election, in 2015, before the new Labor government repealed it.

Anecdotally, Queensland’s experiment produced longer queues. As Graeme Orr notes, turnout dropped, but turnout fluctuates between elections anyway, and cause and effect can’t be reliably identified. Still, it wouldn’t be surprising if voter ID laws turned a lot of people off. And it also produces another possible excuse for not voting. While “I don’t have ID” might not, strictly speaking, be a reasonable defence, it’s likely the Electoral Commission of Queensland was lenient.

(Data from ECQ annual reports mildly supports this. The 2012–13 annual report says $5 million was paid in non-voting fines in that financial year, “the majority… in connection with the two major electoral events conducted in 2012” — that is, before the new voter ID laws. Its 2014–15 and 2015–16 reports, covering the first election under voter ID, recorded just under $1.5 million in total.)

The planned federal legislation, which at time of writing hasn’t been seen, looks as if it will be like Queensland’s, but with the added feature that you can get someone else on the roll to vouch for you if you’re without ID. Not mentioned in current media reports is whether the AEC will send all voters a letter that could be used as ID (as happened in Queensland).

The fine print is that little checking of those declaration votes was done in Queensland. If the claimed voter was on the electoral roll, the vote was counted, because logistically it wasn’t feasible to check if their name was already crossed off one of the many copies of the roll. So for all intents and purposes, that voting paper might as well have gone straight into the ballot box in the first place, along with all the IDed votes.

The Queensland rule was really just a disincentive to vote fraudulently. And, of course, a means to maintain a perception of electoral propriety.

Technology has changed since 2013, too. Increasingly, electoral rolls are being accessed electronically by officials on election day. As far as I know the rolls are not yet live at federal elections, which would facilitate the immediate cross-off of names across all copies of the roll. But even then, under the Queensland arrangements, nothing would have stopped someone impersonating someone they knew wasn’t going to turn out.

So much of this discussion is very twentieth century. Technology is changing the way we live our lives; letters and paper ID are becoming obsolete. Most people don’t receive utilities bills in the post. Not everyone has a printer. It is, of course, impossible for postal voters to show original identification. Widely used internet voting will come eventually (but not soon, fear not).

If the federal government’s ID plan becomes law, the AEC will require extra resources. There will be teething problems. It’s probably easy to overstate the contribution to public trust. Conspiracy theories about electoral malfeasance could take root regardless, and would be likelier in the event of a Labor win. (Already the AEC has to deal with wacky social media disinformation.) The loophole described above creates plenty of space for feverish speculation.

And while the Newman government in 2013 enjoyed a massive majority in its single chamber of parliament, the current legislation must pass the Senate to become law. That’s quite a hurdle. •

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Preferential voting — known as “ranked-choice voting” in America — has now been adopted by ballot initiative (a kind of citizens-initiated referendum) in two states: Maine, in 2018, and now Alaska for all post-2020 elections.

How did the two northernmost states in the Union come to adopt a voting system that has been used for over a century in Australia but remains largely unknown in the United States? Like many aspects of American politics today, the answer is to be found in the increasing dysfunction and polarisation of American electoral democracy.

Although it would typically elect the same candidate as a standard US-style plurality contest, preferential voting offers politicians a different route to victory, and thus different incentives.

In close contests, as Australian politicians know, it pays to attract not just a strong primary vote but also a healthy flow of preferences from minor parties and independent candidates. Labor, for instance, would never win a federal election in the absence of preference flows from the roughly 10 per cent of the electorate who support the Greens — which explains the unwillingness of Anthony Albanese and Mark Butler to indulge Joel Fitzgibbon’s road-to-nowhere plan to renege on Labor’s climate commitments.

Transferred to the United States, preferential voting means that a supporter of the Libertarian Party — which garnered 1.2 per cent of the national vote in 2020 — could avoid helping split the conservative vote (as arguably happened in several states this time). Similarly, America’s Green voters could give their second preference to the more pro-environment of the major parties, just as their counterparts do in Australia.

But a newfound embrace of minor parties is not what is driving this reform. Rather, ranked-choice voting is seen as a way to shift the tone of American politics in a more civil and cooperative direction, or at least a less negative and polarising one.

America’s combination of primary elections with plurality (and non-compulsory) voting means that centrist voters face an invidious choice at the ballot box. In 2020, this was typically between a pro-Trump Republican and an increasingly left-wing Democrat.

The political centre, where many American voters still profess to be, has emptied out. As former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower put it, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

Where compulsory and preferential voting pushes Australian politicians to contest the political centre, the incentives push the other way in the United States — towards mobilising one’s base vote.

Party primaries are prone to capture by radicals on both sides who want to ensure that only “pure” ideologues and true believers nominate. The most effective way to do this is by advocating the kind of extreme policies that are highly attractive to party diehards but may repel everyone else.

By rewarding those with broader appeal, preferential voting can deter such extremism. Candidates who command a solid base of support but attract few preferences from others — Donald Trump, for example — are less likely to be nominated and win under preferential voting than under plurality rules. Switching to preferential elections at all levels, from primaries to presidential contests, is thus seen as a way to bring back the “missing middle” in American politics.

While the idea of giving voters the opportunity to rank candidates is familiar and indeed unremarkable to Australians, it is being hailed as a major reform in the United States. As democracy scholar Larry Diamond put it, “Many reforms are needed, but ranked-choice voting can be the Archimedean lever of change, enabling a small force to move a great weight.”

Maine shows how this can work in practice. After repeated split-vote wins by divisive Republican governor Paul LePage — who styled himself as “Trump before Trump” — a grassroots movement pushed for and won a ballot initiative in 2016 to introduce preferential voting. When this was stymied by the legislature, Maine voters forced the change via a special “people’s veto,” overriding the politicians.

In Maine’s first use of ranked-choice, in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrat Jared Golden won the state’s knife-edge 2nd congressional district by securing enough preferences from two Independents to leap over the Republican incumbent.

Golden’s receipt of what turned out to be an election-deciding flow of preferences came after he publicly pledged to reciprocate with his own rankings, signalling to Democrat voters to do the same. His Republican rival, by contrast, spurned the idea and hence received few preference flows from excluded candidates — becoming the first incumbent to lose the district in over a century.

While cooperative signalling of this kind can make sense under preferential voting, under plurality rules there is nothing to be lost by “going negative” in campaigns.

Golden’s upset victory led to a series of legal challenges (and the Republican state secretary’s scrawling “stolen election” on the official certification of results), but the system was upheld by the courts and Golden was elected again, with much less drama, in November 2020.

At that same election, on the other side of the continent, Alaskan voters narrowly approved a proposal to adopt preferential voting as well, along with new disclosure requirements to prevent “dark money” in politics. In a new and potentially influential twist, the state’s preferential contest will take place after a single primary election for all parties, with the four best-polling candidates going on to a general election in which voters can rank from one to four.

The Alaska campaign benefited from a cross-party coalition of Independents, Libertarians, Democrats and some Republicans. By contrast, a similar initiative in Massachusetts championed predominantly by the Democrats failed to win majority support on 3 November.

Whether preferential voting can actually lower the temperature of American politics in the hyper-polarisation of the post-Trump era remains to be seen. Studies from other jurisdictions that use ranked ballots — including Australia, Papua New Guinea and over a dozen American cities and local governments — have found that they produce more moderation than plurality elections. But these either tend to be non-partisan contests, in the case of local elections, or have very different political cultures.

Nonetheless, leading American thinkers have seized on the idea of preferential voting as “the leading institutional reform that could potentially reduce polarisation in the country,” as the high-profile political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it. Others endorsing preferential voting include Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, the late John McCain, newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Economist, five winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, and nine winners, including Fukuyama, of the Skytte Prize, the highest honour in political science.

Amid this heavyweight support, the unlikely duo of Maine and Alaska — blue-collar, rural and remote — have thus become testing grounds for whether a seemingly modest electoral reform can help arrest America’s democratic decline. Despite their locations on America’s periphery, they could be at the centre of national democratic renewal. •

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Worried that a record turnout of voters is trending Democratic, Republicans across the country have been running a series of shadow campaigns: while candidates lobby for people’s votes, lawyers and activists lobby for those votes not to be counted.

The pandemic has forced these campaigns into the open, with the desperate scramble to limit the franchise clashing with voters’ demands for more ways to cast their ballots in the midst of a public health emergency. But the Republican campaign to shrink the electorate stretches back decades as part of a growing anti-democratic strain that now defines the party.

To understand how this anti-democratic politics emerged, it’s first necessary to understand how Americans came to embrace broad democracy. That story can be told as a slow expansion of the vote — first, to unpropertied white men in the 1830s, then to Black men in 1870, women in 1920, and Indigenous Americans in the 1950s. But formal enfranchisement didn’t mean people could actually cast a ballot. For most Black Americans, for instance, a series of laws backed by violence made voting next to impossible until the 1960s.

In that decade, two things happened: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 empowered the federal government to protect voters who had been discriminated against, and the Supreme Court developed its “one-person-one-vote” doctrine that said, generally speaking, one person’s vote shouldn’t be more powerful than another’s. These changes marked a democratic revolution, and Americans increasingly came to expect universal and equal franchise: the notion that every citizen has an equal right to vote.

For a Republican Party increasingly reliant on white voters in a rapidly diversifying country, this was a problem. In the early 1980s, they began pushing back against expanded voting rights by complaining about “voter fraud,” arguing that new measures had to be put in place to make voting more secure. If fewer people voted as a result, well, that was the price Americans must pay to have confidence in their elections.

How that played out on the ground was not so neutral. In 1981, the Republican National Committee sent a “National Ballot Security Task Force” to Black and Latino neighbourhoods in New Jersey. This group of armed off-duty police officers plastered the neighbourhoods with warnings that they were hunting fraudulent voters, and then appeared at polling sites and challenged Black and Latino voters to show their voter registration cards. This voter-intimidation scheme was so blatant that the Republican Party was forced by the courts to enter a consent decree, in which it agreed not to intimidate voters at the polls. (That decree expired a few years ago.)

The Republican voter-disenfranchisement project gained new energy in 2010, when huge victories put Republicans in charge of state houses across the country. Conservative legislatures introduced hundreds of laws to restrict ballot access, including strict voter ID laws that required voters to pay significant fees for required documents. Republican secretaries of state also purged voting rolls and closed polling sites in minority neighbourhoods, leading to the hours-long lines that have become a standard part of American elections in the past decade.

The courts, too, have played an increasingly pivotal role in voting restrictions. Most important, in 2013 a conservative Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ending most protections for voters in states that have historically discriminated against minority voters. Legislators in those states rushed to pass new restrictions following that ruling. And now in 2020, appeals courts packed with Trump appointees have stayed most efforts to make voting easier during the pandemic. (This year has already seen more than 350 court cases over ballot access and deadlines, meaning the courts are playing an outsized role in this election.)

This may all seem like rough-and-tumble politics, political parties fighting for whatever advantage they can get on election day. But even setting aside the ethical component of that argument — disenfranchising voters is more than a political tactic, it’s a violation of a fundamental right — a broader political development is worth mentioning. Republicans have increasingly adopted policies and positions attractive to a shrinking minority of voters in the United States. Along with voting restrictions, they have begun to explore ways to limit democratic representation more broadly.

Nothing is more emblematic of the GOP’s anti-democratic strain than calls to repeal the 17th Amendment. That amendment allowed for the direct election of senators, who, for the first century of US history, were selected by state representatives. The Senate had been constructed that way so it could serve as a firewall against popular democracy.

By the early twentieth century, though, Americans had come to see the Senate as a corrupt body of self-dealing politicians with no accountability. So they amended the constitution to enable the people to directly elect their senators. In recent years, a growing number of writers and politicians on the right have begun to complain about this amendment. Just last month, Republican senator Ben Sasse penned an op-ed calling for it to be repealed. There had been, he decided, just too much democracy, which was a bad thing for the American people.

In the midst of all this, a countervailing force has emerged: a new voting rights movement. This movement began receiving national attention in 2013, when the “Moral Mondays” movement emerged in North Carolina in response to a radically conservative Republican legislature’s stripping of voting rights and democratic representation from Democrats across the state.

The voting rights movement has had an impact. Not only are Americans far more aware of the efforts to limit voting rights — and the reality that voter fraud is vanishingly rare — but Democrats winning control of state houses in recent years have instituted reforms that make it easier to vote: automatic voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting, and even felon enfranchisement.

That last move has had a massive impact. A number of states strip people convicted of felonies of their right to vote, even after they have served their sentences. Given the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, this had disenfranchised enormous numbers of Black men in many states. In Tennessee, for instance, more than 20 per cent of Black people had been stripped of their right to vote. Thanks to reforms by Democratic legislatures and voter initiatives, people with felony convictions are in the process of having their voting rights restored in several states.

The fight over which ballots count in 2020 is likely to continue past election day, as Republicans attempt to win in courts and counting rooms what they could not win at the polls. But this is not just a 2020 problem. The major parties disagree about a very basic democratic principle: that all citizens should have the right and ability to vote, and that their votes should be equally counted. That fight, over the desirability of democracy itself, will go on for years to come, and Americans who believe in democracy will have to grapple with what it means that theirs is not a broadly shared faith. •

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No, this is not a prime ministerial affirmation, but an actual question.

Most Australians — 70 per cent or more — support compulsory voting. But no Australian alive today has voted at a federal election under voluntary voting. We don’t know anything else.

Defenders of compulsion (who include a huge majority of academic political scientists) routinely point to the horrors of US electoral practice, on full display at the moment, as if that’s the alternative, as if it’s the only other country on Earth. It’s true that America presents a template for how not to run elections, but voluntary voting is a small part of that mix. The big majority of advanced democracies don’t force people to vote. There’s a little one nearby, across the Tasman, holding one such event in a few days’ time.

The best thing to be said about compulsory voting in Australia is that it does what it is designed to do: increase turnout. A lot. If it were done away with tomorrow, we would probably reach a new, much lower turnout after several elections. How much lower? Well, compulsion’s introduction in 1924 boosted turnout from 59 per cent of those enrolled in 1922 to 91 per cent in 1925. So perhaps we’d drop back to around 60 per cent. Or some other figure. But it would be substantially lower.

The $20 non-voting fine is trivial for a big majority of Australians, and probably less of a deterrent than the paperwork involved. For a large slab of the population compulsion is a gentle prod to swing by that primary school on the way to wherever on a sunny Saturday (or, increasingly, to vote early).

What’s not to like?

Some people object on the grounds of individual rights. But it’s only compulsory to “turn out”; you can always vote informal. Still, it’s a minor infringement of liberty, like many others our society insists on, like stopping at a red light even if the road is empty.

Others reckon compulsion drags the uninformed to the ballot box, but that view involves subjective assessments about what being informed means. It’s not obvious that people who follow the political soap opera are better equipped to decide who governs us than those who have better things to do. You’ve seen the internet, haven’t you? Anyway, all votes are supposed to count equally.

Is high turnout better than low turnout? I believe it is. Our turnout is impressive by international standards. But it’s not as good as we like to think.

New Zealand, the seventh antipodean colony — the one that decided not to join the upcoming federation in the 1890s — gets by okay without it. Its last election in 2017 saw an eligible voter turnout of around 71 per cent. Our numbers are better than that, but the figures we wave around are misleading.

The best way to make comparisons is to calculate what percentage of the estimated number of eligible voters (whether or not they’re on the electoral roll) actually vote. At the 2010 election, Australia’s figure was around 85 per cent; at the next two it was 87; and last year it hit 89. (We are actually bucking the worldwide trend of declining turnout, a function of our improving electoral roll and more early voting availability, particularly pre-poll.)

The estimated figure for the 2016 US presidential election is 59 per cent.

There is also a question of whether to include informal votes in our calculation of turnout. Is simply attending the polling place enough? By international standards we have a very high level of informal votes (around 5 per cent), about half of them deliberate and half accidental. The deliberate ones are nearly all a result of mandated turnout: they are people choosing not to vote despite being forced to attend. I believe they shouldn’t be counted in turnout. The accidental ones flow from our complicated voting system, and it’s not clear that they should be included either.

Making international comparisons is complicated, though, because no accepted practice seems to exist for making the calculation.

From what I can determine, America’s turnout figures don’t include what they call “invalid votes.” (The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance doesn’t have any post-2006 figures on the number of invalid votes in the United States. And the numbers in this table seem to exclude totally blank ballot papers.) If we take all the informal votes out of Australia’s number, we drop to a turnout of 84 per cent in 2019 (and a touch below 80 in 2010).

Still good, but getting less to write home about.

American advocates of compulsion (there are a lonely few) tend to cite the Australian experience to boost their case. Like, who else are they going to hold up — Brazil and Uruguay? Belgium and Luxemburg? No, good old unpretentious, un-European, almost-American us. This recent Brookings Institution/Ash Center paper cites the Australian Model, particularly our ease of voting, but most of its features have little to do with compulsory voting and can be found (again) across the ditch, and in fact in most of old Western Europe.

But there is one significant problem with compulsory voting in Australia that gets worse as the electoral roll becomes more complete.

Getting on the roll has been compulsory since 1911, but no one has been fined or prosecuted for breaking this law since the 1980s. Instead, a rolling amnesty is designed to encourage people to register. But it creates an incongruity: if you avoid being on the roll, and you don’t vote, the state doesn’t bother you. Enrolled people who don’t vote will get a fine.

Until 2012, simply moving house was enough to get unenrolled. The AEC would find out from other government agencies that you’d left an address and take you off the roll. It would then send you enrolment forms at your new home, several times, but if you didn’t fill in and return them there was nothing it could do. And people, increasingly, weren’t returning those forms.

As a result, the roll was becoming less complete. Lots of people would try to vote and find they couldn’t. So, in 2012, the AEC was finally given the power to do the other bit: put people on the roll at their new address, and find others who had not been on the roll, without the need for a signed form. It’s what most citizens expect in the modern age, and indeed what many assumed was happening. It’s why the roll has improved dramatically over the past eight years. Remember the “missing 1.5 million” the commission publicised (also in 2012)? It’s down to 600,000 or less (out of a bigger population).

Terrific. At the last election the roll was around 97 per cent complete, up from 91 per cent ten years ago. But because of this, non-voter numbers have skyrocketed. Not surprisingly, people who don’t like to vote are over-represented among those new, passive enrollees. And unlike other minor transgressions such as littering, jaywalking or illegally parking, the chances of getting caught and punished are pretty close to 100 per cent.

The number jumped most spectacularly, by 46 per cent, between the 2013 and 2016 elections. In 2016, the commission went after some 970,000 people. (In 2019 it was probably a bit under this.) Now, $20 isn’t much to most people, but it’s a lot to a few. Some people who receive the please-explain letter have an accepted excuse. Others simply fib and pretend they do — they were sick or looking after a sick loved one, or insist that they did vote (and someone else’s name must’ve been ticked off). The commission will accept it, but this doesn’t engender respect for those who run our elections. Ignoring the letters, or not paying the fine, will usually end up in court and a $180 fine plus costs. The numbers clogging up our courtrooms in this manner run into the thousands.

It costs the AEC millions to go after non-voters (and sadly the fines go not to them but to general government revenue). And the letters disproportionately go to low-income (particularly Indigenous) Australians.

What penalties do other countries with compulsory voting use? Australia sits at the more heavy-handed end. Some nations don’t bother to enforce at all; others, counterintuitively, take people off the electoral roll as punishment.

In early 2016 the Turnbull government greatly improved the Senate system by eliminating inter-party preference tickets and bringing in optional preferential voting above the line. The one potential drawback was the prospect of millions of Australians continuing to tick just one box, which would still count as a formal vote but would not see preferences flow to any other party. The solution? Have polling staff tell voters to “number at least six,” and also make that clear on the ballot itself. The implication being that fewer than six and your vote doesn’t count. Not quite a lie, because it’s not actually stated. Anyway, it works (and we have not yet seen a Langer-style campaign alerting voters to the fact that they can indeed number fewer than the six).

Should we adopt that strategy for voting? In other words, maybe we should become one of those countries where voting is compulsory but no one actually gets punished for not voting. Alternatively, should we chase up every, say, tenth, or one-hundredth non-voter?

The compulsory voting stick is too unwieldy. Something more gentle is needed.

Or perhaps we should do away with compulsion all together. •

The post A complex compulsion to vote appeared first on Inside Story.

Its members are more ethnically diverse and more progressive than older generations. In their relatively short lifetimes they have experienced the 9/11 terrorist attack, the global financial crisis, a series of extreme weather events and the impact of global warming, and now a global pandemic and a nation rent by racial, civic and hyper-partisan divisions.

They also turn out to vote in consistently lower numbers than older generations. In 2018, though, fired up by gun control, immigration, student debt, climate change and other issues they took personally, and supercharged by their opposition to president Donald Trump, their turnout increased substantially at the midterm elections. The figure is variously given as 36 per cent by the US Census Bureau, 42 per cent by Pew Research, and 46 per cent by the Harvard Institute of Politics: the differences appear to lie in the fact that data are only available from forty-two states so the national figure must be estimated.

Two-thirds of them supported the Democratic candidate for Congress, the widest partisan gap in this group for the past twenty-five years.

With this year’s presidential election widely seen as a pivotal point for both American democracy and international politics, experts say young voters could have a significant impact on the result. Is that accurate? Will their concerns and the candidates’ responses get them out to vote this time around?

The United States has one of the lowest rates of youth voter turnout.

Despite the boost in 2018, the early evidence from the 2020 presidential primaries suggested that figure wouldn’t rise this year. Fewer than one in five young people cast ballots in the Super Tuesday states.

These young people aren’t turned off by politics — in fact, they are surprisingly engaged. During the 2016 campaign, three-quarters of Americans aged under thirty professed an interest in politics, and a survey conducted in 2019 by the Kennedy School at Harvard found that 43 per cent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds said they were likely to vote in their party’s primary.

To date, though, those intentions haven’t translated into actions. Key among the reasons is the fact that first-time voters are often confused by complex and unclear voter-registration rules.

Voting is a fraught process in the United States, even in the best of circumstances, and young people are less likely to know where they should vote and more likely to be negatively affected when polling places get moved. It is particularly difficult for those from families that don’t see voting as a priority, for those whose parents may not themselves be eligible to vote, and for those who are moving from home to college or work. Young Americans are also less likely to have the necessary driver’s licence, passport or other voter identification.

Young people often miss the deadlines to register to vote, which is required in every state except North Dakota. Four million teenagers turn eighteen in 2020 and each state has varying laws about when they can register. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia allow pre-registration for seventeen-year-olds, and sometimes even sixteen-year-olds, but some states require people to be eighteen. Same-day registration is available in twenty-one states and the District of Columbia, and several states, including California and Oregon, have some form of automatic voter registration. In states that have implemented these types of reforms the turnout gap between older and younger voters has closed by about a third.

College and university campuses would normally be expected to help students vote, although this year many campuses are closed because of Covid-19. Between 2014 and 2018, the rate of student voting more than doubled, from 19.3 per cent to 40.3 per cent. In 2018 that was some 7.5 million students whose voting preferences leant strongly to Democrats. Female students, especially those who were Black or Latina, voted at the highest rates.

Students have a right (protected under a 1979 US Supreme Court decision) to register and vote where they attend college. Colleges and universities are also obliged by the federal Higher Education Act to make voter registration and voting available to all their students. That hasn’t stopped legislatures in several swing states, including Texas, Wisconsin, Florida and New Hampshire, from imposing rules that make it harder for college students to register and vote.

Campus closures combined with active suppression efforts are creating the “perfect storm,” especially with the alternative, mail-in voting, itself under threat. A recent poll found that more than half of young voters feel they don’t have the resources or knowledge they need to vote by mail in November.

On the other side of the ledger, a plethora of action groups is seeking to engage young people in the political processes. Those with a progressive focus include the Alliance for Youth Action, Kids Voting USA, NextGen America and Young Invincibles. Conservative group Turning Point USA, meanwhile — which aims to “educate, train and organise students to promote freedom” — is closely linked to the Trump family, and founder Charlie Kirk has acknowledged its focus on waging political warfare on campuses, in particular those in swing states.

Young voters care about a range of issues, including college debt, affordable healthcare, expanding voter rights, gun violence, immigration, climate change, and jobs and the economy. Polling shows they are less likely to approve of President Trump’s performance, more likely to think government has a role in solving society’s problems, more likely to think African Americans are treated less fairly than white Americans, and more likely to attribute climate change to human activity. College students cite Covid-19 and race relations as the two most important issues facing the nation.

The pandemic will most heavily affect the future prospects of young Americans, who are bearing the brunt of job losses in those businesses — restaurants, bars and retail — that typically employ younger people and seldom provide benefits, or who have had their education interrupted. For older millennials, the economic disruption is especially difficult because many have never fully recovered from the global financial crisis. The pandemic also makes access to affordable health insurance top of mind, especially with the Trump administration supporting the current attempt to have the US Supreme Court strike down the Affordable Care Act.

But while millennials and generation Z agree on many issues, this age group is by no means a liberal monolith. In particular, the voting patterns of young white men stand out. In 2018, more than a third of voters under age thirty were white men; in some key states like Iowa, Ohio and New Hampshire they make up a sizeable share of the electorate. They are the only subgroup of young voters to consistently vote Republican, although this support fell significantly over the first two years of Trump’s presidency.

In 2016 young white men preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton by twenty-two percentage points while young white women and young women and men of colour preferred Clinton by margins ranging from fifteen to sixty percentage points. Two years later young white men still preferred the Republicans, but by only seven percentage points. By contrast, young white women and young men of colour voted for Democratic candidates by a margin of thirty percentage points and young women of colour by a margin of over eighty.

Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, classifies this group of young white men as potential swing voters in 2020. Its research found that nearly one in five young voters who backed Republicans in 2018 plan to support Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden this year.

Who speaks to and for this generation of young voters? Many millennials cast their first votes for Barack Obama, and members of generation Z began entering the electorate just as his term was ending. For them, his administration is a reference point for who is electable and what is achievable. Small wonder that many in 2020 don’t see anyone offering what they want.

A series of polls taken in the run-up to the primary elections this year show that it isn’t necessarily the age of the candidates that matter — rather, young people are attracted by the ideas they put forward. That is why Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg ranked so well, although Biden has always been in consideration.

Young Republicans are also speaking out, concerned that the party and its leaders are failing to speak to people like them. In his rants against illegal immigrants, voter fraud and crime, Trump has undoubtedly preyed on the fears of older white voters and dismissed the more socially aware concerns of younger voters. At the same time, more than a quarter of the country’s eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds (29 per cent) say that their lives are worse because of Trump and only 15 per cent say their lives are better.

It is no surprise, then, that this election will be a referendum on Trump and his administration and policies for this age group.

A Harvard Institute of Politics poll in April found that 54 per cent of young voters (69 per cent of Democrats, 64 per cent of Republicans and 31 per cent of independents) intended to vote in November’s general election. This is up from the 50 per cent who, in the spring of 2016, told the same pollster they would vote — although the actual turnout in November that year was lower. (The poll cites 46 per cent and, as previously discussed, it is likely even lower.)

This poll also found that young Americans preferred Biden (then only the presumptive nominee) over Trump by twenty-three percentage points, an advantage that extended to thirty percentage points among those most likely to vote.

More recent polling shows that Biden, as the official Democratic candidate, has kept this level of support among millennials and generation Z, who strongly reject Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic and his responses to the Black Lives Matter protests. Differences based on race and education remain, but they are diminishing.

A July Brookings Institute survey of voting intentions among white working-class Americans — those without a college education who are seen as Trump’s key supporters — shows younger voters in this group are more likely than their elders to question Trump’s competence and character. The survey found 45 per cent of these potential 2020 voters aged under forty were leaning to Biden. It can be assumed that this trend is more pronounced in voters under thirty (and has perhaps become even more dramatic with the passage of time and the impact of the pandemic).

An August survey of college students by the Knight Foundation showed Democratic nominee Joe Biden to be their clearly preferred candidate; around 70 per cent said they’d vote for the Democratic nominee, compared with only 18 per cent for Trump. But respondents were not enthusiastic about Biden, and their voting intentions appear to be driven by a dislike of Trump (of whom 81 per cent had an unfavourable view).

Motivated by their social sensibilities and their experience of life in Trump’s America, it is clear that young voters will make efforts to have their voices heard in the November election, even in the face of voting barriers. Seventy-one per cent of the 4000 full-time college students who responded to one survey were “absolutely certain” they would vote in the general election this year. Such a participation rate would be unprecedented for young voters (that’s the level seen in voters aged sixty-five and over), but then the 2020 election will have many unprecedented aspects.

While turnout will be important in determining the outcomes of the November election, the exigencies of the electoral college system mean that where the turnout occurs will be even more important. CIRCLE’s analysis sees youth votes as particularly important for the presidential outcome in a number of states, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Arizona.

These voters will actually have two important roles in 2020. The first is to follow up on the commitments they have expressed so strongly to date by casting their votes. The second is to spearhead a movement that engages their peers and family in the political process.

Projections show that millennials and generation Z will make up more than half of the population by 2030, and more than half of all eligible voters. If they turn out in 2020 at the same rate as older citizens and then stay politically engaged, they can get their elected representatives to pay attention to the policy issues that matter to them and begin the task of uniting a nation bowed down by a pandemic, racial injustice, social inequalities, ultra-partisan politics and the Trump kakistocracy. •

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But the theory that has got most traction in the post-election polling is one that has teased poll-watchers for longer than almost any of these, and has done so since the advent of pre-election polling in Australia in the 1940s. This is the theory that large discrepancies between what polls “predict” and what voters do can be explained by the existence of a large number of late deciders — voters who don’t really make up their minds until sometime after the last of the opinion polls are taken.

In 2019, if that theory is right, the late deciders need to have either switched their support to the Coalition after telling the pollsters they intended to vote for another party, or shifted to the Coalition after telling the pollsters that they didn’t know which party to support. It was, after all, the Coalition that the polls underestimated, and Labor that they overestimated. On a weighted average of all the final polls — Essential, Ipsos, Newspoll, Roy Morgan and YouGov Galaxy — the Coalition’s support was 38.7 per cent (though it went on to win 41.4 per cent of the vote) and Labor’s 35.8 per cent (though it secured just 33.3 per cent of the vote). Variation around these figures, poll by poll, wasn’t very marked. Nor was there much to separate the polls on the two-party-preferred vote: every poll underestimated the difference between the Coalition’s and Labor’s two-party-preferred vote by between 2.5 and 3.5 percentage points.

The most recent, and most widely reported, research to have concluded that late deciders made the difference is a study of voters interviewed a month before the election and reinterviewed a month after it, published recently by the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods. According to Nicholas Biddle, the author of the study, the group that  determined the result was comprised of those who were “undecided in the lead-up to the election and those who said they were going to vote for the non-major parties but swung to the Coalition.” At the beginning of July, the Australian’s national affairs editor, Simon Benson, also argued that those who were only “leaning” towards Labor ahead of the election had “moved violently away from Labor” once they entered the polling booths and had a pencil in their hands; the “hard” undecided, those who registered in the opinion polls as “don’t knows,” also decided not to vote Labor. At the beginning of June, an Essential poll, conducted shortly after the election, had presented evidence for much the same point.

Over the years, the idea that polls may fail to pick the winner because they stop polling too early had become part of the industry’s stock-in-trade. Especially in the period before 1972, when there was only one pollster, Roy Morgan, the argument had been difficult to refute. By 2019, it was an oldie — but was it also a goodie?

The ANU study: For the Biddle report, two sets of data were collected from the Life in Australia panel, an online poll conducted by the Centre for Social Research and Methods. The first was collected between 8 and 26 April, with half the responses gathered by 11 April, five weeks ahead of the 18 May election; the second between 3 and 17 June, with half gathered by 6 June, three weeks after the election. The analysis was based on the 1844 people who participated in both.

In the first survey, respondents were asked how they intended to vote. Among those who would go on to participate in the June survey, the Coalition led Labor by 3.8 percentage points. In the second survey, respondents were asked how they had voted; among those who had participated in the April survey, the Coalition led Labor by 6.4 percentage points. These figures, based on first preferences, included those who said they didn’t know how they were going to vote (April) and those who didn’t vote (June).

Although Biddle says that the data “on actual voting behaviour and voting intentions” were collected “without recourse to recall,” this is misleading. While the data on voting intentions were collected “without recourse to recall” — this is axiomatic — the same cannot be said for the data on voting behaviour. The validity of the data on voting behaviour, collected well after the election, is wholly dependent on the accuracy of respondents’ recall and their willingness to be open about how they remember voting. It can’t be taken for granted.

Among those who participated in both waves and reported either intending to vote (April) or having voted (June), support shifted. The Coalition’s support increased from 38.0 to 42.2 per cent, Labor’s increased from 34.1 to 35.4 per cent, while support for “Other” vote fell from 14.4 to 8.7 per cent. Only the Greens (13.6 per cent in April and 13.7 per cent recalled in June) recorded no shift.

The panel slightly overshot the Coalition’s primary vote at the election (41.4 per cent) and, as the polls had done, also overshot Labor’s (35.4 per cent). More importantly, it overshot the Greens (10.4 per cent), and undershot the vote for Other (14.9 per cent), and did so by sizeable margins. It overestimated the Greens by 3.3 percentage points, or about one-third, and underestimated Other by 6.2 percentage points, or more than a third. These are errors the polls did not make. A problem with “Australia’s first and only probability-based panel,” as the ANU study is billed, or a problem with its respondents’ recall of how they really voted? None of these figures — or the comparisons with the polls — are included in Biddle’s report; I’ve derived them from the report’s Table 3. Of course, the total shift in support across the parties was much greater than these numbers might indicate.

From his data, Biddle draws three conclusions: that “voter volatility… appears to have been a key determinant of why the election result was different from that predicted by the polls”; that part of the “swing towards the Coalition during the election campaign” came “from those who had intended to vote for minor parties,” a group from which he excludes the Greens; and that the swing also came from those “who did not know who they would vote for.”

None of these inferences necessarily follows from the data. Indeed, some are plainly wrong. First, voter volatility only comes into the picture on the assumption that the polls were accurate at the time they were taken. And before settling on “volatility” to explain why they didn’t work as predictions, one needs to judge that against competing explanations. Nothing in the study’s findings discounts the possibility that the public polls — which varied remarkably little during the campaign, hence the suspicions of “herding” — were plagued by problems of the sort he notes in relation to the 2015 polls in Britain (too many Labour voters in the pollsters’ samples) and the 2016 polls in the United States (inadequate weighting for education, in particular), alternative explanations he never seriously considers.

Second, while positing a last-minute switch to the Coalition among those who had intended to vote for the minor parties might work with the data from Biddle’s panel, it cannot explain the problem with the polls. Had its vote swung to the Coalition, the minor-party vote would have finished up being a good deal smaller than that estimated by the polls. But at 25.3 per cent, minor-party support turned out almost exactly as the polls expected (25.7 per cent, on a weighted average). In its estimate of the minor-party vote — the Greens vote, the Other vote, or both — the ANU panel, as we have seen, turned out to be less accurate (21.4 per cent).

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Third, in the absence of a swing from minor-party voters to the Coalition, a last-minute swing by those in the panel “who did not know who they would vote for” can’t explain the result. That’s the case even if the swing among panel members, reported by Biddle, occurred entirely on the day of the election and not at some earlier time between April and 18 May, the only timeline the data allow. In the final pre-election polls, those classified as “don’t know” — 5.7 per cent on the weighted average — would have had to split about 4–1 in favour of the Coalition over Labor on election day in order to boost the Coalition’s vote share to something close to 41.4 per cent and reduced Labor’s vote share to something close to 33.3 per cent (unavoidably rendering the polls’ estimate of the minor-party and independent vote slightly less accurate). In the ANU panel, those who had registered as “don’t know” in April recalled dividing 42 (Coalition), 21 (Labor) and 36 (Other) in May. That is certainly a lopsided result (2–1 in favour of the Coalition over Labor) but nowhere near as lopsided as would be required to increase the gap between the Coalition and Labor in the polls (roughly three percentage points) to eight percentage points, the gap between the Coalition and Labor at the election.

The C|T research: Biddle wasn’t the first to argue that there was a late swing — a swing that the polls couldn’t help but miss — and to produce new data that purported to show it. Already, the Australian’s Simon Benson had publicised another piece of research — “the most comprehensive and intelligent analysis so far” — said to show the effect on the election of “[hard] undecided and ‘soft’” voters who had swung late.

This research was conducted by “a private research firm” (the C|T Group, in fact — the political consultancy that polled for the Liberal Party) and “provided to senior Liberals and shown to the Weekend Australian.” Its findings — released without the knowledge or endorsement of any senior member in the Group — were said to show that: (a) ahead of the election, “many Labor voters” had been “only leaning towards Labor” — having been classified initially as “don’t knows,” nominating Labor, presumably, only after being pressed about the party for which they were likely to vote (in the jargon of the trade, after being asked “a leaner”); (b) “on the day of the election,” these Labor “leaners” — plus the “‘hard’ undecided” who remained “don’t knows” after the “leaner” (“about 5 per cent”) — “couldn’t bring themselves to back Labor” and “largely went with a minor party”; and (c) via the minor parties, the preferences of both “came over to the Coalition.” Benson quotes the “research briefing” as saying, “Rather than Newspoll results suggesting Newspoll ‘got it wrong,’ a more informed interpretation is that the ‘“hard” undecided’ voters (those still undecided on May 17) did not support Labor on election day.”

But the story doesn’t survive the most cursory of checks. If the “soft” Labor voters — the “leaners” — and the “don’t knows” (the “hard” undecided) moved to the minor parties on election day, Newspoll’s estimate of the vote for the minor parties must have been an underestimate. In fact, Newspoll’s estimate of the vote for “others” was an overestimate: “others” in the final Newspoll were 16 per cent; at the election, they accounted for 14.9 per cent of the vote. (I exclude the Greens from what the analysis calls “others,” almost all of them supporters of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation or the United Australia Party, simply because it makes little sense to assume that many “softly” committed Labor supporters switched to the Greens and then preferenced the Coalition.) Newspoll didn’t underestimate the vote for “others,” and neither did the final polls from Essential, Galaxy, Ipsos and Morgan.

“Labor and Shorten,” Benson says, may “have made it very difficult for their soft supporter base to stick with them” — and, he might have added, difficult for the “hard” undecided to swing to them. But not all the polls overestimated Labor’s vote, as Newspoll did. Ipsos, which provided a better estimate than Newspoll of the Coalition’s first-preference lead over Labor, estimated Labor’s support at 33 per cent — almost exactly the proportion that voted Labor. Roy Morgan was also closer than Newspoll in estimating Labor’s first-preference vote; so, too, was Essential.

Newspoll estimated the “don’t knows” (the “hard” undecided) at 4 per cent — not 5 per cent, the estimate in the post-election private polling. By ignoring the “don’t knows,” as all the polls did, it was effectively assuming that they would split in much the same way as those who had nominated a party: 38 (Coalition), 37 (Labor), 9 (Greens) and 16 (Other). If we assume, for the sake of the argument, that three times as many of the “don’t knows” voted Coalition as voted Labor, then a more accurate Newspoll would have been one in which the “don’t knows” were split 60–20–10–10. Had that happened, Newspoll would have estimated the Coalition’s first-preference vote at 39 per cent, Labor’s at 36 per cent (allowing for rounding) — a Coalition lead of three percentage points compared with the lead of one percentage point it actually reported. Since the Coalition’s winning margin was 8.1 percentage points, an estimate of three percentage points would have been better than an estimate of one percentage point, but not much better. On the other hand, Newspoll’s estimate of the Coalition’s share of the two-party-preferred vote would have been 50.4 per cent (50.5 per cent if it stuck to 0.5 per cent as its smallest unit) not 48.5 per cent. Compared with the actual tally of 51.5 per cent, this estimate of the two-party-preferred would have been considerably better.

Newspoll was at liberty to adjust its figures along these lines. It didn’t, presumably because it wasn’t persuaded that there were good reasons to do so. But if Newspoll’s figures are to be rejigged, why not those of the polls that don’t appear in the Australian? Most of them had a higher proportion of “don’t knows” to redistribute (5 per cent, Morgan; 7 per cent, Ipsos and YouGov Galaxy, and all (except Morgan on the two-party-preferred) had results as close, if not closer, to the mark than Newspoll’s. Rejigged, their figures would benefit even more substantially than Newspoll’s. For some reason, the research Benson cites appears not to have noticed this; and if Benson noticed it, he didn’t draw it to the attention of his readers.

Like all the polls, Newspoll got the election wrong. But Newspoll’s performance, on some measures, was worse than other polls: both its overestimate of the Labor vote and its underestimate of the Coalition vote were greater than any other poll’s. Having stayed in the field later than all the others — it ran its final poll from Tuesday through to Friday — and having boosted its sample size to 3038, nearly twice the number used by anyone else, Newspoll had given itself the best possible chance of picking up the late swing to the Coalition for which, no doubt, both the Australian and its readers were hoping. But a late swing to the Coalition is something it did not pick up. Its final poll detected what Benson described, literally though ludicrously, as a “half-point break” not to the Coalition but “towards Labor.”

The fact that C|T’s findings surfaced in the Weekend Australian is no great surprise. Where better for the C|T researcher to drop the findings than into the hands of the Australian, the newspaper that commissioned Newspoll, hence the newspaper where the research was most likely to get a run and least likely to be critically examined? The findings, as Benson wrote, offered “another explanation” for why Labor hadn’t done as well as the polls’ expected. And they seemed to get Newspoll off the hook: “Even polling on Friday night would not have picked up what was going to happen.”

The Essential poll: The C|T Group wasn’t the first to produce research purporting to show a late swing either. That honour belongs to Essential Media — a firm that conducted polls on its own account and then placed them with the Guardian.

Immediately after the election, Essential’s Peter Lewis wondered whether the polls had erred by simply “removing” the “don’t knows” — what the C|T research would call the “hard” undecided — from the poll; “removing” them, as all the pollsters had done, meant, in effect, assuming that they would split along the same lines as the respondents who said that they did know how they were going to vote. Essential had not only “removed” that 8 per cent of the sample categorised as “undecided” — a figure Lewis revealed for the first time — which was “nearly double the number from previous elections,” it had also given insufficient thought to another 18 per cent of respondents who “told us they hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to the campaign.” As a result, Lewis conceded, the company may have missed the “possibility” that “the most disengaged 10 per cent” — why 10 per cent? — had “turned up on election day and voted overwhelmingly for the Coalition.”

To test this theory, Essential conducted another poll. According to this poll (or at least the Guardian’s reporting of it — Essential has not responded to a request for a copy), the result “underscore[d] the fact that undecided voters broke the Coalition’s way in the final weeks of the campaign, with 40 per cent of people who made up their minds in the closing week backing the Coalition, compared to 31 per cent for Labor.” Of those who had been “undecided” on election day — 11 per cent of the post-election sample — “38 per cent broke Morrison’s way and 27 per cent Bill Shorten’s way.” From this, the Guardian inferred that the Coalition did especially well from late deciders. Though the story didn’t say it, Lewis’s theory, it seemed, had been confirmed.

But had it? One problem with the analysis is that those who made up their mind either during the last week or on election day weren’t necessarily those categorised as “don’t know” in Essential’s final poll; that group may have included respondents who indicated a party preference but hadn’t made their minds about whether that was the way they would actually vote. Another problem is that the report doesn’t say what proportion of respondents made up their minds in the final week. And we are not told what proportion was changing from one party (which?) to another party (which?) rather than simply confirming an earlier decision to vote for one of the parties and not another. Without knowing any of this, there is no way of estimating the impact a 40–31 split among the “undecided” in the final week would have had on the distribution of overall voting-intention figures.

The figures for election day itself give us more to work with; but they don’t do much to confirm the thesis. To see what difference a 38–27 split would have made (38–27–35, allowing for “others”) requires us to compare it to the 40–36–24 split when it was assumed that the “undecided” would divide in much the same way as the rest of the sample. Since the proportion of “don’t knows” in Essential’s final pre-election poll was 8 per cent (not 11 per cent), the new ratios imply that 3 per cent (unchanged) would have voted for the Coalition, 2 per cent (rather than 3 per cent) would have voted Labor, and 3 per cent (instead of 2 per cent) would have voted for some other party.

On these figures, had the final Essential poll been conducted at the same time as the final Newspoll, the Coalition’s share of the distribution would have remained unchanged (about 40 per cent) and Labor’s would have come down from 36 to 35 per cent. In terms of the two-party-preferred vote, the Coalition’s share would have risen from 48.5 to 48.8 per cent (49 per cent, if we round up to nearest 0.5 per cent) — the two-party estimate produced by YouGov Galaxy and Ipsos. For Essential, this would have been a better set of figures — but no cigar.

Evidence, post-election, that the “don’t knows” favoured the Coalition — let alone did so by a wide margin — is not unequivocal. A poll conducted by JWS, in the two days after the election, shows virtually no difference among those who said they had decided on their vote in the last week, including election day, between the size of the Coalition vote (39 per cent) and the size of the Labor vote (37 per cent). Moreover, among those who had voted Greens, 49 per cent also said they had decided late.

The Guardian’s account of Essential’s analysis, like all the arguments for a “late swing,” fails to mention the exit poll conducted by YouGov Galaxy for Channel 9, which purported to show that the government was headed for defeat — and by a similar margin to that predicted by the pre-election polls.

Oldies can be goodies. Given that the polls, using different techniques, missed the mark by roughly the same amount, all pointing in the wrong direction, the idea of a late swing might be especially tempting. But if the decisions of late switchers are to explain why the polls performed poorly, these voters would have to have switched from Labor to the Coalition — not from minor parties to the Coalition. For respondents who said they “didn’t know” how they were going to vote to have made the difference, they would have to have voted for the Coalition — and to have done so overwhelmingly.

Responding to pollsters, respondents can be strategic or they can be sincere. If they are strategic, “late deciders” may not be late deciders at all; for the most part, they will simply be respondents who dissemble. Mark Textor, co-founder of the C|T Group, and Australia’s most internationally experienced pollster, insists that respondents now “game” the polls. “Knowing the results will be published,” he observed after the 2015 British election (referring, presumably, to Britain’s public rather than its private polls), “leads many respondents to give the most dramatic choice that sends the message of the day… they are using their answers to ‘tickle up’ one party or another.”

Misleading pollsters, though not necessarily in this way, has a long history. As early as 1940, the American Institute of Public Opinion used a “secret ballot” to encourage respondents to be honest about how they intended to vote. The Australian Gallup Poll, worried about its under-reporting of the DLP vote, would later introduce a similar device. More recently, it has become fashionable to talk knowingly about the “shy Tory” — respondents who may be perfectly certain that they are going to vote for a party on the right but don’t feel comfortable admitting it to a pollster, not only in a face-to-face interview, apparently, but also in a robopoll or in response to an online questionnaire. If the polls were “gamed” in 2019, it won’t have shown, and it won’t have mattered, provided it affected the Labor and Coalition vote in equal measure. That voters didn’t drift from the minor parties to the Coalition at the last minute is clear from a comparison of the final polls and the election results. The final destination of the “don’t knows,” however, cannot be established in this way.

A “late swing,” including claims about the “don’t knows” dividing disproportionately in favour of one party or another, has long been invoked by pollsters who believe their polls were fine at the time they were taken — only to be overtaken by events. This line of defence can take a pollster only so far. Always, the challenge has been to find a narrative that fills the gap between what the last poll showed and how the electorate actually voted — the last-minute intervention of Archbishop Mannix in the 1958 campaign, for example, or the death of President Kennedy shortly before the 1963 election — and to do so plausibly, if not always persuasively.

Reviewing the performance of the polls this time, Graham Young, a pollster who claims to have “pioneer[ed] the use of the Internet for qualitative and quantitative polling in Australia,” also concluded that “undecided voters, and a late swing to the government, rather than problems with methodologies’ explained the polls’ ‘failure.’” His narrative? That Bill Shorten had “pulled-up stumps” too early and gone “for a beer on Friday, while Morrison was still working hard, just as people were making their final decision.” Benson’s narrative turned out to be very much the same. The idea that over 350,000 voters responded to the last minute campaigning — or absence of it — by switching their vote choice from Labor to the Coalition, stretches belief.

Strikingly, none of those responsible for actually producing the polls sought refuge in Benson’s or Biddle’s or Young’s line of argument — certainly, not on its own. For Lewis, “the quality of poll sampling” also merited examination — not only in the online polling of the kind Essential used but also in the modes used by other pollsters. He  thought that the problems pollsters encountered around the weighting of their data, especially data gathered from groups reluctant to respond, warranted investigation as well.

John Utting, another pollster, though not one involved in this election, wasn’t buying the last-minute-change argument at all. He thought more structural factors were at work. Had the kinds of problems that had brought the polls undone, he wondered, existed undetected for a long time? “Did polling create a parallel universe where all the activity of the past few years, especially the leadership coups and prime ministerial changes, were based on illusions, phantoms of public opinion that did not exist?”

Not, apparently, in some of the private polling. The last of the Liberal Party’s “track polling” — polling conducted nightly during the campaign using rolling samples in twenty seats — put the Liberals ahead of Labor, on the final Thursday, 43–33, according to a report that quotes Andrew Hirst, the party director, as its source. Exactly which seats — five of them Labor, fifteen Liberal — were polled is not disclosed, and Hirst has declined to name them. Nor are we told how the polling was conducted. But if the polling was as accurate as the story implies, it follows that: we don’t have to posit a last-minute swing; we don’t have to worry about the need to track down “shy Tories” or similar respondents (and non-respondents) who may have gamed the polls; and we can accept that whatever mode C|T chose, its polling worked. Not only did it work during the campaign; the polling showed that the government’s fortunes had “turned around immediately after the [early April] budget.” This suggests that the problems encountered by those pollsters that used the same mode — and there must have been some that did, given the range of modes deployed during the campaign — could have been overcome had they (or their impecunious paymasters) been both willing and able to invest in them properly.

The fact that none of the post-election surveys has succeeded in identifying any last-minute swing suggests that a swing of any great significance simply didn’t happen. While it’s conceivable that evidence of a swing will still emerge, this line of inquiry seems to have reached a dead end for now. It’s one thing to go back to the past in search of explanations; it’s another thing to be trapped in it. •

Murray Goot is a member of the Association of Market and Social Research Organisations panel inquiring into the 2019 federal election polls. The views expressed here are his own. For comments on an earlier draft of this article, he is indebted to Ian Watson and Peter Browne.

The post Did late deciders confound the polls? appeared first on Inside Story.

If amending the Constitution were as simple as passing any old piece of legislation, a government controlling both houses of parliament could do whatever it wanted. Abolish elections, for example.

But is our Constitution a little too resistant to amendment? It can only be altered by a vote of all electors at a referendum. Compulsory voting in this country drags the unwilling to the ballot box, potentially (especially at a midterm referendum) creating a class of crankypants inclined to say No on principle. And because the proposal needs to attract not only a majority of all votes but also a majority in a majority of states, and we have only six states, it effectively needs two-thirds of them.

Throw in the nature of Australian politics, politicians, parties and — if I may be so bold — voters (a wise person once noted that Australians are extremely wary of change but then adapt to it with relative ease) and any advocate of constitutional change faces a huge challenge.

The tally, eight successes from forty-four referendums since Federation, is so lop-sided that proposals rarely even get off the ground. It won’t pass, so why bother? Most politicians are willing to take short-term unpopular decisions for long-term political reward, but it’s less appetising to back an idea that will probably be given the thumbs down by the electorate and go nowhere.

If you’re wondering how other countries navigate this conundrum, the answer — at least among those established liberal democracies we compare ourselves with — is that most of them don’t need to. The big majority can alter their founding document with legislative supermajorities, typically of two-thirds, but sometimes three-fifths.

A comprehensive comparative study of nations’ amendment processes remains to be done, but Denmark’s seems to be the most onerous. A legislative vote begins the process, followed by a general election (!), another legislative vote and then a referendum. Like Australia, changing the constitutions of Ireland and Switzerland (and Japan, although its membership of the liberal democracy club is tenuous) requires a parliamentary vote and then a popular vote.

For most, though, a supermajority is at least an option — with, in France, Italy and many other cases, a referendum being another. Some federations (including Canada and the United States) also require a supermajority of state legislatures. (Thanks to Twitter folks for enlightening me on some of this.)

Back in the late 1890s, the authors of the Australian Constitution were aware that whatever text they came up with would need to be approved by a majority of voters in each of the six colonies. So it made sense to insert an amendment process that also involved a referendum.

But they did all this before the formation of Australian political parties as we know them. And they certainly did it before the firming up of the two-party system — and a ferociously combative and highly disciplined two-party system at that.

That solidification is usually dated to the end of the first decade of Federation, when the anti-socialist parties merged to present a united front against the disciplined Labor Party. That’s also when Australians got into the habit of voting No at referendums. The first decade of Federation had seen three of them, one in 1906 and two in 1910, all (sensibly) held with general elections. Two succeeded and one (narrowly) failed, a creditable success rate of 67 per cent.

Then in 1911 a Labor government — the first majority federal government of any hue — held the first-ever midterm referendums. While the earlier ones can be characterised as basic housekeeping, these were truly radical and ambitious: in the words of R.S. Parker (writing in 1949), “more than constitutional,” they were “social and economic and political in the most provocative way.”

They were also soundly rejected by the electorate, with 60.6 and 60.1 per cent respectively voting No. From then on, though, midterm referendums became the option of choice.

Why? Because our major-party politicians reckon that bipartisan support (a necessary though not sufficient criterion for success) isn’t possible at election time, when each side is painting the other as the devil incarnate. This is not a time to be holding hands in agreement.

But bipartisanship has also been pretty rare outside elections, and these have actually been the site of the biggest carnage: the sixteen lowest Yes votes were all at midterm referendums.

Let’s imagine that our Constitution included a method of effecting constitutional change that involved a two-thirds supermajority of federal parliament. Bipartisan support would still be a necessary condition for success, but it would also be sufficient.

(It would be necessary because only once has a party or coalition won two-thirds of the seats in both houses, and that was way back in 1931. The Liberal and National parties under Malcolm Fraser took more than two-thirds of House seats in both 1975 and 1977, but the post-1948 Senate electoral system makes it all but impossible for either side to get an upper-house supermajority.)

Without indulging in a full 118 years of “road not travelled” guessing games, it’s very likely that the section 44 dual citizenship fiasco would have been fixed long ago, local government would be recognised, and simultaneous House and Senate elections would be mandated. (That last one received the support of both major parties at a 1977 referendum, and 62.2 per cent thumbs up from Australians, but failed to clear the “double majority” hurdle.)

Those embarrassing references to “race” would already be excised (with the “race power” retained with some other formulation of words). And much more besides; our Constitution would look quite different.

What about the Voice to Parliament, a key recommendation of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart? In this alternative reality, without the self-fulfilling referendum dynamic dragging out the worst in our MPs, we might see in this term this historic piece of constitutional change, driven by earnest speeches and MPs’ better angels fluttering around Parliament House. A landmark like the 2008 Apology, only including nuts-and-bolts change.

Coalition sceptics could have been placated with the assurance that it can be undone by the same process.

But that’s the rub. The Voice is a very unusual proposal, because it doesn’t in itself require constitutional change at all. It could simply be created by legislation.

Its advocates respond that it needs to be in the Constitution so that a government that finds it troublesome can’t simply eradicate it via legislation — or, as in the case of earlier incarnations, a flick of the ministerial pen. (For more on this history, listen to this Radio National Rear Vision podcast.)

If a supermajority could suffice, the Voice could be inserted with relative ease, largely bypassing ugly and hurtful language that a referendum would inevitably generate. But it could be taken away just as easily; recall the fate of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2004–05, when the Labor opposition beat the government to the punch in announcing its abolition.

So Voice proponents might have mixed feelings about this supermajority hypothetical.

If a constitutional referendum to create an Indigenous Voice to Parliament is held this parliamentary term, and is successful, it will be extremely difficult to undo. But convincing Australians to vote Yes will be an immense challenge.

Which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted. As we’ve seen, Australian political history is littered with defeated referendums. Being doubtful of success is no reason not to try.

With the No campaign likely to include accusations of gratuitousness — this is all unnecessary; why not simply legislate? — the referendum might generate momentum for that second-best legislated option. And it might produce wider discussion of other approaches. It’s hard to see how a failed vote would worsen the status quo in terms of Indigenous empowerment and quality of life.

Predictions of the dire repercussions of rejection — that it would, in the words of Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt, be “a major setback for at least ten or twenty years” — are overly dramatic. Yes, it would shut down the possibility of enshrining a Voice for the foreseeable future, but so would postponing the referendum.

That’s because successful referendums require a Coalition government; in opposition, Liberal leaders simply lack the authority to support Labor proposals. Nixon goes to China, and all that.

Thanks to the events of 18 May, the current prime minister possesses a significant reservoir of internal party authority. These favourable circumstances won’t last forever; in fact, they’ll probably expire at the next election.

The iron might not be piping hot, but it’s radiating a decent temperature. Scott Morrison has a shot at the history books — for the right reasons.

A failed Voice referendum before or with the next election would be better than none at all. •

The post The referendum conundrum appeared first on Inside Story.

Contrast the minor party’s fate with that of the Nationals, who turned a primary vote of just 4.5 per cent into ten times as many seats as the Greens, or 6.6 per cent of the total. Is it fair, is it right, when votes translate so unevenly into seats?

Really, it’s neither fair nor unfair, right nor wrong. Grumbling about the mismatch is like complaining that the caesar salad you ordered tastes nothing like ice cream. We have a single-member district, or SMD, electoral system, and it’s designed to produce these kinds of results. In particular, it rewards the major parties with disproportionately large numbers of seats. If you want to eat ice cream, that’s what you need to order: if you want proportional outcomes, you should use a proportional system.

Proportional representation, or PR, is used by about half the world’s democracies. In their elections, parties can expect to receive about the same percentage of seats as they get in votes. SMD systems — often called majoritarian (or plurality) systems — are different: they push towards winner-takes-all results and favour stability by making sure that one big party usually gets a majority of seats.

Here in Australia we use SMDs to elect members of the House of Representatives, the chamber that decides who governs. In this regard we are like a big majority of former British colonies — including nearly all of the South Pacific nations, Canada, New Zealand until 1993, and Britain itself. But our Senate is elected under PR, making our particular combination — SMD in the lower house, PR in the upper — virtually unique. I’ve written about how this explains much of our current political malaise.

Our lower house system has an added twist: it is preferential instead of following the first-past-the-post system that predominates in the former British realm. In that way it resembles the system in France, which uses SMDs but adds run-offs between the two frontrunners, typically two weeks after the first vote. Our preferential system was devised in the late nineteenth century in an attempt to replicate the French, but with the hassle and expense of only one election instead of two. That’s why preferential voting is sometimes called “instant run-off.”

PR systems throw up a set of parliamentarians that more accurately represents society in all its complexity. Think of our occasionally colourful senators, who are elected by PR. And because no party generally has a majority, PR encourages consensus, deal-making, and give and take.

PR’s other big advantage is that virtually all votes have the same value. Contrast this with House of Reps elections, in which safe seats are ignored and marginal ones fetishised and showered with riches. Parties get carried away with “bellwether” electorates, sometimes seeming to perceive them as possessing magical powers: seat X invariably goes to the overall winner, so if we pour lots of resources into winning it then we win government.

A former Labor national secretary, Karl Bitar (2008–11), even formulated the “Lindsay test” based on this conviction. The Labor government of the time (first under Kevin Rudd, and then Julia Gillard) should, he dictated, only do things voters in that outer-western Sydney electorate would approve of.

A certain demographic tends to be over-represented in electorally volatile outer-suburban seats like Lindsay: young families who are politically unengaged, moderately educated, middle-income and white. This is whom our parties largely pitch their messages to. It’s a terribly clunky way to operate, and often counterproductive, but our machine people reckon they know what they’re doing. If you’ve ever wondered why our political discourse is so bad, this is a major reason.

(Lindsay, created in 1984, kicked its bellwether habit in 2016, electing a Labor MP while the nation voted Coalition. This negated some of the obsessing about that particular electorate but not the belief that elections are won or lost by appealing to that kind of voter.)

SMDs also facilitate a lot of dodgy election analysis. Before every election, commentators list their “must-win seats” — as if, again, some electorates are worth more than others. Once the count is in, an electorate, no matter how narrow its outcome, is deemed 100 per cent in the hands of the party that won it. The electoral commission and others construct colour-coded electoral maps, red for Labor and blue for the Coalition, and a 50.1 per cent win gets the same shade of ink as a 90 per cent one.

Across the liberal democratic world, centre-left parties tend to do well in big cities and centre-right ones outside, and Australia is no exception. So our maps contain red in densely populated capital cities and a sea of blue outside. There’s a hell of a lot more blue ink than red because sprawling country seats, with few people per square kilometre, tend to vote conservative.

When Labor is out of power, commentators wave these maps to show how dire that party’s situation is. Look at how small its support is! When will it reconnect with outer-suburban battlers and regional voters? Will it ever win again? The maps are still predominantly blue when Labor is victorious, but the story doesn’t work. Under PR you get much less of this nonsense.

Around the democratic world, support for major parties is on the decline. SMDs mask this phenomenon. Our May election saw the lowest combined major-party primary vote since the second world war, just 74.8 per cent, but you would barely know it from the seat tally; between them they scooped up 145 of the 151 on offer, or 96 per cent.

Germany uses PR, and at its last election, in 2017, the two major parties couldn’t even form a “grand coalition” big enough to govern. In other words, its equivalent of our Labor and our Coalition couldn’t scrape together a majority between them. Our major-party support levels are not yet anything like that low, but their continuing decline is masked by SMD.

SMD preserves major-party dominance, with the Australian accessory of preferential voting boosting that dynamic. Because of that — because voters continue to perceive that only one side or other can form government, and because they don’t want to waste their vote (most Australians don’t understand how preferences work) — our system works to prop up major-party support.

But one day, if the major-party vote continues its decline, something will have to give. Someone else will start to win seats, though we don’t know who that will be.

In the meantime, there is no point grumbling that a non-proportional electoral system produces non-proportional results. •

The post Not what the voter ordered? appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the District Court of New York’s decision to stop the question appearing in the 2020 census — a decision since upheld by the Supreme Court — and despite assertions by commerce secretary Wilbur Ross and the justice department that the courts would be heeded, Trump says he is considering an executive order to force the question onto the census.

Some legal experts think this end run around the Supreme Court and Congress will bring chief justice John Roberts and House Leader Nancy Pelosi into the fray. It would certainly put the White House squarely at loggerheads with those two bodies, and could provoke a constitutional crisis.

How did America reach this contretemps? Under the Constitution, an “actual enumeration” of everyone living in the United States must take place every decade. Seats in the House of Representatives are then apportioned according to “the whole number of persons in each state.” The census also determines each state’s quota of electoral college votes, as well as helping shape electoral maps and ensuring the equitable allocation of some US$900 billion in federal funds for Medicaid, development grants, public schools, law enforcement and disaster relief.

Despite the Census Act’s requirement that Congress be notified of planned questions three years in advance, citizenship was not on the list Ross sent to Congress in March 2017. But we now know that the topic was being discussed within the White House, though perhaps mainly among since-departed right-wing functionaries like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

The public debate was kicked off by a leaked January 2017 draft executive order calling for the Census Bureau to add the question as part of a range of new immigration enforcement measures. Secretary Ross approved the question in March last year, overriding career officials at the bureau who were concerned that the question would reduce the response rate among non-citizens.

In congressional testimony later that month, Ross denied having discussed the matter with the White House and said he was responding solely to a request from the justice department; but it later emerged that he had discussed the matter with Bannon and attorney-general Jeff Sessions in the spring of 2017. Leaked emails show that the idea had been pushed by a justice department political appointee who, in private practice, had defended partisan electoral boundaries introduced by Republican legislators.

Adding new questions to the census isn’t unusual, and nor is asking about citizenship — though only in census-related surveys targeted at a sample of households rather than in the questionnaire received by every household. Those latter forms haven’t included questions about citizenship or country of birth since 1950.

As early as 2015, four former census directors were warning that a citizenship question to all households would undermine the accuracy of the count. They argued that significant numbers of people — especially those from immigrant and minority families — would be fearful of responding. That fear was heightened when Trump threatened that immigration enforcement agents would begin rounding up and removing millions of people without approved documentation.

Because of their potential impact on response rates, all questions proposed for the census must be adequately tested. The citizenship question hasn’t been through that process, but testing of the existing 2020 census questionnaire had already revealed a heightened reluctance to answer the survey and increased concern about confidentiality and privacy. Although the federal government is barred from using individual census data for law enforcement, most people don’t know or perhaps don’t believe that.

With the Census Bureau required to make follow-up efforts to collect data from non-responding households, a low response rate will be costly. For every percentage point of non-responsiveness, the bureau is expected to spend around US$55 million following up.

For some states in particular, inaccurate census data will result in less representation in Congress and less federal funding. By one estimate, 6.5 million people will be missing nationally, with Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas potentially losing seats in Congress. According to a Pew Research Center study, a majority of the nation’s undocumented immigrants live in just twenty metropolitan areas, with most of them resident in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Miami and Washington, DC.

Along with lawmakers in states like California and New York, urban leaders, who are mostly Democrats, are alarmed by the proposed question. Their fears appear well founded. The justice department’s official view is that it needs to know how many people are eligible to vote so it can better enforce the Voting Rights Act. But recent evidence — in the form of files found on the computer of a Republican strategist after his death — suggests that the citizenship question was drafted specifically to benefit Republicans. In 2015, the strategist, Thomas Hofeller, conducted a study that found a citizenship question would help Republicans in their efforts to shape electoral boundaries to their advantage during the periodic “redistricting” process. Hofeller contributed to a memorandum for the justice department arguing that the question was critical to enforcing “voting rights.”

Not surprisingly, more than twenty states and cities, along with civil liberty groups, filed lawsuits about this issue, culminating in the Supreme Court decision that shocked Trump and his administration. In what has been described as a “split the baby” decision, the Supreme Court upheld, 5–4, the decision of the New York District Court requiring the commerce department to give a true explanation for its decision to include the citizenship question in the census.

Chief justice John Roberts was the surprise swinging vote. He sided first with the conservatives on the court to uphold the right of the administration to add the question, finding that this was constitutionally and statutorily permissible. Then he switched sides and, along with the four liberals on the court, held that the commerce secretary had not given the true reasons for needing the question on the census. The opinion written by Roberts suggested that Ross was motivated by partisan politics and could face charges for his “pretexts” (a lawyerly term for lies) and for blatantly misleading the courts.

The justice and commerce departments appeared to accept the Supreme Court decision, announcing that the census materials would now be able to meet the 1 July deadline for printing. Trump, fuming, had other ideas. At 1.04am on American Independence Day he undercut his officials to tweet that “News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question.”

What followed was a round of chaotic manoeuvring, as administration officials quickly reversed themselves and pledged to restore the question to census forms. Attorney-general William Barr now says the Supreme Court decision was wrong, and that there is “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem” — presumably this means Ross’s lies — “and that we might as well take a look at doing that.”

By one count the Trump administration has changed its position on the citizenship story at least ten times in the past four months. But the real thinking behind the citizenship question became clearer in the argy-bargy following the Supreme Court’s decision. The acting director of the citizenship and immigration services said the questions would help “financially and legally with the burden of those who are not here legally,” and Trump said, “I think it’s important to find out if somebody is a citizen as opposed to an illegal.”

The justice department’s search for a “legally available path under the Supreme Court’s decision” appears to have hit a roadblock. Earlier this week the lawyers charged with this task were removed from the case with no explanation. Just as I write this, though, it is reported that a federal judge, acting at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs, has barred government lawyers from leaving until they meet a legal requirement to satisfactorily explain their departure and show that it would not impede the case they were working on going forward.

It seems likely the legal team’s departure is linked to the legality of Trump and Barr’s pushing ahead and aggravated by Trump’s threat of an executive order to bypass the courts’ decisions and get the citizenship question on the ballot. However much Trump might want to do this, a presidential order cannot override existing court rulings. And federal courts also have the power to set aside unconstitutional executive orders. Moreover, Congress cannot cede its constitutional responsibility for the census to the executive branch and the president.

It’s hard to imagine chief justice Roberts and House leader Nancy Pelosi allowing Trump to get away with this testing of the boundaries of executive power, and this is why some legal experts see a constitutional crisis looming.

The administration has other, less dramatic options, as Trump himself has acknowledged. “We could also add an addition on,” he has said, allowing time for a renewed effort to introduce the citizenship question by normal means. “So we could start the printing now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision. So we’re working on a lot of things including an executive order.” Trump also says he has asked the administration’s lawyers if they can delay the census.

From a logistical point of view, though, any delay or add-on could be problematic. The census is mandated to take place on 1 April 2020 and changing the date would require an act of Congress. Printing and distributing a separate question would be prohibitively expensive.

Even if the troublesome question doesn’t make it into the census, the damage has probably already been done, with people’s confidence and willingness to accurately supply information compromised. Certainly, the job of the thousands of census workers in certain neighbourhoods has been made doubly difficult. Beyond the census itself, this has now become a civil rights issue.

Unless there is a reasonable resolution soon, this contentious issue will be a major factor in the 2020 election. Trump’s recent tweets give an indication of how he will use the census to play to his base. On Tuesday he tweeted about the “strained” Supreme Court ruling, saying it “shows how incredibly important our 2020 Election is.” •

The post In for the count appeared first on Inside Story.

(Exact numbers don’t exist, but the Ace Project’s imperfect database says it’s about 60 per cent Australian Ballot and 20 per cent French Ballot, with the rest being combinations, permutations, something totally different, or paper-free.)

What’s the difference between the Australian and French systems?

Under the Australian Ballot, the elector chooses a candidate (or candidates, or a party or parties) from among the ones listed on a single piece of paper — as we do, for example at federal elections, on a ballot paper for each house of parliament.

Under the French Ballot, voters choose a ballot paper from several piles, each representing a party or candidate. Their choice typically goes into an envelope so no one can identify it as they make their way to the ballot box. No pen or pencil required.

Both versions have their origins in open voting — that is, non-secret voting — around two centuries ago. Back then, electors brought along bits of paper on which they had already written not only the name of the candidate they were voting for but also their own name, address and qualifications to vote.

Open voting had its problems, and so some places — including France, Switzerland, Belgium and a few American states — introduced the secret ballot. It still involved bringing along a piece of paper and putting it in a ballot box, but electors only needed to identify whom they were voting for. They might write it themselves, or cut it out of a newspaper, or take the paper from a candidate’s agent on the way in. Candidates often had chosen colours to represent them, and these ballot papers would be that colour. So it wasn’t very secret in practice; secrecy was optional. If you’re trying to eliminate bribery or coercion, that was quite a flaw.

And it led, at least in France, to rather rowdy election days, as candidates’ agents loitered outside polling places to thrust their ballot into voters’ hands, and follow them in, sometimes all the way to the ballot box, to ensure they put that ballot, and only that ballot, in the box.

And so, in 1856, we ingenious Australians invented a new way of voting to disincentivise such rowdy behaviour and eliminate fraud and coercion. We did this by the simple expedient of making it impossible for people to prove how they had voted. Henceforth, the government would supply ballot papers containing candidates’ names. Electors would arrive empty-handed, be given a ballot paper, go to a compartment and make their mark, fold the paper and put it in the ballot box.

It was very labour-intensive and burdensome on the public purse, and back in England many rolled their eyes at this typical colonial extravagance. But it eventually became the most common way of voting around the world.

Still, the French stubbornly persisted with their system. But it slowly evolved, and eventually — perhaps borrowing from Australia — the government began supplying the ballot papers in this system as well, though it still involved a different piece of paper for each candidate. Eventually the French brought in secret voting compartments, too — with curtains. Making them much more secret than ours.

The French system is used in a small number of countries today, including France. Many ballot papers are printed, and lots are thrown away afterwards.

Some countries have gone for a combination of systems: a ballot paper for each party, onto which the voter makes a written choice among individual candidates. In Sweden they use the French system but choose the ballot paper out in the open. That’s pretty weird and not very secret at all.

The French system predominates in its former colonies, for example in Africa (although over the last decade or so some have moved to the Australian Ballot). Systems in a few other countries have evolved separately to resemble the French. (If it involves a curtain, it probably came from France.) Argentina has hardly evolved at all: the parties and candidates still supply the ballot papers.

I used to say that the very idea of a government-supplied voting paper with candidates’ names originated in Australia. It was very Australian, given our talent for bureaucracy and all that.

But last year I learnt from two experts on France and its elections, Malcolm and Tom Crook, that during the French revolution a French lawyer and academic named Jacques-Vincent Delacroix suggested this method for voting on referendums:

Each voter will be given a printed ballot paper, bearing propositions. Each voter to whom this bulletin is given will go into a designated space, divided into several compartments, where, without being seen, he will write “yes” or “no” after each proposal. He will then fold the paper, stamp it with the national seal and put it in a closed box.

Sound familiar? Maybe, on the other side of the world, six decades later, those Australian reformers had heard of this idea.

So should we perhaps call it the Delacroix Ballot? •

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The others? Around a fifth of all formal votes, or 8.5 per cent, were postal, a drop from the all-time peak of 8.8 per cent in 2016. The rest — a shade under a third of votes — were pre-poll, cast by voters attending a designated polling place in their electorate in the three weeks before election day. That’s a big leap from less than a quarter in 2016, and a huge rise on 2004’s one-in-seventeen.

What accounts for this change in behaviour? It’s push and pull: voters increasingly want convenience; parliamentarians respond by making voting easier; the Australian Electoral Commission makes new arrangements and encourages people to avail themselves.

It doesn’t always go as planned: fewer Australians pre-polled than expected at the 2016 election, which might have contributed to longer-than-usual queues on election day (though the new Senate ballot paper was the main reason). Pre-poll numbers exceeded expectations in 2019 (and reports suggest polling places on 18 May were on the whole pretty quiet).

If the rate of change between 2016 and 2019 is replicated next time, the 2022 election will be the tipping point: by the time election day comes around, most Australians will already have voted.

Does this matter? Should we care?

Since the very first colony-wide elections in Australia, people have demanded that voting be convenient. In the earliest elections, from the 1840s, men could vote in any and all electorates where they owned qualifying property. Because travelling massive distances to do so was often impractical, they could go to the capital city on polling day and vote for multiple electorates there.

From the 1850s all adult men could vote in most colonies, and they now did it under the “Australian ballot,” with the government supplying voting papers containing a list of all candidates. (Plural voting — voting in more than one electorate — was on the way out, for lower houses at least.)

With comprehensive postal services, and the great public expense of erecting polling stations to service large areas, logic pushed towards an obvious accessory: voting through the post. One early South Australian suggestion was for postal voting, and only postal voting, to be used for designated large electorates. But the Australian countries, as they called themselves, had just put in place a complicated and expensive system for guaranteeing secrecy, making it impossible for one person to prove to another how he had voted. Voting from home created a giant loophole, because it could be done in the presence of others.

Eventually, gradually, postal voting came into existence, but the earliest versions resembled what we would call pre-poll voting. Postmasters acted as electoral officials, and individuals would vote in their presence. Having ensured secrecy, postmasters then forwarded ballot papers to the returning officer. First Western Australia, then South Australia, then Victoria, and then the Commonwealth adopted this option for limited classes of people.

Incrementally the rules were relaxed so that various categories of trustworthy people could “witness” these votes, and they didn’t have to do that in their offices; it could happen anywhere, for example in the voter’s home. Then, from 1918, electors themselves posted their ballot papers to the returning officer — and postal voting as we know it today was born. From 1965 the “witness” qualification was expanded so that it could be anyone on the electoral roll. Mandated secrecy had long ago ceased being a great priority.

Pre-poll voting was introduced in 1990. Voters went along to a pre-poll centre and signed a declaration that they had a good reason to vote early; the declaration and the completed ballot papers went into an envelope, to be checked and counted after election day. In 2010 this procedure was changed to resemble voting day: most ballots were no longer stuffed into envelopes but put in actual ballot box (and counted on election night). Unlike postal voting, pre-poll voting is still totally secret.

But how important is the secrecy? In countries like Australia our understanding of ballot secrecy has become somewhat distorted. We see it as a right, although most of us would be hard-pressed to explain its exact purpose. But originally it was an obligation, and its purpose was wholly practical: to eliminate vote-buying and coercion — for example of workers by employers, or tenants by landlords — and temper the rowdiness at polling places. The Australian ballot was adopted around the world because of its compulsory secrecy — you couldn’t prove to other people how you voted, so they had no incentive to hold a gun to your head or offer you money.

But back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, secret voting was often presented, even by some advocates, as a necessary evil. They agreed that everyone would vote openly and proudly in an ideal world, defending their choice if asked. Secrecy eliminated certain blights on the election process, and so, on balance, it was desirable.

These days most advanced democracies, like Australia, are long past their secrecy hang-up, and postal voting is common. In Switzerland it is the main way of voting at national elections.

But in developing countries, where vote-buying and coercion remain serious threats, postal voting is either non-existent or limited to special classes of people, such as members of the armed forces. These countries generally don’t offer pre-poll voting either: everything is done on one day, in full view of the public and observers.

And then there’s internet voting, which is frequently advocated in this country, sometimes in facile terms and often by people or companies with government tenders and dollar signs in their eyes.

New South Wales and Western Australia have dabbled in internet voting for state elections, with mixed results. It is, of course, no more secret than postal voting, but that doesn’t matter much. The possible security problems are obvious and potentially disastrous. And there is something to be said for knowing that, tucked away in a warehouse somewhere, every vote is backed up by a piece of paper containing the voter’s handwriting.

Internationally, Estonia appears to be the only country to use internet voting for national elections to a significant degree, but not without problems.

What does the future of voting in Australia look like? Politicians of various stripes complained this year about how the three-week pre-poll period inconvenienced them and their staff. And the parties are grappling with adjusting their campaigns to suit the new reality. But this isn’t about them; what matters is finding a system that works for voters and is practicable for electoral authorities but also preserves the integrity, actual and perceived, of our elections.

Candidates and parties should work around what is in citizens’ interests. (Of course, with elected MPs deciding the rules, it doesn’t necessarily work out this way.)

The other argument against encouraging pre-poll voting involves views about the civic purpose of this most egalitarian of rituals, attending a polling place. Surely it’s one of those things that bind us together as a society? But rituals come and go, and societies need to move with the times.

Even if the current parliament decreases the pre-poll voting period from three to two weeks, bureaucratic logic is pushing its continuing uptake. The Australian Electoral Commission has limited resources, and bodies like the Australian National Audit Office and the parliamentary committee on electoral matters regularly nag it to avoid wasting public money on underused polling places. The response to last month’s quiet polling day will likely be fewer election-day polling places and staff in 2022, meaning longer queues for those who do turn up then, and further incentive, at subsequent elections, to vote early, one way or another.

Gradually, across elections, more and more people will vote early. Perhaps a rejigged version of postal voting (including a legislative change to allow votes to be counted before election day and included in the Saturday evening figures) will facilitate a comeback in that category.

In the longer term, internet voting (via one’s own device, from anywhere) seems inevitable. As with postal voting, secrecy wouldn’t be guaranteed, but no one cares about that anymore, and perhaps the solution to security issues will involve further offending that core principle by making it possible, ultimately, to match people and their votes. The very first Australian ballot, devised in Victoria in 1856, had such a system: every ballot paper had a number that was put next to the voter’s name on the roll.

We could, for example, vote on our MyGov accounts, keeping it as a record in case of system failure. Of course, the more votes are registered electronically, the quicker the election count.

That other ceremony, the election night get-together to watch as the seat totals mount up, would also fade away. But Antony Green AO will probably be long retired by then. •

The post Voting for the future appeared first on Inside Story.

There’s change in the air. People can feel it.

Will today’s election be decided in western Sydney? Or in Queensland? By women, or by young people? The answers to all are yes, and it’ll be decided everywhere else in the country too. The aim is to get seventy-six or more lower house seats. Strengths for one side in different demographics will be cancelled out by weaknesses in others.

The Coalition’s best states should again be Queensland and Western Australia. Tasmania is likely to once more put in Labor’s biggest two-party-preferred vote, with Victoria and South Australia fighting it out for the mainland title.

New South Wales could be a dark horse, outperforming for Labor compared with expectations for the second time in a row. Queensland will likely fizz for the opposition (again), and Victoria will certainly disappoint anyone who’s been anticipating anything like a repeat of last November’s state election.

Overall, unless the pollsters have really stuffed up, there’ll be a national two-party-preferred swing to Labor, seats will move in both directions, and some will shift to and from independents. The Greens might take Higgins from the Liberals.

Will election 2019 be decided by preferences? Of course, in the way that every federal election this side of 1975 has been. It’s quite possible to impute slightly different preference flows that would change the overall outcome. (To put it another way, at no election since 1975 has any party won a majority of seats on primary votes.)

And if Labor prevails today, it will probably be despite trailing in primary votes in most electorates.

But with One Nation and the United Australia Party together registering 9 per cent in today’s Newspoll — the first running in only fifty-nine electorates, the latter in all 151 — strong preference flows from those two parties to the Coalition should moderate the big preference advantage Labor has had this century, mostly from the Greens.

But there is a different preference question this time, as I’ve written too obsessively about already. In short, we could see a repeat of Queensland in 2014, when the pollsters got the primary votes about right, but their mistaken preference assumptions made for a surprise overall result.

And of course there’s the fact that Newspoll’s 5 per cent for the UAP is unlikely to be replicated in the actual results. Where will those extra votes go?

Scott Morrison has run a disciplined, on-message campaign, emphasising the standard Coalition theme that a government can’t afford to pay for good stuff like health and education if the economy isn’t healthy. Labor will wreck the economy, goes the theme — and its “new taxes” will send you to the poor house.

Bill Shorten has made the best of his inherent woodenness, revealing warmth and humour, but in the final days has displayed that very Labor tic of just ignoring his party’s weak spot, the economy, and emphasising — guess what — health and education. And climate change.

It would be wiser to meet the weakness head on (see Morrison above). Voters take these lingering doubts to the ballot box.

Shorten also declined to give the traditional final-week National Press Club talk. I believe the last opposition leader to do that — I’m sorry to bring him up — was John Hewson in 1993, who instead busied himself with noisy rallies that every commentator at the time judged an excellent way to “build momentum” but then, from around 7.30pm on the Saturday, saw (more accurately) as a mistake.

Bill’s also been doing a bit of rallying the true believers in the final days, presumably to enthuse the volunteers for election day.

Still, if Labor wins all will be forgotten. And it probably will.

The betting markets, those distillers of general expectations, give Shorten an 83 per cent chance of being sworn in as prime minister. That’s way too high. Let’s just say Labor is more likely to form government than the Coalition.

Note: equivocation about the result does not imply a “close” result, let alone a hung parliament.

Noon update: note that being unsure about the likely result does not equate with anticipating it’ll be particularly “close” (however that is defined).

•

The post Can you feel it? appeared first on Inside Story.

It took some time for the role of preferences to be properly understood. In David Williamson’s classic play Don’s Party, set on the night of the 1969 election, the party-goers are excited by Labor’s lead on primary votes, only to realise, as the night wears on, that DLP preferences flowing to the government are likely to produce a narrow defeat.

What made sense of this phenomenon was the idea of the “two-party-preferred vote,” or 2PP, which reflects the fact that minor-party candidates and independents are generally eliminated first when votes in each seat are counted. Their preferences are then distributed between the two major parties, the Liberal–National Coalition (treated as a single party for this purpose) and Labor, giving the 2PP result.

Broadly speaking, the party that receives a majority of the national 2PP vote is likely to win a majority of seats and therefore form government. That isn’t necessarily the case: one party can score narrow wins in a large number of seats while the other piles up large majorities in fewer seats. But effects of that kind are typically small. The biggest 2PP vote recorded by a losing party in recent history was Kim Beazley’s 51 per cent in 1998.

Opinion polls attempt to estimate the 2PP vote either by using historical preference flows or by asking respondents which of the two parties they prefer. Notably, Newspoll recently adopted the assumption that Clive Palmer’s deal with the government would deliver 60 per cent of his preferences, a decision was almost entirely responsible for the “tightening” of the margin that was trumpeted when the first poll using this flow was released.

What no one seems to have noticed is that 2PP calculations are illuminating only if we assume that the final two candidates in any seat are those of the two major parties. But that doesn’t happen if an independent or minor party candidate finishes ahead of one of the major party candidates and is elected on that candidate’s preferences — as Kerryn Phelps was in the recent Wentworth by-election.

Such a result, very rare in the twentieth century, is now becoming much more common. Independent or minor candidates have won seats in every federal election since 2010, and hold seats in every state lower house (counting those held by the WA Nationals, who refuse to form a coalition with the Liberals).

In these circumstances, the notion of a 2PP vote is meaningless. It might show which party would have won in a particular seat if the independent were not running, but that doesn’t help the party in question to form a majority government. Less obviously, the same is true in cases where the independent loses in the final round. Once again, the question of where their preferences might have gone is irrelevant.

Opinion polls don’t provide the seat-by-seat data that’s needed to undertake this exercise before an election. We can make a rough-and-ready adjustment by looking at the difference between the 2PP and two-candidate-preferred, or 2CP, votes at a previous election, then scale this difference to take account of changes in support for independents and third parties. I estimate that, for each of the major parties, the 2CP vote was about 0.5 per cent lower than the 2PP vote. That’s consistent with the outcome in 2016, when the LNP, with 50.4 per cent 2PP, scraped in with the barest possible majority, while Labor, on 49.5 per cent, fell well short.

This time it looks as if support for independents will be stronger, and will be concentrated in seats where there is a good chance of first or second place. On that basis, I’d suggest a reduction of one percentage point from the 2PP result recorded in the polls. These have been consistently close to 51–49 (arguably, too consistently given the random variation we would normally expect). Assuming the polls are correct, this would imply a knife-edge result, with Labor either gaining a bare majority or falling just short.

The seat of Mayo, won by Rebekha Sharkie in 2016 provides an example of how this would work at a seat level. While the 2PP vote went to the Liberals 56–44, the 2CP vote went to Sharkie, 58–43, a difference of 14 per cent. For completeness, it would be desirable to count the 2PP vote for Labor against Sharkie, which would have arisen if the Liberal candidate’s preferences were distributed. On the assumption that they would all have gone to Sharkie, the final vote would have split something like 75–25.

Although I have not undertaken a complete analysis, it seems likely that replacing the 2PP vote with the 2CP vote in every electorate where a major party candidate was eliminated would reduce the “preferred” vote for each of the major parties by one or two percentage points. Using the same reasoning we use in relation to the 2PP vote, we would expect a party to win a majority of seats in an election if, and only if, its 2CP vote was above 50 per cent. If neither party exceeds 50 per cent, we would expect a minority government.

How well does this predict observed outcomes in the period since third-party candidates became a major force? The 2010 election was very close, with Labor winning the 2PP vote 50.1–49.9. Clearly neither party would have had a majority of the 2CP count, so we would expect a minority government, which was the outcome. In 2013, the LNP won 53.5 per cent of the 2PP vote, implying well over 50 per cent of the 2CP vote and a majority government, as observed.

The 2CP model fared less well in 2016. The Coalition, with 50.4 per cent of the 2PP vote, almost certainly fell short of 50 per cent of the two-candidate vote, but won seventy-six seats, the narrowest possible majority. The outcome remained in doubt for over a week.

The current election will provide another test. Discussion of the polls has focused on the 2PP vote, which has, in recent polls, favoured Labor by 51–49.  If this is unchanged on election day, it is likely that neither party will secure an absolute majority, but that Labor will have enough support to form a minority government.

Many political commentators will bewail the prospect of a “hung parliament.” But this is an outdated prejudice. Over the past twenty years, we have seen numerous parliaments with no lower house majority, and many with no upper house majority. Nearly all have run a full term. Few have produced the kind of electoral backlash experienced by majority state governments seen as unaccountable and/or corrupt. Indeed, as I have argued, it would be better to use the term deliberative parliament to contrast hung parliaments with the rubber-stamp lower houses seen as the norm. •

The post A matter of preferences appeared first on Inside Story.

Tuesday’s Essential poll has the Coalition easily in front on primary support, 38 per cent to Labor’s 34. Morgan sings from the same sheet, 38.5–34. Newspoll and Ipsos, released on Sunday night, have 38–36 and 36–33 respectively. The only poll that doesn’t put the Coalition ahead is one Galaxy released two weeks ago, with 37 per cent apiece. In this alternative universe, the betting money would be flowing to the Morrison government.*

But of course we have full compulsory preferential voting — you must number every square! — and it’s two-party-preferred votes that matter. On this measure, all the pollsters have Labor ahead, either 51–49 or 52–48.

That’s very close. And of course a majority of votes doesn’t guarantee you win the seats. Labor got 51 per cent in 1998 and still fell well short.

Those two-party-preferred numbers also involve lots of guesswork. The pollsters estimate from primary voting intentions, and the lower the total major-party primary vote, the trickier this exercise is.

They mostly (but not all) use preferences as they flowed from the minor parties and independents at the last election, but those numbers aren’t necessarily set in stone. For example, One Nation preferences flowed Labor’s way 50.5–49.5 at the 2016 federal election, but that was largely because it preferenced Labor in more seats than it preferenced the Coalition. (By “preference” we mean made recommendations on its how-to-vote cards.)

This had the most spectacular effect in Longman, Queensland, where One Nation preferences flowed 56.5 per cent to Labor and tipped out the sitting member, Wyatt Roy. At the same electorate’s by-election last July, One Nation preferenced the Liberal National Party, and its preferences flowed a whopping 67.7 per cent the LNP’s way.

(Incidentally, presumably because of that by-election result — a 3.7 per cent swing to Labor and an easy retain with 54.4 per cent after preferences — few election-watchers seem to have Longman potentially in play this time. But with One Nation again preferencing the LNP, it’s a good chance of a pick-up for the government on 18 May.)

Like One Nation, the flow of United Australia Party preferences will depend on the kind of voters it attracts in the first place — Labor- or Coalition-leaning — how many have how-to-vote cards thrust into their hands, and how many take any notice of them. Most people don’t follow the cards, but enough do to make a difference in close contests.

In 2013 Palmer United Party preferences favoured the Coalition 54–46. Despite preferencing the Coalition everywhere, Clive Palmer was a more left-friendly cuddly figure back then — not yet the boss from hell, still sympathetic to asylum seekers and very anti–News Corp. There is evidence he took more primary votes from Labor than the Coalition and churned, via how-to-vote cards, perhaps a fifth of them into Coalition votes after preferences.

This time he’s a much more Trumpian entity, contesting One Nation turf. So rather than turning, say, 44 per cent Coalition support into 54 per cent, the UAP might be turning 55 into 65.

The pollsters’ preference estimates also matter in another way: they are likely to be overstating support for the minor parties included on the list they read out to respondents. Take the Ipsos poll, which has the Greens on a ridiculously high 14 per cent. Like all parties included in the party readout, it’s artificially inflated, and support for the major parties is correspondingly too low.

But it hardly matters when it comes to the two-party-preferred estimate, because Greens how-to-vote cards don’t have much effect. (Their supporters tend to be sure which major party they prefer.) Assuming the Greens wind up polling around 10 per cent on election day, then the other 4 per cent are likely to vote according to the flow of Green preferences used by Ipsos, which is presumably last election’s 82–18 in Labor’s favour.

But if One Nation and UAP are being overstated by, say, 1 per cent each, in what proportions will they return to the major parties? The recent pollsters’ total major-party tallies range from 69 to 74. (At the 2016 election it was 76.8.) For reasons already given, we can expect it to be around or above that top figure on election day. The final polls, of course, will be closer to the true amount.

The best scenario for the Coalition, and Labor’s nightmare, is that the people who have been telling pollsters for months that they support One Nation and, more recently, UAP are overloaded with rabid consumers of Sky News After Dark who are angry that neither Tony Abbott nor Peter Dutton is prime minister.

In that case the government will do better than expected on 18 May, in both primary support and preferences.

Not long to go now, thank God. •

* I acknowledge that voters would behave differently under first-past-the-post, but given a widespread misunderstanding of our electoral system, probably not a lot differently. Please don’t @ me.

The post Labor’s nightmare (and other preference puzzles) appeared first on Inside Story.

The modern-day low point for enrolment — probably the lowest since it became compulsory in 1911 — was in 2010, when only around 91 per cent of eligible Australians were on the roll. The figure was about 92 per cent in 2013 and about 95 per cent in 2016, and this year we’re up to 96.8 per cent. (These estimates exclude around a million Australians living overseas, most of whom, for complicated reasons, aren’t on the roll and don’t vote.)

In a press release last month, electoral commissioner Tom Rogers credited this accomplishment to “Australian citizens and to the hard work and careful processes put in place by AEC staff. It is something all Australians can be proud of.”

Decorum prevented him from giving a shout out to the Gillard government, which in 2012 pushed legislation through parliament, against fierce Coalition pushback, that corrected a corrosive imbalance in the commission’s enrolment processes.

Current enrolment practices can be traced to 1999, when the AEC was given access to various government agency databases — federal, state and territory — that show who has moved house. After verifying address changes, the AEC was able to cull the roll with increasingly ruthless efficiency, but it couldn’t automatically add the new details.

It did send letters and enrolment forms to the new address, repeatedly, urging the elector to re-enrol, but these pleas were largely ignored. Who reads that junk mail these days? So the roll was shrinking.

Since those 2012 amendments, though, the commission has also been able to put people on the roll at their new address, and enrol people for the first time, without needing a filled-in form.

Hoorah, the best roll ever. The greatest practical outcome is that fewer people go along to vote only to find there’s no record of them. But there’s a downside, and it’s related to a contradiction in our compulsory voting system.

While both enrolment and voting are mandatory in this country, the AEC has not fined or prosecuted anyone for not being enrolled in over thirty years. That’s because it doesn’t want to discourage people from enrolling after a period of “breaking the law”; it’s like a rolling amnesty.

In effect, if you’re on the roll and don’t vote you get chased by the authorities, but if you manage to stay off the roll you’re fine.

The 2012 changes made it more difficult for even the most determined recalcitrants to stay beneath the radar. So they’re dragged onto the roll, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to cast a vote.

A close-to-complete roll almost guarantees a drop in official turnout — the number of votes cast (formal or informal) as a percentage of total enrolees. In 2010 and 2013 turnout was 93 per cent, in 2016 it dropped to 91 per cent and it will drop again this year.

But these numbers are misleading. Turnout as a percentage of estimated eligible voters has actually increased (a little) at each recent election.

In practical terms, this means that the AEC is faced with a surge in apparent non-voters, and is required to chase them up. In 2016 it sent out 969,586 “apparent failure to vote” letters, a huge 46 per cent increase from 2013. This year, probably in July or August, Australia Post will be delivering well over a million of these requests for explanation. And that’s just the first round of correspondence; ignoring them doesn’t make the AEC go away.

Yes, you can sign a form saying you were looking after your sick mum or you tried to vote but the staff couldn’t find you on the roll. I suspect that even claiming you did vote would do the trick.

But honest people who admit they simply didn’t feel like voting, or didn’t get around to it, will cop a $20 fine. If you ignore the letter, or don’t pay the fine, it can go up to $180 plus court costs. And as the roll gets closer to fully complete it’s catching up lots of the hardcore stay-aways.

The commission spent around $3.4 million chasing non-voters in 2016. That figure includes printing, postage, lodgement and court costs, but not staff time. Something over $2 million comes back in fines, but because life isn’t always fair the AEC doesn’t get any of that — it goes straight to general government revenue.

The fine has been $20 since 1984. In 2016 the Australia Institute recommended to a parliamentary committee that it be hiked to $70, the rough equivalent today. This didn’t happen.

Twenty dollars is a small amount for the vast majority of Australians, but for a small group it is a lot. Seventy dollars would be more onerous. (Indigenous Australians are over-represented among non-voters.) For the disorganised or tardy low-earner, $180 could be pretty serious.

So spare a thought for the AEC as it licks and stuffs all those envelopes in a few months. And for the wicked non-voters.

It seems that mandatory turnout is here to stay in Australia. But some countries with compulsory voting don’t actually enforce it. Maybe that’s something we could consider. •

The post On a roll with the AEC appeared first on Inside Story.

Asked which major party has the best policies on climate change and energy, just 13 per cent nominated the Coalition, well behind “neither party” (41 per cent) and Labor (42 per cent). The fact that these Coalition policies are no more popular than, say, Tony Abbott is among mainstream business figures is no great surprise — they’ve been saying so for years — but the size of the gap between the major parties certainly is.

Former Liberal senator Nick Minchin once said that the left had been forced to look for a new cause after the collapse of communism, and the cause happened to be the environment. But it’s much more revealing to turn that observation around the other way: the Australian (and American) right was casting around for a new enemy in the 1990s, and decided on environmentalism; later that hostility morphed into a senseless opposition to mainstream climate science. Maybe the left did need a new cause, but at least it has a scientific consensus (and Angela Merkel, among many others) on its side.

In Boris Johnson’s Britain, the new enemy has been the “faceless bureaucrats” in Brussels — though in practice the nastiest battles have taken place within the Conservative Party itself. Here in Australia, two prime ministerships have been brought down by forces within the Liberal Party who think the tide of history can somehow be turned back.

I suspect part of the explanation for this strange behaviour is that both these parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, often behave like they don’t have much of a clue about how the economy works. It’s surprising how few federal ministers have ever run anything apart from a lobby group, another minister’s office or a law practice. After flirting with innovation under Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberals seem to have decided they don’t like the look of the future, regardless of the opportunities it opens up for business.

Small pool, big problem

The Liberal Party’s axing of another two candidates this week is a reminder of how much trouble the major parties are having in attracting talented would-be MPs. It’s not a new problem, but it’s probably made worse by the fact that the prestige of the job has declined just as the gap in remuneration, particularly for potential Liberal candidates, has grown.

Both parties now draw most of their candidates, apart from their sometimes disastrous captain’s picks, from a much-diminished party base populated by people whose passionate interest in politics isn’t always matched by the necessary intellectual and practical skills. Meanwhile, the factional system — especially toxic in the Liberal Party at the moment — means that strong potential candidates need to consider the possibility that they’ll never reach a cabinet-level position when their party is actually in government.

Better vetting can help to avoid the most obvious problems, but it’s clear that the major parties need to vastly increase the size of their recruitment pool — and not as part of branch-stacking exercises that have damaged the Victorian Liberals in particular — so that a new, generally brighter bunch of candidates can emerge. The big parties are going to remain the dominant players in Australian politics for quite some time, so we’ll all be better off if they lift the quality of their candidates.

More days in court

As Inside Story contributor Jeremy Gans pointed out on Twitter yesterday, one of this week’s Liberal casualties, Peter Killin, was a late pick to replace the original preselectee, Vaishali Ghosh, who had to pull out of the contest in the inner-Melbourne seat of Wills because of section 44 worries. Jeremy has been ploughing through the new disclosure forms — some illuminating, others not — that election candidates have submitted to the Australian Electoral Commission as part of this year’s nomination process. As he has shown over the past eighteen months, section 44 is much more of a minefield than the High Court seems to comprehend. He’ll be reporting back any minute, but his conclusion so far is that the court should clear its calendar from July to September for a stream of section 44 cases. [Update: Jeremy’s article is here.]

Early voting, early electioneering

Stephen Mills, also an Inside Story contributor, was on ABC Radio early this week discussing early voting, which AEC figures show is running at around double the rate recorded at this point in the 2016 campaign. On balance, he’s worried by the trend, but I wonder whether it’s necessarily a bad thing, especially if we want to sustain support for compulsory voting. It’s still the case that most voters settle on their preferred party well before the formal campaign begins (despite what they sometimes tell pollsters), and I suspect many of them are more likely to be alienated than enthused by the torrent of announcements and price-tag disputes during the campaign.

What might need changing, though, is the period over which early voting runs. As Stephen mentions, Voices for Indi — the group that successfully backed Cathy McGowan — has argued persuasively that the three-week voting period disadvantages small parties and independents, who are less likely to have the capacity to hand out how-to-vote cards day after day. The group suggests a week, which seems like a reasonable compromise.

Coincidentally, Stephen was on the airwaves again on Wednesday, this time in a Radio National documentary about the Liberal Party’s extremely well-funded quest to win the 1949 election, which was the subject of his first article for Inside Story back in 2012. This is the fascinating story of a twice-weekly radio series, John Henry Austral, produced by the Liberal Party during 1948 and 1949 as part of its drip-feed campaign against the Chifley government.

Amazingly, the series was broadcast on around eighty radio stations across Australia. It was a “concerted, extended effort to present voters with a coherent and complete worldview — a political philosophy,” says Stephen. “At a time when party campaign advertising has abandoned platforms to focus almost exclusively on manoeuvring over short-term issues and attacking the character of rival leaders, that is not a bad example to look back on.” You can read his Inside Story article here and listen to the RN documentary, with audio from the broadcast, here. •

The post The war within appeared first on Inside Story.

In the weeks following the poll, the Australian Electoral Commission scanned all the paper printouts of the roll and found 18,343 people whose names had been crossed off more than once. In September that year they sent a letter to each of these apparent multiple voters.

The AEC does this after every election. In 2013 the number was a little higher, at 18,770.

Is 18,343 “multiple voters” a lot? How many of them were fraudulent? Should it worry us? How do we stop it happening?

The 18,000-plus figure averages out to about 120 per House of Representatives electorate, which could obviously make a difference in a tight contest. The closest seat in 2016 was Herbert in Queensland, which Labor snatched from the government by thirty-seven votes. Not surprisingly, Coalition members of the parliamentary electoral matters committee have taken a particular interest in that result.

So has the AEC, which asked the Australian Federal Police if they wouldn’t mind having a close look at forty-two Herbert voters who appeared to have voted more than once.

The wallopers investigated and concluded:

Thirty-three (78.5 per cent) were attributable to potential AEC error (electoral roll marking error, incorrect advice re: absentee voting, failure to identify/destroy duplicate records);

Five (12%) were attributable to potential voter error (genuine confusion with process, mental illness or medical issue, language issue); and

Four (9.5%) were attributable to there being no obvious explanation (no evidence of intent to vote more than once).

Regarding the country as a whole, the AEC found that “among the number of electors who provided an admission to multiple voting, 84 per cent of cases were the result of age, confusion, or poor comprehension.”

Words like “admission,” “evidence” and “intent” make it all quite vague. And if a voter whose name was marked off twice simply swears that they only voted once, there’s little the AEC can do.

Those 18,343 people equal 0.13 per cent of the electoral roll. Again — is that a lot or a little? The vast majority turn out to almost certainly be mistakes made by AEC staff. Of the rest, we would expect a tiny proportion of voters to turn up mad, bad, drunk, senile, mentally ill and/or combinations of the above. Humans do all sorts of strange things.

But it’s also reasonable to believe that a tiny number, around a tenth of all multiple mark-offs, deliberately voted more than once — as a lark, to prove some point or to get their preferred candidate elected. (Some fifty-nine names were crossed off three times or more, the largest number of cross-offs was sixteen; there was definitely mischief-making in most of them.)

At a general election, any coordinated multiple-voting effort would need to be organised across a great number of electorates, because we never know in advance which seats will be close enough for it to matter. Very few people had Herbert on the radar as a possible Labor gain in 2016, for example.

But something like last year’s Wentworth by-election, with the numbers so close on the floor of the House, would be enticing to fraudsters. (As far as I know the AEC hasn’t released multiple-voting data for Wentworth, and no suggestion of fraud has been made there. The final margin was a healthy 1850 votes.)

What’s important to remember is that elections need to be not only fair but seen to be fair. That 18,000-plus number is a gift to those sections of the media and social media that specialise in sowing distrust, and it’s not hard to imagine many people feeling troubled by the ease with which voter impersonation is theoretically possible.

So, what further safeguards can be put in place to minimise these multiple cross-offs?

The most commonly suggested solution is mandatory voter ID. In this, as in so much of our political discourse, we are influenced by the longstanding and toxic American debate, where ID laws are used by parties to try to exclude certain categories of voter. But many countries use voter ID without partisan considerations, though a lot of them (particularly in Europe) have national ID cards that all citizens must carry.

Voter ID makes a lot of sense but has severe drawbacks. Under a photo ID system a huge majority of Australians would find voting as easy as they do today. But a sizeable minority — perhaps 10 to 15 per cent who don’t carry a driver’s licence or proof of age card around with them — could run into problems.

In 2014 the Queensland LNP government introduced an ID system that was at the benign end of the spectrum. The Electoral Commission of Queensland would send out a letter that each voter could then use as identification. In addition, a range of possible ID documents, from an electricity bill (without a photo) through to a passport, could be used. And someone without any ID at the polling station could fill out a declaration vote — accompanied by a signed statement in an envelope — and if the ECQ found no problems then the vote would be included in the count.

Not surprisingly, increased delays were reported at the following election. And that system would not, for example, stop me overhearing you in the pub say you’re not going to vote, and voting in your stead. But having to sign a bit of paper would discourage that. ID can be forged, commission letters stolen from letterboxes, but the signature discourages deliberate mischief-making. On the other hand, staff will still make mistakes.

In 2015 Queensland’s Labor government abolished voter ID. Unfortunately, the ECQ doesn’t seem to have conducted useful research into the former system’s effectiveness.

Another option is “real-time electronic mark-off,” which both the electoral matters committee and the AEC are in favour of, and which has been tried out at recent federal by-elections. Instead of those big books, the electoral roll — connected to the central database —is held, live, in the hands of staff. This ensures that names aren’t marked off twice.

In New South Wales the state electoral commission is trying these out for early voting this year, and early last week internet connection problems caused them to turn people away. The most recent ACT and Northern Territory elections used real-time electronic mark-off virtually everywhere, and the AEC claims great success in all but eradicating multiple voting in those two jurisdictions.

But we only have to briefly contemplate how this works to realise that much of the improvement is illusory.

Say you rock up on election day to vote (either in the context of voter ID or not) and are informed your name has already been crossed off. Either someone has impersonated you or a polling official has made a mistake. “Not to worry,” you are assured, “fill in this declaration vote.” This is time-consuming, tedious and, most importantly (though presumably you will not be told this), almost certainly a waste of time; because your name has already been marked off, your vote won’t be counted.

In this way multiple voting is “eliminated.” But for real-time mark-off to achieve its purpose, you have to assume legitimate voters attend first and impersonators dawdle along later. And any accidental marking-off of the wrong person would, instead of creating an apparent double vote, simply disenfranchise the voter.

As New South Wales showed, technical issues are also a factor. And a live roll on election day? The potential for malicious hacking activity ramps up the blood pressure (in this writer anyway).

(Note the difference between this live roll and having standalone copies of the entire roll in every polling official’s hand. The latter is a very worthwhile aim for the AEC, with little downside except the huge cost.)

It’s possible that accidental double-marking is less likely on electronic than on paper rolls. Or it might be more prevalent.

In a joint submission to the electoral matters committee, the AEC and the Federal Police suggested CCTV cameras at polling stations. Effective? Yes, but also uber-expensive, and they might discourage some people from voting at all. It’s very Big Brother, and not a goer in the short to medium term.

Given that the vast majority of the 18,000-plus were staff errors, and the exercise is largely concerned with fortifying public confidence, does it make sense to direct resources towards reducing that figure to, say, 5000 or so? Having two workers instead of one, to double-check that the correct name is crossed off, would be horrendously costly.

A less alarming variation than CCTVs might be sound recorders at each table, so that staff can go back and listen to the name that was uttered at the relevant time. But this would only work in conjunction with time-stamped electronic mark-off.

It’s likely that one day we’ll nearly all be voting online with our MyGov accounts, with the few lagging technophobes doing it in person, verified by biometrics, facial recognition or computer chips.

In the meantime, a mild ID system, such as Queensland’s former arrangements, in the context of a non-live electronic roll across the country, might be worth considering. (It’s obviously too late for this year’s election.) Perhaps also those audio recordings. Extra resources would be needed, especially for the electronic roll.

It would be crucial for governments to fund any of these solutions adequately to avoid increased delays at polling stations. It can’t be done on the cheap.

Voter ID might be a solution in search of a problem, but perceptions are important. In our social media–driven, tinfoil-hat age, with trust in democratic institutions under pressure, even a large amount of added expense could turn out to be money very well spent. •

The post Voting early, voting often? appeared first on Inside Story.

Judith Brett traces the emergence and development of compulsory voting within the Australian political system, but her scope is broader than the sub-title implies, covering aspects of the franchise (especially relating to women and Aborigines) and the introduction of preferential voting and, later, proportional representation.

From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage begins with a question: what explains Australia’s position as one of the few democracies in which voting is both compulsory and enforced? Sixteen countries have it and nine enforce it, none of them countries we would normally compare ourselves with. By way of explanation, Brett points out that Australia — unlike the United States — was not settled by dissidents fleeing autocracy and imbued with John Locke’s social contract theory. While the Americans opted for liberty and rights, pragmatic Australians preferred democracy and majorities, with a dose of bureaucracy thrown in for good measure. The contrast with the American “system,” with its partisan-based election administration and baffling state variations on everything from the franchise to the shape of the ballot paper, is stark.

One of Brett’s many interesting revelations is that compulsory voting was on the agenda, in both the pre-Federation colonies and the new Commonwealth, long before its eventual introduction for federal elections in 1924. But she tracks back even further, outlining in considerable (and often humorous) detail what the voting process looked like before the introduction of the secret ballot. Casting a vote could be a time-consuming affair for the elector: in the pre-ballpoint era, considerable dipping of ink could be required, and it was only with the switch to pencils that the process became more expeditious and the queues shorter.

At the moment of Federation, many of the new nation’s adults were still not entitled to vote. The decision on how far the franchise would be extended was in the hands of that group of white males who constituted the first federal parliament. The debates about the voting rights of women and Aborigines don’t make for comfortable reading: the observations about potential female voters are bad enough in their misogyny, but the vileness of the comments about Aborigines retains the capacity to shock. White women were granted the franchise for federal elections in 1902, but the struggle for full and equal voting rights and obligations for the first Australians would be a longer and more drawn-out affair.

Brett argues that the decision to make voting compulsory for federal elections was a natural expression of the political culture that had emerged over preceding decades. The fact that enrolment had been compulsory since 1911 also made the extension of the obligation to cast a vote less contentious. Concern about low turnout — 58 per cent in 1922, the last voluntary vote — was a critical factor, with supporters of compulsion arguing that genuine democracy required those who governed to represent the majority of those being governed. The cause was assisted by evidence from Queensland, where voting had been compulsory for state elections since 1915. The Queenslanders’ habit had proved transferable to federal elections where, without compulsion, their the turnout was far higher than that of other states in 1922.

With the three largest parties on side, parliamentary opposition to the proposal was minimal. The conservatives, disadvantaged by Labor’s union-based capacity to get out its vote, could view compulsion as helping solve a problem. And, with many voters having developed the habit of demanding to be driven to the polls in vehicles funded by candidates or parties, compulsion would help eliminate an unwelcome election expense. Significantly absent from the debates was any sustained libertarian view. The “right not to vote” simply had no traction, then or now, and compulsory voting continues to enjoy majority support from both voters and MPs.

Brett also covers the introduction of preferential voting for federal elections in 1919, which was prompted by the emergence of the Country Party and the need to avoid splitting the conservative vote in three-cornered contests. Like compulsion, the idea had been around for a while, and the desire for political survival proved a handy stimulus. As an aside, it is interesting to note the gradual dilution of full preferential voting, with eight of the nation’s fifteen legislative chambers now being elected by some version of optional preferential.

Proportional representation also had a nineteenth-century pre-history, although it would be 1949 before it was adopted at federal level — and then only for Senate elections. Opposition to such a system was often based on its alleged complexity, and while Brett doesn’t explore this point in any detail, it possibly warrants more attention than it receives. The proposition that the voting system should be comprehensible to the voter is not unreasonable; indeed, the principle often formed part of Politics 101. Yet today, otherwise informed people can question the legitimacy of a senator because he secured a pitifully low primary vote, obviously unaware that a person could theoretically be elected with no primary votes at all under the proportional system. The same is true of state and territory chambers employing proportional representation. A PhD in mathematics shouldn’t be a prerequisite for understanding a voting system.

I have two quibbles. It is not quite the case, as Brett writes, that a proposed constitutional referendum must first pass both houses of parliament with an absolute majority. Strictly speaking, the Constitution allows one house to force a referendum even if the other opposes it, involving a three-month interval in keeping with the double dissolution rules. Practically, Brett is right, as the power has never been employed and probably never will be.

Of the Whitlam government’s lowering of the voting age for federal elections from twenty-one to eighteen, Brett suggests a link to the age of conscription for military service (which could include deployment to Vietnam). Not so: the age for conscription in Australia at the time in question was twenty, not eighteen — as many ageing male baby-boomers could attest!

Brett’s treatment of her subject leaves us with the impression that, at a time when disillusionment with politicians is at high levels, there is less need for concern about the system that elects them. “We are good at elections,” she proclaims. Leaving aside the vexed question of party funding and donations (not covered in the book), the boast doesn’t seem unreasonable. •

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This is not the first time the committee’s conservative majority has recommended that voters be required to produce evidence of their identity. The same recommendation was made three years ago. In some US states, voter ID laws have been used as a discriminatory form of voter suppression. As with much in that country’s partisan-tainted electoral administration, voter ID has spawned a cottage industry of campaign consultancies, research and litigation, with the litigation infected by concerns about judicial bias.

To be fair, its Australian proponents are not calling for the most onerous, US-style, government-issued, photographic-only ID. The proposal here is inspired by a short-lived Queensland law enacted by Campbell Newman’s Liberal National Party government and repealed by Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Labor government. In that model, ID could include faceless government plastic (Medicare or seniors cards) or official notices with addresses (a utilities bill or a tax notice), though the latter isn’t as simple as it sounds if you are in a share house or don’t have a printer.

Electors who go to the polls without such ID would be offered a vote via a statutory declaration. That backstop is welcome, but it defers the question of whether such voters would also have to produce ID, after the event, to validate their vote. And will they receive the courtesy of being told whether their vote was accepted? If not, their vote enters a black box rather than the visible assurance of the ballot box.

Research Tracey Arklay and I published on voter ID in Queensland showed a not-unexpected correlation between regional electorates, and those with concentrations of Indigenous people, and problems with voter ID. Younger voters and those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, or NESBs, may face similar challenges, but Queensland data was only available at electorate level. (Electorates do not vary much by age, and NESB electors tend to blend into urban seats.) These discriminatory effects came on top of the natural confusion that accompanies a new measure. Turnout dropped after voter ID was introduced, an odd result given its first and only run was at the passionately contested election that swept Premier Newman from power.

As a matter of principle, as Antony Green and others have noted, voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. It faces three main objections.

First, Australian elections are already very clean by world standards. Voter ID might deter “personation,” where someone votes in someone else’s name. But there’s minimal evidence of personation here and its best prophylactic is clean rolls and high turnout.

We do have an issue with “multiple voting.” But it is a small problem that voter ID cannot cure. Marking voters off in real time, on electronic rolls, might counter this, but at great cost in resources and confusion. (Most “multiple” votes turn out to be administrative errors. Someone is recorded as voting twice while an almost identically named person is recorded as not voting.) Short of CCTV cameras at every polling station, it is hard to police.

Second, voter ID doesn’t sit well with compulsory enrolment and voting. Are we to fine people who don’t bother turning out because they lack the necessary ID? The long history of Australian electoral practice has been to facilitate the franchise, not to hinder it. Think Saturday polling, pre-polling and online and direct enrolment schemes. The place for ID is at the enrolment stage, not polling.

Third, the proposal explicitly discriminates between those who vote in person and those who vote by mail. If I have to produce ID at the polling station, why should I not have to photocopy the same to vouch for my posted ballot? Postal votes, after all, are not 100 per cent secure.

At least as interesting as the legal niceties and electoral effects are the politics of voter ID in Australia. Leading the push is the committee chair, senator James McGrath. McGrath is no stereotypical blueblood; like Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd, the senator is a product of Nambour High School. He took his first law degree at the nouveau Griffith University, not a sandstone campus. (For the record, I too went to Nambour High and even taught the senator workplace law.)

McGrath cut his teeth in the administrative wing of what is now the Queensland Liberal National Party. He rose to prominence working on Conservative Party campaigns in Britain. There he was both feted as a “heavyweight strategist” and derided as an “arrogant apparatchik.” Boris Johnson sacked him for telling a reporter that disgruntled Caribbean-born Britons should go home. When James himself came home, he became LNP campaign director and deputy federal director of the  party director. Recently he has run numbers for — then against — Malcolm Turnbull. In short, he seems destined for the role of special minister of state, who oversees internal governmental affairs including parliament and electoral systems.

Conservatives, as a rule, mind hurdles to voting less than progressives. This fits the two mindsets: one is less trusting of humanity, stressing individual responsibility, while the other wants the state to achieve substantive equality. McGrath likened voter ID to membership cards to meet licensing laws and buy cheap beer at a surf club, and proof of age/bona fide cards for late entry at nightclubs.

Never mind that nightclub ID cards have upset clubs and revellers alike and, in practice, created a mountain from a molehill. McGrath’s rhetoric is a variant of the now-dated line, “you need ID to hire a DVD but not to vote.” (Every video shop I ever frequented let you borrow if you cited your phone number.) Polling stations are staffed by thousands of casual employees. When we make the process more complex, we risk increasing queuing times and, worse, invite different interpretations of the rules at different booths.

Can the government get voter ID through parliament? Inverting the usual challenge, it may have a better chance in the Senate than the House. The Senate’s crossbench is, at the moment, more conservative than the House’s. Even were the measure to succeed, you can be sure GetUp! will seek to run a judicial review action, given its success on that front in voting rights cases.

Prior to an election, however, such a claim won’t be easy to mount. The High Court may say to any test-case plaintiff, “Why are you here rather than out gathering ID?” A challenge after the event is more feasible. The court will not object to voter ID in principle, given its many variants around the world, including in countries with actual bills of rights. But it has said that hurdles to the exercise of the franchise have to be justified by evidence of a problem and a proportionate response. This is the reason it overturned early closure of electoral rolls, a Howard government initiative.

Given the need for solid constitutional justification, Senator McGrath and his committee may rue taking a scant couple of pages to assert their preference for voter ID, rather than making a cost–benefit case for its necessity. My hunch is that the government doesn’t really care. It is likely to introduce the measure in the lead-up to the election due in the first half of the year. In doing so it may be less interested in making an empirical case for voter ID than in running with this political kite. Labor and the Greens, in opposing the measure, will be labelled as enemies of “common sense” electoral integrity. •

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But Australia still has a significant democratic deficit. Not only because money is subverting political equality, or because media concentration is stifling pluralism, or because we’ve failed to properly provide for Indigenous self-determination, each of which is disturbing. The flaw I’m talking about is blindingly obvious once you see it, but often ignored. It is the fact that a significant minority of Australia’s adult population doesn’t have a meaningful say in the political process.

The people missing out are permanent residents — people who have made Australia their home but haven’t, for one reason or another, become citizens. To that group I would add people who have lived here, sometimes for years, on temporary work visas, as international students, or because they’re entitled to as New Zealanders. In 2016, non-tourist temporary visa holders numbered more than 1.5 million, or more than 6 per cent of the Australian population.

Some people might think that giving the vote to these residents is a ludicrous idea. They are not, by definition, Australian citizens, and some would say that, being non-citizens, they aren’t entitled to have a say in the country’s political processes.

This argument draws on the view that community is anchored in citizenship; in other words, that the Australian community is composed entirely of Australian citizens. But does that really mean that citizenship should be the exclusive basis for having a political voice? After all, “democracy,” by definition, is rule by the people, not rule by citizens. This deep truth is most clearly recognised in Article 21(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.”

It might also be argued that democracies have a collective right to determine the composition of their communities — that they should be able to determine who is within their “demos.” Nearly three decades ago, in his classic book Democracy and Its Critics, the political scientist Robert Dahl pointed out the absurdity of this view. It would allow nation-states to call themselves “democracies” even when they exclude a significant proportion of their resident population from the demos. As Dahl argued, “If a demos can be a tiny group that exercises a brutal despotism over a vast subject population, then ‘democracy’ is conceptually, morally, and empirically indistinguishable from autocracy.”

There are alternatives to these narrow and distorted views of democracy. Of particular note is the theory of social membership proposed by another political scientist, Joseph Carens, in his book The Ethics of Immigration. According to this theory, it is not the legal status of citizenship or the nation-state’s say-so that determines whether an individual is a member of the community (and therefore entitled to a political voice). Rather, it is the connections a person has to his or her place of residence — “the relationships, interests, and identities that connect people to the place where they live.”

The implications of this theory are clear enough: permanent residents and temporary visa holders are members of the countries where they have ongoing residence, and that membership entitles them to have a say, and ultimately an equal say, in the political process.

Contemporary Australia might fall dramatically short of this ideal, but the notion that ongoing residents are entitled to a political voice is not entirely alien. Residents, citizens or not, are entitled to vote in local government elections, for instance. This entitlement has its roots in the property franchise, but it can also recognise the interests of residents with a stake in the local government area. In another field, industrial relations, there is a consensus that all workers should have a “voice” at work, including permanent residents and temporary visa holders.

History also supports the argument that ongoing residence should be the basis of membership. What is usually remembered about the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 are its racist exclusions, particularly of Indigenous Australians, Asians, Africans and Pacific Islanders. What is less often recalled is that these groups weren’t excluded in the original Commonwealth franchise bills when they were introduced in 1901 and 1902. At the heart of those bills was a highly progressive principle of inclusion. In the words of Richard O’Connor, the NSW senator who had their carriage, they recognised “one ground only, as giving a right to vote, and that is residence in the Commonwealth for six months or over by any person of adult age.”

In his pioneering book Not Quite Australian, Peter Mares has proposed eight years as the threshold at which temporary visa holders should be given the option of permanent residence. Let me propose another principle to bring Australia closer to democratic justice: once migrants have resided continuously for twelve months in this country and intend to continue living here, they should be considered members of this country and entitled to a say in its political processes.

Why twelve months? It is the period underlying the concept of “usual residence” that determines the population estimates issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (more precisely, the ABS relies on the 12/16 rule, which only requires twelve months of residence within a period of sixteen months). These estimates have constitutional significance: under section 24 of the Constitution, they represent the number of the “people of the Commonwealth” that, in turn, determines the number of federal parliamentarians in each state.

For a living example of such a rule in operation you need only look across the Tasman. Permanent residents of New Zealand have the right to vote in elections after one year of ongoing residence, a rule that has been in place since 1975.

The disenfranchisement of permanent residents and many temporary visa holders is an affront to democratic principles; that it is not recognised as such only makes it more egregious. As John Stuart Mill wrote in Considerations on Representative Government, “It is an essential part of democracy that minorities should be adequately represented… No real democracy, nothing but a false show of democracy, is possible without it.” •

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Though unsuccessful in her several bids to become the first woman elected to an Australian parliament, Vida was one of the inspiring women who gave their all to the cause of women’s rights in the early years of the twentieth century. They were patronised by conservative politicians (“I consider the qualifications of the ladies are already sufficiently charming”) and ridiculed and vilified as members of “the shrieking sisterhood,” but I suspect they would be surprised that we are still fighting for equal parliamentary representation more than a century later.

The publication of the second volume of Clare Wright’s Democracy Trilogy could not be more timely. A big book with a long title and a cast of thousands, You Daughters of Freedom relates with sparkle and wit the largely untold story of the trailblazing women who not only dragged recalcitrant male leaders into the new century and won the right to vote but also were at the forefront of the struggle for women’s enfranchisement internationally. In 1903, pipped at the post only by New Zealand, South Australia led the way, providing a crucial stepping stone at a time when “the convergence of feminism and Federation produced the perfect storm for democratic reform.” It would be more than two decades before Britain followed suit.

“Crafting the story of the nation has always been women’s work — on the ground, if rarely in history’s written page,” observes Wright. She takes the huge women’s suffrage banner (2.5 metres high and 1.4 metres wide) that hangs behind glass in Parliament House in Canberra as a framing device for her book. Designed and painted by Australian artist Dora Meeson Coates in London, and carried in suffrage “monster marches” in 1908 and 1911, it depicts Mother Britannia with daughter Minerva stretching out her hand as if to say, “Join me.” Beneath the words “COMMONWEALTH of AUSTRALIA” is the message “TRUST THE WOMEN MOTHER AS I HAVE DONE.” (The newspaper reports all added the missing commas, I’m pleased to note.)

Wright does excellent craftwork herself, skilfully weaving the stories of five prominent women involved in the Australian suffrage movement into the larger tapestry of the international struggle for women’s enfranchisement. The eldest two of those women were born in England in the 1850s but settled and married in Australia: upper-class Dora Montefiore formed the Womanhood Suffrage League in New South Wales in 1891; and the vivacious Nellie Martel, daughter of a blacksmith, founded the Women’s Progressive Association in the same state in 1901.

Two others, Vida Goldstein and Muriel Matters, were also contrasting figures. Tall, elegant Vida, “daughter of the Victorian squattocracy,” became the first Australian to meet an American president at the White House, where she charmed Teddy Roosevelt while on a speaking tour in 1901. Muriel, born in South Australia in 1877, the third of ten children, was the youngest of the protagonists; a talented actress with “impish charm,” she was the epitome of the independent “Australian girl.”

Making up the five is the artist and creator of the banner, Dora Meeson Coates. Long-faced and serious, she studied art at the National Gallery of Victoria, where she met her future husband George Coates, a “solemn boy.” After a period studying in Paris in 1897, the pair married, both aged thirty-four, and settled in England.

The five women extended their range of activities from Australia to London, where they took part in the suffragettes’ passionate activism of the new century. Demonstrating women were physically abused, imprisoned and force-fed; some, like Emily Wilding Davison, died. The women from the Antipodes used their position as vote-carrying Australians to support the cause.

In an almost hilarious episode known as the Siege of Hammersmith, the property-owning “globe-trotting socialist possum-stirrer” Dora Montefiore, who had a penchant for cocaine lozenges, refused to pay “the King’s taxes” because she could not vote. Having been stripped of much of her furniture and silverware by the bailiffs, she addressed an auction room she had packed with suffragists and women’s rights activists, thus creating “a brilliant publicity stunt.”

The flamboyant “elocutionist” Nellie Martel arrived in London in 1904 and joined with Emmeline Pankhurst in starting the London branch of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU. During demonstrations over the ensuing years they were pelted with vegetables, snowballs and even stones; on one occasion, Nellie and Emmeline were attacked by a group of young men, grabbed by their throats and beaten, fearing for their lives. Nellie also spent time in Holloway prison.

Muriel Matters came to London in 1905 to further her acting career. Caught up in the fervour of the time, she became known for actions that put her at great personal risk, chaining herself to the iron grille that separated the Ladies’ Gallery from the House of Commons chamber in 1908 and taking to the sky over London in a hot air balloon emblazoned with “Votes for Women,” from which she rained leaflets on the crowd below.

Vida Goldstein worked mainly in Victoria, campaigning throughout the state during her bids to enter parliament. But in 1911 the WSPU invited her to London, where she was received to overwhelming acclaim, addressing the suffragettes in a much-publicised address at the Royal Albert Hall.

Living in London, Dora Meeson Coates helped found the Artists’ Suffrage League with artist Mary Lowndes. The Actresses’ Franchise League was formed a year later, and Dora became friends with Cicely Hamilton and other women, thriving on the “feeling of solidarity, belonging and sisterliness” that helped her endure her “sometimes suffocating marriage.”

Wright mentions the much-noted absence of women of colour from the 2015 feature film Suffragette and discusses at length the appallingly racist debate about excluding Indigenous people from the vote in Australia, a decision implicitly condoned by suffragist women. But the exclusively heterosexual lens through which she views the women of You Daughters of Freedom overlooks another element of the suffrage struggle, namely, the importance of the many women who joined female partners in often lifelong relationships.

These relationships flew under the radar for good reason, since a chief aim of the female franchise was to purify politics and uphold the innate sex superiority of women claimed by the suffragists. The concept of an idealised motherhood, a civic motherhood, was a central plank of the movement.

Dotted through the book are the names of British women — Mary Lowndes and Ethel Smyth among them — who are known to have loved women. Closer to home, but not discussed, two of the most senior office-bearers in Vida Goldstein’s Women’s Political Association enjoyed a lifelong partnership, while the pages of Vida’s journal, the Woman Voter, included articles such as “Spinsters Indispensable” celebrating the unmarried state.

Four of the five protagonists of the book married, and their unions are discussed at some length, but Vida Goldstein is simply described by Wright as “a public woman” who “lived and breathed politics.” She might have “turned down marriage proposals like a housekeeper turns down sheets,” but her particular friendship with her WPA business secretary Cecilia John has been noted by other feminist scholars. The two women travelled together to Europe in 1919 and then parted ways, but Cecilia later lived with a female partner in England.

Feminism is a moving feast and, while the first wave’s emphasis on women’s purifying influence might now seem wowserish, the second wave of the 1970s and 80s coincided with a general drive for liberation (women’s liberation, gay liberation, sexual liberation) that was able to include lesbian relationships positively. The zeitgeist is different again today, with the passing of same-sex marriage legislation and the rise of the #MeToo movement.

Clare Wright’s timely book sheds light on a neglected chapter in the story of Australian democracy and women’s place in it. On the world stage, whether garbed in the white, green and purple suffragette colours of the last century or sporting pink pussy-eared knitted hats in the twenty-first, women continue to march for their rights. •

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Let’s start by looking at the evidence. In this case it’s voting-intention data from the three months leading up to each federal election, when Newspoll (who provided the 1987 to 2010 data) and Essential Research (2013 and 2016) asked voters about the forthcoming election. Newspoll used computer-aided telephone interviewing of randomised respondents from the general population, Essential used an online panel, and in both cases only respondents’ primary voting intention, not their preferences, was included. Using results grouped in five-year age brackets we can tabulate how respondents are likely to vote at different ages. By comparing each age group against the all-age average, we can then pinpoint age-related patterns.

Why do it this way? Elections come and go, and support for the major parties waxes and wanes: 1996 was a triumph for the Coalition, 2007 for the Labor Party. By using the gap between the age-specific average and the all-age average, we can see shifts in age-group support independently of overall ebbs and flows. I’ve shown these gaps by graphing the data from the opinion polls as bar charts, with the height of the bars indicating the size of the gap, and the direction — up or down — indicating whether the gap favours that party or not.

Chart 1: Voter support for the Liberal–National Party Coalition, 1987–2016

Source: Author’s calculations using Newspoll and Essential Research data. See technical note at the end of this article.

Chart 1, which shows the age-related pattern of support for the Coalition from 1987 to 2016, shows a changing pattern of support over time. During the late 1980s and early 1990s support for the Coalition was based on middle-aged and older Australians (indicated by positive bars for those age groups). As the 1990s wore on, its support became more concentrated among the older age cohorts, and particularly those over fifty. By the early 2000s, support was almost exclusively to be found among those aged over fifty-four, with a very large concentration in those aged sixty and over. Since 2007 this group of older Australians has become the bastion of Coalition support: as they have aged, their voting patterns have remained wedded to that side of politics.

In the hope of deepening that trend, the Coalition has increasingly favoured seniors in its policy-making. Back a decade, before the Kevin07 landslide swept it from office, the Howard government shrewdly crafted a political deal that welded the “seniors’ vote” to the fortunes of the Coalition. Howard’s largesse towards older Australians was legendary; as Saul Eslake caustically observed, “Self-funded retirees were a protected species.” Among the measures that favoured both the wealthy and retirees, Eslake listed the senior Australians tax offset and tax-free superannuation for over-sixties. Treasurer Peter Costello’s 2007 budget, unveiled the year the Coalition lost office, saw a $1.4 billion package targeted at older Australians, including a “seniors bonus payment.”

The electorate repaid the favours. Throughout the Howard years older Australians consistently voted for the Coalition. Retirees became the Howard heartland: in 2004 some 56 per cent of voters aged sixty-five or over intended to direct their first preference to the Coalition, and in 2007 the figure was 53 per cent. These figures contrasted with an all-age average of 44 per cent in 2004 and 40 per cent in 2007.

What about the “baby boomers,” the cohort born a generation behind these Howard stalwarts? Did they retain their progressive values as they became older, mortgaged and time-poor? Dealing with this question is far from easy, and there is no precise answer. First, we face methodological issues: how do we separate the ageing effects (the impact of getting older on voters’ preferences), period effects (the historical context) and cohort effects (a particular generation)? Second, these polling data define age in five-year bands, but the gap between federal elections is generally three years (and occasionally less). So, even if we identify a baby boomer cohort in 1987, for example, we can’t neatly track them through the data, election by election.

Then there is the issue of who fits into the definition of a baby boomer. Some commentators use the term to encompass people born between 1946 and 1964, but those born at the tail end of this period would only have reached their late teenage years as the 1970s ended. How likely would they have been to share the values of their older sisters and brothers who lived through the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s?

Finally, we shouldn’t assume that even those who fitted into the earlier cohort of baby boomers — the sixties generation — were invariably left-wing. After all, as political scientist Rod Tiffen reminds us, “although John Howard may have been born among the people who became the flower-child generation of the sixties, it’s much more likely he was attending a meeting of the Young Fogies Society than dropping out on a hippie commune.” Tiffen nevertheless accepts the broad proposition that “different age groups tend to have distinctive outlooks.”

Despite all these difficulties, can we draw any conclusions about whether a baby boomer bulge, moving through the years, has shifted politics towards the left and away from the conservatives? On Chart 1, a fall in Coalition support among those in their forties and fifties is certainly evident when we compare the early 1990s with a decade later. But that chart has certain limitations. By the mid to late 2000s, the sixties generation — baby boomers born in the 1940s — were entering their sixties, at which point they are swallowed up in the data by the “Howard seniors,” who still dominated the ranks of the retired population.

Fortunately, the recent opinion poll data — from 2004 onward — provides an additional age bracket: sixty to sixty-four years of age. Using these data, Chart 2 allows us to track the baby boomers as they move into their sixties. Across all years — from 2004 through to 2016 — those voters aged sixty-five and over continued to solidly support the Coalition, but those in their late fifties and early sixties steadily jumped ship. By 2016, those in their early sixties were barely on the Coalition’s radar, and those in their fifties were long gone.

Chart 2: Voter support for the Liberal–National Party Coalition, 2004–16

Source: Author’s calculations using Newspoll and Essential Research data. See technical note at the end of this article.

This demographic pattern seems fairly convincing, but is it a case of a more left-wing cohort gracelessly rejecting the Howard-Costello largesse? Are we seeing the 1960s hippies winning out over the young fogies? At this point, the lack of precision in these data — and the methodological challenges mentioned above — warrant caution. If you look at support for the Labor Party and the Greens (and in earlier years, the Democrats) using the same year and age-group tabulations, then an almost mirror image of Chart 1 emerges. Where the percentage gap is positive for the Coalition, it is negative for this “left combination,” and vice versa (see Chart 3).

Chart 3: Voter support for Labor and the Greens (and the Democrats), 1987–2016

Source: Author’s calculations using Newspoll and Essential Research data. See technical note at the end of this article.

But the mirror image is far from perfect, particularly during the late 2000s. For example, if we look at the late baby boomers — those born in the early 1960s — the support for the Labor–Greens side of politics in recent years has weakened among those now aged in their late fifties. This particular age cohort seems to have deserted both the Coalition and the Labor–Greens combination. Their support has gone somewhere else.

What might be happening here? Of course, voters do have other alternatives to the Coalition and Labor­–Greens. These are the micro0-parties and individuals that pollsters usually group together as “Other,” along with a miscellany of right-wing parties — including One Nation and the Palmer United Party — and independents and mavericks like Bob Katter.

In the Newspoll and Essential opinion data used for this article, the “Other” category is quite small, which means that tabulating age-related voting patterns isn’t feasible. But one insight into this question can be gleaned from the Australian Election Study, an ANU-based survey that asks respondents how they voted in the last election. These data show that in 2016, more than half of the voters who supported either One Nation, Palmer United Party or Katter’s Australia Party were aged over fifty. This is an age profile similar to that of Coalition supporters. By contrast, the age profiles for those who voted Labor or Greens are much younger (decidedly so for the Greens).

But this group of voters — the supporters of One Nation, Palmer United Party or Katter’s Australia Party — were not simply deserters from the Coalition. Indeed, they were just as likely to have voted Labor in the previous election in 2013 as to have voted Liberal.

In other words, the voting intentions of baby boomers turns out to be more complicated than at first glance. Certainly there is a long-term shift in support away from the Coalition as the population ages, suggesting that the “cohort effect” is more powerful than the “ageing effect.” But this hasn’t necessarily translated into gains for the Labor–Greens side of politics. Some of these baby boomers have gone elsewhere, primarily to the micro-parties and independents.

What might lie behind this trend? It is worth considering the other “effect” that can shape voting patterns over time: the period effect. The relevant period for today’s voters is characterised by considerable discontent. Since Brexit and Trump, it has almost become a cliché to point to a drift away from the mainstream, which in many cases becomes a lurch to the right. In Australia, the latest Fairfax–Ipsos Poll, taken in mid August, showed a sudden drop in the Coalition two-party-preferred vote from 49 per cent to 45 per cent, which triggered leadership challenges later in that week and culminated in the departure of Malcolm Turnbull from the prime ministership.

More revealing was the primary vote: Labor and the Greens barely shifted from their long-term average, while the vote for “Others” jumped from 15 per cent to 19 per cent. At the last election it was just 13 per cent. At that election, in July 2016, the Coalition primary vote was at 42 per cent, but the August Fairfax­–Ipsos poll had the Coalition scoring a primary vote of just 33 per cent. Hence the leadership turmoil.

By itself, the voting-intention data discussed in this article is not sufficient to fathom discontent among baby boomers. But the age patterns in these data are consistent with the Brexit–Trump story. It is no coincidence that economic restructuring has often left some voters in their fifties and sixties high and dry. Discontent readily surfaces among those retrenched from blue-collar jobs, often in industries subjected to privatisation or severe cost cutting and the mass redundancies that usually ensued. Similar discontent can surface among voters in country towns where employment opportunities have dried up under the onslaughts of agribusiness and drought.

Even for those older voters not afflicted by economic restructuring, a certain nostalgia for what Australia “used to look like” has also played into the hands of the right-wing micro-parties. The parallels with recent developments in Europe — in Austria and now Sweden — come to mind. ●

I am grateful to both Newspoll and Essential for making the data available for this analysis. Thanks to Murray Goot, Peter Browne and Jan O’Leary for valuable feedback.

Technical note: All the charts use the data from Newspoll and Essential Research for the opinion polls leading up to each election in which respondents are asked for which party they intend to vote. The data are combined for all the polls in that year, providing large sample sizes of between 10,000 and 15,000 observations. This allows for the breakdown of the data into these age groups. The gap is calculated as the difference between the average voting intention of a particular age group and the all-age average. A positive percentage indicates greater support for that party in that age group, a negative percentage indicates the opposite.

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It will be a bizarre election in many ways. For one thing, it features a weird and wonderful line-up of candidates. Liberal-aligned pollster Gary Morgan is hoping he’ll be fourth time lucky, having stood against Doyle three times; councillor Ken Ong, another Liberal, has also thrown his hat in the ring. Colourful independent contenders include activist Phil Cleary, a former federal parliamentarian once tripped up by section 44 of the Constitution, and sporting identity Sam Newman, who is reportedly considering a tilt. Embattled state MP Jane Garrett was thinking of taking a stab too, but decided against it, leaving no Labor-backed candidates.

But the main contest will be between the Greens, who hold this turf at a state and federal level — their candidate is councillor Rohan Leppert — and the Property Council’s CEO, Sally Capp, who is formally unaligned but has backing from segments of both the Labor Party and the Liberals. Altogether, it is a strange contest for those of us accustomed to a fairly clear party divide.

In fact, none of the normal rules seem to apply to the City of Melbourne. Unlike other levels of government and most of its local counterparts, Melbourne elects its top office-holder through a direct, popular vote. Tasmanians and Queenslanders are more practised at this kind of thing — they directly elect all their mayors — but in Victoria mayors are generally elected from and by councillors. The state’s only other exception has been the mayor of Geelong, though that city reverted to indirect elections last year after things went sideways under its colourful mayor Darryn Lyons.

Then there is a quirk in the franchise for Melbourne Council elections. Both residents and ratepayers get a vote — that much is common in Australia (except in democratic Queensland, which abolished the property franchise in 1921). Where Melbourne gets strange is that corporations or joint property holders get a second vote. That’s one vote for people and two votes for businesses — a system that only Melbourne and the City of Sydney enjoy. As a result, says poll-watcher Ben Raue, businesses and non-resident property holders make up a majority of the votes — as much as 60 per cent, leaving just 40 per cent for residents.

This eccentric system makes Melbourne closer to the old rotten boroughs of England than a proper representative democracy. One person, one vote is nowhere to be seen. Or perhaps, if we’re being more generous, it is more like a medieval republic, with trades and guilds rather than citizens electing the Doge. Indeed, in Sally Capp we have one of the most powerful local professions — the Sacred Order of Property Developers — standing its leader for the top job.

Is Melbourne’s electoral system simply a relic of the past? In some respects, yes. The bias to propertied interests, for instance, is as old as the city itself. From 1863, votes were doled out only to ratepayers, with extra votes apportioned depending on the value of their rateable property. Some residents ended up with three votes; many had none.

For decades, that system allowed larger businesses to dominate. But by the 1960s bracket creep had given a majority of electors the full three votes. After plural voting was abolished in 1969, the franchise stayed attached to property rather than residence, and ward boundaries systematically favoured business districts over residential ones. That was the case through to 1982, when John Cain’s Labor government attempted to democratise the council.

In 1982 — yes, 1982 — all residents over eighteen years could vote in the council’s elections for the first time. Labor also watered down the business vote, but never quite eliminated it altogether. At times it crept back through quiet tinkering with the regulations — changes to boundaries, enrolment obligations and so on. By 1993 the pendulum had swung nearly all the way back on the franchise, with Liberal premier Jeff Kennett restoring plural voting with the two-votes for business arrangement we know and love now.

Kennett went further. Though well known for controversially amalgamating most councils, his government actually made Melbourne’s smaller and more intensely focused on the CBD, carving off parts of the surrounding suburbs where the left-wing gentry dominated. The business bias was strengthened further in 1995 with automatic enrolment of two voters per company and fines for a failure to vote. Democracy-wise, Melbourne was almost back to square one.

If the property franchise is ancient, direct election of the lord mayor and his or her deputy is a modern flourish. Steve Bracks’s Labor government introduced this and other changes in 2001. After the third sacking of the council in eighteen years, Labor was seeking deeper reform of the electoral system. It abolished Melbourne’s wards and introduced proportional representation alongside the directly elected mayor and deputy.

The changes made for a very different kind of council election. The first of them, in 2001, shared some characteristics with Senate elections under full-preference group voting. If Antony Green was worried by the massive 2013 Senate ballot paper, nobody show him the 170-page booklet, with its ninety-seven candidates, that was posted to all voters in that first Melbourne City Council direct election. Without wards, candidates also had to run city-wide, high-spend campaigns to have any hope of getting into office — bigger campaigns than had ever been seen in local government elections.

Developer donations have poured into the council’s elections ever since — so much so that in its previous term the council couldn’t assess nearly a dozen major planning applications because a majority of councillors had received donations from the applicant. Despite the appearance of being more democratic, the 2001 reforms probably made Melbourne’s councillors even more beholden to vested interests.

Even with the council’s positively Dickensian franchise and an electoral system reliant on big donations, some people defend the status quo. Stephen Mayne, the Crikey founder who went on to sit on the council, argues that a change to a resident-only franchise would result in an unacceptably left-wing, anti-business council governing the corporate and financial centre of Victoria. Former lord mayor Robert Doyle has argued that taking votes away from businesses would violate the highest democratic principle of all: no taxation without representation.

The local Chamber of Commerce has also railed against any curbing of business votes. Businesses are simply too integral to the city, it says, to be deprived of a say. Indeed, this is the view enshrined in law by the City of Melbourne Act: because Melbourne has “capital city status” and serves many interests that don’t live in it, giving votes only to residents would deprive many of the city’s stakeholders from a say in its governance. Multiple votes for business is part of a balancing act that gives all the important segments of the city a say.

Perhaps. But this sounds a bit thin when we consider the fact that people who work in the CBD don’t get any votes, and they are the biggest users of the city, bar none. Expanding the franchise to even more non-residents is hardly going to be a popular rallying cry, and it’s not something I’m advocating here, but the idea directs us to the big question we should be asking when we look at this election: who owns Melbourne? Nearly a million people live, work, study or visit the City of Melbourne every day — that’s nearly a million people with some kind of claim on the place.

Some claims are stronger than others, of course. Of that near-million, many thousands are regional or international visitors. But many others consider themselves Melbournians, have a real stake in the city and the decisions being made about it, and can only watch, disheartened, as elections like the present one unfold. And what about the Wurundjeri, the original custodians of the land? Perhaps they should get a vote, regardless of residence? Or two votes. Or three. The only influence that they, along with the rest of Victoria, have on the council comes via the state government, which intervenes in city matters from time to time.

But it needs to be asked whether there is any legitimate role for a tiny, gerrymandered business fiefdom in the governance of a modern, democratic metropolis serving millions. The answer is surely no. Whether we get Sally Capp, Rohan Leppert or, somehow, lord mayor Sam Newman this May, let us hope that they will be the last sovereign of this very rotten borough. It is a system well and truly past its use-by date. ●

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Albanese has ambitions to be Labor prime minister — preferably the next one — and his behaviour should be viewed through this prism. But let us take this idea at face value.

On one of his proposed referendums, to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, Albo was vague. Mere symbolic recognition was rejected by the First Nations Constitutional Convention last year in favour of a voice to parliament. But the Turnbull government has already vetoed that, and while opposition leader Bill Shorten has expressed sympathy for the idea he has not pledged to take it to a national vote if he wins office.

Hence this Albanese contortion: “Aboriginal people have determined for themselves what they want to see with the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and consistent with that of course is recognition in the Constitution.”

Make of that what you can.

The other referendum topic (and you get the feeling this was tacked on as a sop to true believers) would be that durable piece of 1990s kitsch, an Australian republic. Labor policy is to hold a non-constitutional referendum (aka “plebiscite”) in its first term of government asking voters whether they support the general idea of a republic, and then, in the event of a Yes majority, to devise a model to put to constitutional referendum, so Albanese’s apparent desire to leap to stage two could be seen as problematic.

Holding referendums on Australia Day would throw up ready-made avenues for No campaigners along the lines of “Hands off/don’t politicise Australia Day!” and “This is the first step towards changing the flag/anthem/country!” And 26 January 2019 will be a Tuesday: we’re being dragged back from our four-day weekend for this?

Still, if we only considered potential downsides we’d never hold a referendum again about anything.

There is zero chance of this suggestion’s being taken up by the current Coalition government, but it’s very possible we’ll be living under a Labor regime this time next year, because a general election in the second half of 2018 remains a real possibility, despite Malcolm Turnbull’s ruling it out last month.

Let us suppose Labor is in government next January. The issue that Albanese sidestepped, what “recognition” would entail, would have to be dealt with. A minimalist model might receive Coalition support — but probably not, because Liberal opposition leaders are institutionally all but unable to support Labor government referendum proposals. And anyway, it’s already been rejected by Indigenous leaders.

The voice to parliament, on the other hand, would be met with a ferocious No campaign, from the Coalition and elsewhere. And organising that republic vote is difficult to envisage in such a short space of time.

One of the roadblocks to constitutional change in this country is the habit Australia’s policy and commentator class has fallen into of only contemplating holding referendums midterm. The obvious, cheaper, more convenient alternative, to put them with general elections, tends to be discounted because (so it is argued) any referendum will be overwhelmed by the frenetic struggle of policies, gaffes and horse-race commentary. People will end up ticking the referendum ballot having given it not a great deal of thought.

But that’s actually a reason to do it that way.

The broad history of Australian constitutional referendums is well-known. Of forty-four votes since Federation, only eight have passed. Another five attracted majority national support but failed to clear the double-majority hurdle. Labor governments were responsible for twenty-five, with one success, while conservative governments had seven wins from nineteen attempts. (That nineteen contains the anomalous 1999 vote on the republic and the preamble, not officially supported by the government.)

Labor government referendums almost never receive federal opposition support, even if the conservatives have, or will, put up the same proposal themselves. Labor oppositions, by contrast, have usually been on board with governments’ referendums.

Our first three referendums, one in 1906 and two in 1910, were held with general elections. Two received a popular thumbs up and the third came close (with a touch over 49 per cent national support). Then in 1911 a Labor government held two, midterm; they were soundly flogged, with a little under 40 per cent Yes vote each. At the 1913 election Labor put them again, split into six, and these also failed — but more respectably, each receiving between 49 and 50 per cent support. That’s been the general pattern of referendums lacking bipartisan support.

Overall, since 1901, twenty-three referendums held midterm have averaged 48.4 per cent support, while the twenty-one put with elections averaged 52.3 per cent.

Today we’re contemplating a Labor government’s attempt to amend the Constitution, and Labor-only numbers are more dramatic: the midterm ten averaged 37.9 per cent support; the fifteen with elections average 49.3 per cent.

The argument for holding referendums apart from elections tends to be that by avoiding partisan argy-bargy the issue can be calmly decided on its merits. This seriously represents hope over experience: Labor-held midterm referendums have always degenerated into rancour, misrepresentation and name-calling. (And much as you might like the result of last year’s same-sex marriage survey, that campaign shared those characteristics.)

And they’ve always led to a big defeat. Early opinion poll support for the Yes case collapses as it becomes something else: a national by-election, an avenue for channelling general resentment, an opportunity to give the government a bloody nose. Almost invariably, the fact of its being held midterm becomes a reason to vote against it. Why are they wasting taxpayers’ money on this, dragging us to the ballot box? (This dynamic could not apply to the marriage quality survey as it was No supporters who had insisted we go through this exercise.)

Some advocates of constitutional change seem partly to desire a replication of the experience of 1967, or rather received accounts of that. In reality, that “Aboriginals” referendum almost fifty-one years ago, with a huge 91 per cent Yes vote, was swamped in the campaign by its partner, which was seen as the main event but is now largely forgotten, the proposal to break the nexus between the House of Representatives and Senate numbers. (It went down, badly.)

There’s a lot to be said for voters’ not overthinking an issue. (As the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed this week, almost three-quarters of respondents to the same-sex marriage survey returned their form in the first week of the six week campaign.)

The only good reason for midterm referendums is that bipartisanship should, in theory, be easier to achieve. In practice, this too has been illusory, especially with Labor in office.

The most successful set of referendums put by a Labor government was with the 1946 election. One succeeded, the other two failed but received majority support. Labor’s worst bunch came in 1988, with all four receiving support in the thirties.

The assumption about midterm referendums needs rethinking. Some American states, for example, routinely hold referendums, constitutional, binding or indicative, with elections. Why wouldn’t you? It makes a lot of sense. Our parliamentarians grasped this at first, before developing bad habits.

There’s a backlog of constitutional issues Australia could take to the vote. The Indigenous voice to parliament, a republic, section 44, recognising local government. (I would add one to de-race the Constitution: in essence the changes that the “minimalist” Indigenous recognition would have entailed — get rid of section 21 and alter section 51xxvi so that it refers to something like “advancement of Indigenous people” rather than “race” — but I would not cast the proposal as anything to do with recognition.)

There would be others. Perhaps a preferential vote on options for the date of Australia Day. And they should be done at Labor’s first re-election attempt. The strategists will baulk — “one campaign at a time,” they’ll insist — but that applies to No campaigners too.

And history has shown the midterm alternative, again and again, ending in debacle.•

The post Are we overthinking referendums? appeared first on Inside Story.

Preference counts by the Electoral Commission of Queensland decisively torpedo the theory repeatedly advanced by the Australian — without any evidence — that One Nation’s decision to preference against sitting members in most seats cost the LNP the election.

The actual counts show that One Nation voters took little notice of their party’s how-to-vote card, if they ever saw it. But unlike last year’s federal election, when Pauline Hanson’s supporters split their preferences almost evenly between the two major parties, this election saw them consistently prefer the Coalition.

In the small number of seats where One Nation officially directed preferences to Labor, the election results show 58 per cent of its voters ignored the ticket, and instead gave their preferences to the LNP. Only 42 per cent went to Labor.

In the seats where the party directed preferences to the LNP, 68.5 per cent did so, while the other 31.5 per cent, almost one in three, preferenced Labor.

A 180-degree difference in voting directions made only a small difference to what voters did. The numbers imply that only one in ten One Nation voters followed the party ticket, with the other 90 per cent doing as they pleased.

Why? Queensland is a big state, and One Nation is a relatively small party; with 1669 polling booths to cover, many, maybe most, of its voters probably never saw its how-to-vote card. But even if they did, these voters are rebels against authority. They would not follow their party’s directions ahead of their own wishes — and they weren’t alone in that.

Every party saw large-scale defections from its how-to-vote cards. LNP voters are much more inclined to stay in line, but in the seats of Logan and Thuringowa, where party HQ directed them to preference Labor ahead of One Nation (because its candidates were seen as unsavoury), half of them preferenced One Nation anyway. In the seats where the LNP preferenced One Nation, almost 30 per cent of its voters rebelled. Labor preferenced the LNP over One Nation in every seat, but 35 per cent of its voters broke ranks to make Pauline Hanson’s party their second choice.

Mostly, One Nation voters backed the conservative side. In all, their preferences were distributed in forty seats, and most of those preferences ended up with the LNP in thirty-seven of them. The three exceptions were in Hinchinbrook, where they favoured Katter’s Australian Party; Noosa, where they went to independent Sandy Bolton; and Redlands, where 50.9 per cent went to Labor and 49.1 per cent to the LNP.

(Even that might understate the pro-LNP tendency. By the time One Nation preferences were distributed in Redlands, many came from voters whose first preference had gone to former LNP member Peter Dowling — the MP who lost preselection in 2014 after sending a woman a photo of his penis in a wine glass. Most of his supporters never accepted his dismissal by party HQ; it would be no surprise if they put his replacement last. It’s possible that most of One Nation’s own voters in Redlands put the LNP ahead of Labor.)

What is remarkable is that, despite a record 31 per cent of Queensland voting for minor parties and independents — 13.7 per cent for One Nation and 2.3 per cent for its electoral ally, Katter’s Australian Party, 10 per cent for the Greens, and almost 5 per cent for the rest — their preferences had very little impact on the outcome.

In all, the figures show that eighty-four of the ninety-three seats were won by the party that topped the poll on primary votes. Preferences changed the outcome in just nine seats:

● The LNP lost four (Aspley, Gaven, McConnel and Mansfield) to Labor on Green preferences, and one (Maiwar) to the Greens on Labor preferences.

● Labor lost two (Burdekin and Pumicestone) to the LNP on One Nation preferences, and one (Mirani) to One Nation on LNP preferences.

● The LNP lost Hinchinbrook to Katter’s Australian Party on preferences from Labor and One Nation alike.

In a first-past-the-post system, the LNP would have won three more seats, but Labor would still have won government, with a majority of one, and three friendly crossbenchers. This was an election in which preferences largely cancelled each other out.

One Nation came third behind the major parties in thirty-three seats and, overall, its voters gave 65 per cent of their preferences to the LNP. The Greens came third in twenty-seven seats, and its voters gave 76 per cent of their preferences to Labor.

In the three Brisbane seats the Australian claimed One Nation preferences “handed to Labor,” the results reveal that, in fact, 53.3 per cent of One Nation preferences went to the Coalition, 30.3 per cent to Labor and 16.3 per cent to the Greens. As 25 per cent of Green preferences then went to the LNP, it’s safe to say that the LNP ended up with at least 57.5 per cent of One Nation preferences in the three seats, and probably more.

Even in the north Queensland seat of Burdekin, where One Nation was officially directing preferences to Labor, 62 per cent of its voters preferenced the sitting LNP member Dale Last, allowing him to come from 1600 votes behind Labor to snatch a narrow win.

The really decisive figures in this election were the first-preference votes. Labor won 35.4 per cent of the votes, the LNP 33.7 per cent. More than anything else, that explains how Labor won the election. ●

The post Queensland: a final note on preferences appeared first on Inside Story.

The unusual nature of the survey campaign, being voluntary, postal, and led by coalitions who lacked the resources or structures of the major political parties, will also have influenced the nature and reception of the messaging. If you’re starting a long way behind, as the No side did, and are more limited than publicly funded political parties in what you can spend, it might make sense to target a promising group of voters who can be influenced by working through established organisations, networks and leaders. If many of those voters have a limited grasp of English or of the substance of the issues at stake, they might also be more receptive to the drawing of long bows about freedom of religion and the corruption of children that were the stock-in-trade of the No campaigners and their friends at the Australian. Yes campaigners, on the other hand, had good reason not to bother with those likely to be unconvertible, and rather to concentrate on persuading voters likely to say Yes, especially the young, to return their forms.

The political parties themselves seem to have played a negligible role, with even the party leaders rather marginal. Not a few of the well-paid politicians who normally pride themselves on being leaders in their communities look to me like they ran dead, and that applies to both sides of the debate.

But we will need to wait for closer analysis of the campaigns to see how they worked in practice. Political scientists and sociologists will be busy for quite some time yet.

Not surprisingly, the initial media analysis of the No vote has focused on Sydney, but it’s striking that two ethnically diverse Melbourne divisions, Bruce and Calwell, also produced solid No majorities. They have much in common with several of the western Sydney divisions. In Bruce, in Melbourne’s outer southeastern suburbs, the 2016 Census tells us that six out of every ten residents were born overseas and a language other than English was spoken in almost 58 per cent of households.

Calwell, at the other end of town, recorded the state’s lowest Yes vote, at 43.2 per cent. Sitting in the city’s ethnically diverse northwest and named after the architect of Australia’s postwar immigration program, 54.4 per cent of its residents were born in Australia, a much larger proportion than in Bruce, but six out of every ten have two overseas-born parents. Calwell, like Arthur himself, also appears to be very religious, at least if formal affiliation counts: around 57 per cent of its residents identified as Catholic (34 per cent), Muslim (17.7 per cent) or Eastern Orthodox (5.4 per cent).

In nearby Scullin, though, with a higher proportion again of Australian-born residents (57.7 per cent), fewer households speaking a language other than English (about half) and a lower proportion identifying an affiliation with the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches or Islam (around 46 per cent), the Yes vote was 53.4 per cent. That’s still well below the national and state average, but a majority nonetheless. Holt and Gorton — both Melbourne outer-suburban electorates with over half the population born overseas — also recorded small or bare Yes majorities. We perhaps find in all this a somewhat paler version of what came to pass in western Sydney.

Gentrified or gentrifying reas of Melbourne’s inner north with a longer history of ethnic diversity — much of the territory south of the Hipster Line (or Bell Street, as it is also known) — were bastions of Yes support. Wills recorded 70 per cent and Batman 71.2 per cent, both well above both national and state averages. Grayndler, an inner-western Sydney seat comparable with these in many respects, delivered almost 80 per cent.

Indeed, the inner metropolitan areas of the major cities voted overwhelmingly Yes, much as expected. More than four out of every five voters in Melbourne and Melbourne Ports, and similar numbers in Sydney and Wentworth, voted Yes, as did almost as many in Brisbane. It mattered nought whether a seat was safe Labor, safe Liberal or, in the case of Melbourne, Greens territory. Affluent Liberal-voting metropolitan seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane — even Tony Abbott’s Warringah — returned Yes votes in the seventies. But ethnically diverse Bennelong, with more than a fifth of the population claiming Chinese ancestry, recorded a slight No majority. Less than half the population there is Australian-born.

Hardly less interesting is the regional picture. Now, clearly, there are regionals and there are regionals. Most, these days, contain one or more sizable cities; many, especially on the coastal strip, have experienced drastic demographic change. We should hardly be surprised to find a seat such as Richmond on the north coast of New South Wales, with Byron Bay within its boundaries, producing a Yes vote just shy of 68 per cent, or nearby Page offering up 59.7 per cent. The urban divisions of the Hunter, the Illawarra, the New South Wales central coast, the Victorian goldfields and Geelong were overwhelmingly in favour. Wannon in Victoria’s Western District, a safe Liberal seat, more or less echoed the national average with a 61 per cent Yes.

Elsewhere, the Yes majorities in what are normally called “conservative” rural and regional seats were sometimes in the low to mid 50s: in New South Wales, this includes New England, Parkes, Riverina, Farrer and Lyne — all except Farrer (Sussan Ley, Liberal) being fairly solid National Party seats. The pattern of sometimes low but usually comfortable Yes majorities also occurs in Barker and Grey in South Australia, and O’Connor and Durack in Western Australia.

In compact Victoria, regional seats almost invariably contain one or more large regional cities. In a rare case where the cities and towns are smaller — such as the seat of Mallee (54.3 per cent) — the narrow Yes majority was similar to several ethnically diverse outer-suburban Labor seats of Melbourne. Much the same pattern emerged in Tasmania, where the most rural seats — Lyons and Braddon — recorded the smallest Yes majorities, being outdone by the seats based on Hobart, where the highest Yes vote in Tasmania occurred, and Launceston. Bass, based on Launceston, like Wannon in Victoria, almost precisely matched the national average Yes vote.

A small number of outback and regional Queensland seats rejected same-sex marriage: Maranoa, at 43.9 per cent, partly encompassing Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s old Kingaroy stomping ground; and Groom (49.2 per cent) in the Darling Downs, centred on Toowoomba. Both areas incorporate parts of southeast Queensland well known for the strength of their conservative Christian values — a kind of antipodean Bible belt. The sprawling northern Queensland seat of Kennedy, represented by Bob Katter, an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, recorded a Yes minority of 46.7 per cent, but Dawson was just over 55 per cent, and Leichhardt, represented by Liberal same-sex marriage advocate Warren Entsch, voted 63.4 per cent in favour.

It’s hard, in the case of Kennedy and Dawson at least, not to wonder about the role of the local member as an opinion-leader, although it is unclear where this would leave George Christensen, a No advocate, whose Dawson recorded that solid Yes. Perhaps some no-nonsense Liberal National Party voters regard his preoccupation with such “moral” issues with tolerant amusement. On this issue at least, his clout seems to have been limited, an experience familiar to several Labor MPs representing western Sydney electorates.

Before we get a sharper picture of what all this means, we will need more thorough analysis correlating survey voting with Census data, party allegiance and the like. It is nonetheless hard not to be impressed by the extent to which acceptance of same-sex marriage is a truly national phenomenon. Remember all that chatter back in the 1990s about a Melbourne-Sydney-Canberra triangle that was supposedly dominated by “elite” and “leftist” concerns remote from the rest of Australia? The patterns of Yes and No voting in the same-sex survey surely suggest something quite different. At the very least, the triangle looks very large and cumbersome, seemingly encompassing dozens of regional towns and cities across Australia.

There are perhaps two ways of looking at this change. A cynical attitude might be that Yes campaigners have been so successful in mainstreaming same-sex marriage — presenting LGBTI people as “pseudo-straight,” as one gay critic of the phenomenon recently put it, divorcing queer politics from its radical roots — that many conservatives are now willing to give it a tick. A more optimistic view might celebrate a significant expansion of our collective sense of what equality might mean in a modern democratic community.

I suspect that both readings are valid — that we are dealing here, as in so much democratic politics, with the eternal dance of sameness and difference. ●

The post Beyond the Hipster Line appeared first on Inside Story.

It was a campaign like no other, with no beginning, middle and end, at least as we usually experience them. By the time the Yes and No teams were shifting into second gear, it turned out most people had “voted.”

That 79.5 per cent turnout is higher than was roundly expected, and one explanation is that — hot on the heels of last year’s Census, and with voting generally compulsory — many recipients assumed that returning the forms was mandatory.

If we’re lucky, the Australian Bureau of Statistics will release results down to SA1 statistical units (of which there are some 58,000 across the country) which, combined with Census data, would provide a treasure trove for demographic analysis. In the meantime, we have data according to federal electoral district. This table shows those districts in order of Yes vote, colour-coded by state, and one of the standouts is the proportion of Labor-held seats that voted No. The bottom of the table is predominantly a who’s who of migrant-heavy western and southwestern Sydney electorates. Pollbludger has developed a useful tool for anyone who wants to check the major permutations.

Interestingly, the electorate most commonly obsessed over by the political class — outer-suburban Lindsay, one of the “whitest” in Sydney — recorded a comfortable 56.2 per cent Yes majority.

Opinion polls suggested that opponents of same-sex marriage were less likely to participate than supporters, which means that a compulsory ABS survey would probably have produced a smaller Yes vote, though still a majority. An actual ballot-box election, as was originally envisaged, would have given people weeks and weeks to think and overthink, with the outcome correspondingly less predictable.

Perhaps we need a conversation about the anti-progressive effect of compulsory voting, which sees the “not sures” end up voting no. And this applies not just to referendums but also to general elections.

Our next closely watched vote will be the by-election in Bennelong on 16 December, and unlike New England (where Barnaby Joyce is all but assured of victory) this will be at least contestable.

By-elections usually arise from resignation or death. Unless the former incumbent was only elected at the previous poll, his or her personal vote evaporates. In the case of a resignation, voters often direct resentment at that former MP’s party.

For these reasons and more, by-elections usually produce swings against governments. But the statistics are skewed by the fact that oppositions more often run in safe government-held seats than the other way around. On top of all that, with nothing of great importance — such as who will form government — at stake, electors generally feel able to vote from other motivations. Most often, the motivation will be to inflict pain on an arrogant government.

At time of writing, Liberal John Alexander is recontesting Bennelong. The last time an incumbent ran in this kind of by-election was in Lindsay in October 1996, after the Court of Disputed Returns found that newly elected Liberal Jackie Kelly had been ineligible to stand at the March election. The Howard government, barely six months old, was still riding high, Kelly enjoyed a sophomore surge, many Lindsay voters were cranky with Labor for pushing the issue that led to the by-election, and the upshot was a 5 per cent swing to the Liberals.

Eighteen years later, John Alexander is a popular MP, as his 10 per cent margin attests. To get an idea of how he has built a personal vote: he first became MP in 2010 with a 53.1 per cent two-party-preferred vote compared with NSW-wide Coalition support of 51.1 per cent, a gap of 2 per cent. Two elections later, in 2016, his vote was 59.7 versus state-wide Coalition support of 50.5, a 9 per cent gap.

Nevertheless, Labor’s recruitment of former NSW premier Kristina Keneally makes this a contest. Forget about her leading the NSW Labor Party to its worst election result ever in 2011: no helmsperson could have prevented that. Barely fifteen months in the premiership, she was not, unlike her party, widely loathed.

Yes, Eddie Obeid’s name will be brought up again and again over the coming weeks. Keneally is of the NSW Right, which generally indicates a linear, reductionist view of political strategy, and that seems reflected in her thinking. (In 2011, after losing office, she urged the Gillard government to announce that it had changed its mind again and would not, after all, be bringing in the “carbon tax” — about as diabolical a piece of political advice as can be imagined.)

Her presentation alongside Bill Shorten on Tuesday, while fine in content (this isn’t about John Alexander, it’s about the Turnbull government), came across as so much politics-speak, and not terribly sincere. And her explanation on Channel 10’s The Project for suddenly deleting her tweets was risible.

The Liberals will energetically dish dirt over the coming month. But Keneally obviously enjoys recognition and is, when she’s not reading a script, an appealing, talented communicator.

And this is not your run-of-the-mill by-election, because the future of the government may actually be in play. Just how that dynamic plays out is impossible to say. ●

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If recently polled primary-voting intentions were replicated on election day, either side could have a big win in the ninety-three-strong chamber. But One Nation, registering in the high teens in the polls, is in with a chance for several seats, and that makes a hung parliament less unlikely than hung parliaments usually are.

With such low combined major-party support (currently around 65 per cent) the pollsters’ two-party-preferred estimates are also more rubbery than usual — and at the last state election they turned out to have very high levels of elasticity.

The sky-high One Nation support makes preferences especially unpredictable. They will most likely favour the Liberal National Party overall, but by how much will depend on the party’s how-to-vote cards.

Last year the Palaszczuk government changed the voting system for the state’s single house from optional preferential voting, or OPV, back to full compulsory preferential. The last Labor premier, Anna Bligh, publicly contemplated the same move during her final term, and for the same reason: to ensure Greens votes returned to Labor via preferences.

Under OPV, around half of all voters didn’t number every square. When those ballot papers had a “1” next to a party that had no chance of being elected, they ended up “exhausting” — that is, not being part of the final two-candidate-preferred count.

The introduction of OPV in Queensland in 1992 made three-cornered contests (Labor versus Liberal versus National) even more damaging for the Coalition parties. To begin with, anyway. The growth in Greens support, and the amalgamation of the Liberal and National parties in 2008, changed that, and since then Labor has unquestionably been the casualty of the “O” in OPV.

Many tens of thousands of left-of-centre voters were putting a “1” next to Greens candidates and not allocating preferences. Labor’s decision to revert to the pre-1992 system, as cynical and undesirable as it was, made partisan sense on paper; if the 2015 election, for example, had run under the new rules, a Labor majority rather than a hung parliament would have been the likely result.

But the governor’s ink was barely dry on the legislation when One Nation staged a revival in Queensland. Whoops.

Because One Nation takes more support from the LNP than from Labor, its revival could have quite severely damaged the LNP if OPV had remained in operation. But CPV — compulsory preferential voting — came to opposition leader Tim Nicholls’s rescue!

Up to a point, at least. The result also depends on One Nation’s how-to-vote cards. If, for example, they preference the LNP across the board (and if the LNP doesn’t suffer collateral damage from an exchange of preferences), Nicholls’s Christmas will indeed have arrived a month early. One Nation will, in effect, have turned thousands of Labor votes (after preferences) into LNP ones.

Thanks to Labor’s how-to-vote cards, CPV also makes it less likely that One Nation will take seats from the LNP, or win seats from Labor that the LNP would otherwise have taken.

As a general rule, CPV is more advantageous than OPV for independents and minor parties (hence its easy passage through the hung parliament last year) because major parties routinely place them ahead of the opposing major party on their how-to-vote cards. CPV ensures no votes exhaust, thus assisting four of the five sitting crossbenchers who are running for re-election.

(Another way of looking at it is that CPV simply renders incomplete votes invalid. Watch out for a big jump in informality at this election.)

The exception to that rule is One Nation, the party of the other recontesting crossbencher. In Queensland and elsewhere, Labor puts its centre-right opponents ahead of One Nation on how-to-vote cards. In this way, CPV will damage One Nation’s chances in LNP–One Nation contests.

We don’t know what the LNP will do with One Nation on their how-to-vote cards. If the LNP does preference One Nation ahead of Labor in some electorates, and if its major opponent in those seats is Labor, then CPV will assist One Nation.

And if One Nation’s polling power endures until election day, the difference between its preferencing one side or the other in any electorate will probably make, on average, around a 2 per cent difference to two-party-preferred outcomes.

If election analysts are very lucky, One Nation will obligingly do all three — preferencing Labor in some electorates, LNP in some and neither in others, ideally in roughly equal numbers. But, as the WA Liberals found out in March, facilitating those friendly cards requires a delicate public balance.

If does all rather hurt the head. Betting markets currently favour the LNP somewhat, but that’ll chop and change with the opinion polls.

And then there is the matter of the next federal election, which Labor is odds-on to win. One of the unarguable dynamics of Australian politics is that state governments, loved or loathed, tend to drag down support for their federal party counterparts. At the last federal election, for example, Labor performed worst, swing-wise, in the two states where it had taken government after the 2013 federal contest — Victoria and Queensland.

If Annastacia Palaszczuk is still premier at the end of this year, that’ll be good news for the LNP’s chances of retaining its marginal federal seats at the next federal election. On draft redistribution boundaries, four electorates are held by the federal LNP by margins of 2 per cent or less.

One of those is Dickson, whose sitting member is one Peter Craig Dutton. An LNP win next month will bode poorly for his chances of survival beyond the next federal election.

The immigration minister tends to divide opinion, particularly among the political class. Mixed feelings might be the order of the night on 25 November. ●

The post Perplexing the poll-watchers appeared first on Inside Story.

The Liberal Party — and shadow special minister of state Bronwyn Bishop in particular — screamed blue murder, claiming direct enrolment would facilitate voter fraud. The argument never made any sense because automation works against attempts to manipulate the roll. In reality, the Coalition was opposed for the same reason Labor and the Greens quite liked the idea: voters who fall off the roll, or don’t get onto it, tend to lean to the left. The most obvious examples are young people, renters, students and those who move around a lot.

Regardless of Senator Bishop and her colleagues, the legislation passed in 2012 and direct enrolment cranked into operation.

And so, at the 2016 federal election four years later, the AEC could boast about the most comprehensive roll ever, or at least on record (no one has done the numbers for all elections back to 1901), at 95.1 per cent of estimated eligible population. This was up from 92.4 per cent at the 2013 elections and 90.9 per cent in 2010.

(That’s eligible people in Australia. Another million or so Australians abroad aren’t included in the total possible number, although the less than 100,000 of them who are on the roll are included. Yes, the calculations are a bit messy.)

The biggest improvement was among the young: some 86.7 per cent of eligibles were now on the roll, up from (my estimate of) 80 per cent at the 2010 election.

This week brought more news about enrolments. The AEC released “close of roll” figures for the Australian Bureau of Statistics’s same-sex marriage survey, and while they didn’t include eligibles, a back-of-napkin guesstimate produces a new record: 95.7 per cent comprehensiveness, with an 88.6 per cent eighteen-to-twenty-four component.

The AEC has released several sets of estimated roll completeness by age group in recent years, but only once for an election — in 2016. But polling day is when the quality of the roll really matters, and for this reason I have estimated, by projecting the AEC’s eligible numbers backwards, the participation rate at recent elections. These are the figures going back to 2007:

The most dramatic component of the graph is the meteoric rise of youngsters. Less expected is the dip in the next age group, twenty-five to thirty-nine, in 2010 and again 2013; possibly these were most affected by the previous one-sided use of government agency data described above.

So does a comprehensive electoral roll really spell doom and gloom for the Coalition? No. Claims that the missing voters would lean 60–40 to Labor were far-fetched: voters under twenty-five might be overrepresented among the unenrolled, but they are a minority of them. And despite the lift in enrolments, the ageing of the population means eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds account for a smaller proportion of the roll (10.6 per cent) than in 2007 (11.3 per cent). Meanwhile, the seventy-plus group has grown from 13.2 to 15.1 per cent.

There’s also the fact that last year’s record participation rate was accompanied by another quite dramatic development: the lowest “turnout” figure since the introduction of compulsory voting in 1924. Turnout as a proportion of a very healthy total roll dropped substantially, although as a percentage of eligible Australians it increased a little. A big chunk of those newly enrolled voters hadn’t bothered to vote. And as the AEC continues burrowing deeper into the remaining hard-to-get group, we can expect this pattern to continue.

In other words, as more and more people are dragged onto the list, often without their knowledge (the AEC sends them letters informing them of their enrolment, but who reads those?) we can expect fewer and fewer of them to participate on polling day.

And here’s another thing: it is believed that tens of thousands of Australians enrolled last month specifically so they could participate in the ABS survey. What proportion will vote at the next general election and future ones? How many are in for a rude shock in the form of a “please explain” letter from the commission, followed by a fine?

Once you’re on the roll it’s difficult to get off.

As the list improves, the number of people chased up for not voting grows exponentially. That’s a problem not just for the individuals concerned, but also for government authorities and the public purse. The solution, as I argued last year, is to eliminate the fines — that is, make voting voluntary. But that’s another topic. •

The post Are voters moving to the left? appeared first on Inside Story.

What started life as a stratagem to save prime minister Tony Abbott’s job has survived a change of prime minister and an election, its gratuitousness driving its dysfunction. Once conservative MPs began announcing that (a) it was imperative this plebiscite be held, yet (b) they personally wouldn’t be bound by the result in the subsequent parliamentary vote, it had devolved well into farce.

Yes, this fiasco is a waste of money, but at an estimated $120 million it’s not expensive as far as political stunts go. No doubt nasty, hurtful things will be said and written (and already are) but that would be the case, albeit to a lesser extent, if we were instead having the parliamentary vote.

Because this postal vote is being run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and is totally unrelated to the Commonwealth Electoral Act, a host of unknowns remain. See, for example, the questions in this Twitter thread.

For years, opinion polls have shown overwhelming public support for same-sex marriage, but these results should provide limited comfort to the “yes” campaign. Approving of something is one thing, voting for it can be another, and Australians have a long tradition of casting their ballots at referendums not on the topic itself but on other things — such as the fact that they’ve been asked to cast the vote.

This postal plebiscite is neither constitutional nor compulsory, and it is obviously unnecessary. But what of its voluntary nature?

As Antony Green has shown, twenty years ago older voters were much more likely to participate in the republic constitutional convention vote than young ones; a similar pattern today would obviously favour the “no” case. Calls to boycott, if followed, could make the difference.

Some commentators, such as blogger Kevin Bonham, point to opinion poll evidence that opponents of gay marriage tend to hold that position more strongly than supporters hold theirs, and so would be more likely to return a voting paper.

Perhaps. But far outweighing this factor is the dynamic evident at referendum after referendum (and other matters of policy — recall John Hewson’s 1991–93 GST proposal) for high early approval to deplete as crunch time approaches. As a policy is picked apart, its support peels away, and eventually the swollen group of undecided voters, along with those who don’t have a strong view one way or the other, or who are annoyed at being forced to make a decision, end up voting “no.”

Other states of mind can come to the fore: annoyance at having been dragged to the ballot box, suspicion of the government’s motives, a desire to inflict pain on those in power (or, as in the 1999 republic vote, on the “elites”).

Compulsory voting ensures that the cranky undecideds come out in force. So, as in 1988, you can approve of the idea that elections should be free and fair, but vote “no” (as more than 62 per cent did) to a referendum to enshrine it in the constitution because… well, to deliver a message to a mid-term, unpopular government.

All else being equal, I’d say that voluntary voting makes a referendum’s success more likely.

This time there is no official government position — but there is a Labor one, and Bill Shorten should perhaps exercise caution, because if he starts getting on people’s goat they might vote to shut him up. Same-sex marriage advocates will need to be careful not to condescend.

Most Australians are aware that Malcolm Turnbull didn’t want this, so you’d think there’d be little point punishing him. On the other hand, the fact that it is going ahead is symptomatic of weakness inside the party, which might be deserving of censure.

Maybe the brightest ray of hope for same sex-marriage supporters lies with Abbott, whose behaviour, in his desire to return to the top job, gets more absurd and delusional by the month. This week he rushed out to a press conference, evidently seeing this as an opportunity to showcase to his colleagues his supposed ferocious campaigning skills. Remember how I destroyed the Labor government, he seems to be saying, remember my “cut through.” Don’t you miss me?

If Abbott continues pushing himself to the front and centre of the campaign it may well impress the roughly 10 per cent of the electorate who remain his fans (and who will be voting “no” anyway) but the large bulk of the country will simply be reminded daily of why they couldn’t stand him in the first place. If this plebiscite becomes in any way about Abbott’s return to the top job, that can only help the “yes” case.

Anything but Tony back as PM!

Abbott may end up the same-sex marriage campaigners’ secret weapon.

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On the same day, another proposal was put to the Australian electorate. Unlike its Indigenous counterpart, this largely forgotten referendum was defeated by almost 60 per cent of voters, and the consequences of that vote persist to the present day.

Section 24 of the Constitution requires the number of members of the House of Representatives to be “as nearly as practicable, twice the number of senators.” Holt’s government wanted to remove that clause (the “nexus”) so it could increase the number of lower house seats without increasing upper house representation. (At the time, the 124 MHRs were roughly matched by sixty senators, ten from each state. The two mainland territories had no senators until 1975.) Given the amazing disparity in electorate sizes (some having four times the enrolment of others), a redistribution of the electoral boundaries was long overdue.

The plan to abolish the nexus had its origins eight years earlier in a recommendation of the 1959 report of the Joint Standing Committee on Constitutional Review, a body that gave a young Labor MP, Gough Whitlam, the chance to shine – and to develop thoughts on federalism and an enhanced role for the Commonwealth that he would later set about implementing as prime minister. But the change in the relative sizes of the two houses required a referendum to amend the Constitution.

Under Holt’s predecessor, Robert Menzies, the necessary legislation was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives in 1965. Such harmony was less forthcoming in the Senate, where the two Democratic Labor Party, or DLP, senators and a number of independent-minded government senators registered their opposition. There could never have been any doubt about how the DLP would react: the influence and status it gained from its representation in the Senate would be at risk if an increase in House numbers (where it could never hope to win seats) were not matched by an increase in upper house membership.

Among the Liberal opponents, the most vocal was the Tasmanian curmudgeon Reg Wright. Not overly concerned with Westminster norms, he frequently conveyed the impression that the Senate was the superior chamber in Australia’s bicameral system. Given that his state had ten senators and only five MHRs (and even the latter reflected a constitutionally guaranteed minimum rather than a population-based entitlement), his philosophy may even have had a gram of merit – for a Tasmanian. Three Liberal senators joined Wright in his opposition.

Also on the government side, two Country Party senators opposed the referendum. Although they had broken ranks with their parliamentary leadership, their stance also reflected reservations within their party organisation. At the heart of Country Party concerns was a fear that an enlarged House of Representatives would reduce the overall proportion of rural seats and enhance the Liberal Party’s prospects of governing in its own right – a status they came within two seats of securing in the 1966 election.

After succeeding Menzies as prime minister, Holt postponed the referendum on the grounds that pressure of business (a federal election was looming) would not allow the government to campaign properly, making defeat of the proposals more likely. This was certainly true in relation to the nexus proposal, though less so in relation to Aboriginal recognition.

Polls taken between early 1966 and May 1967 revealed substantial opposition to the plan to break the nexus, leaving its proponents with a formidable task. While all three supportive party leaders (Holt, McEwen and Whitlam) campaigned for the Yes case, Holt as prime minister was under most pressure. Anticipation of likely defeat may have made for less enthusiasm on the government side, whereas the No case was pursued with vigour by Wright, the DLP and sections of the press. Misleadingly, if predictably, they argued that a Yes vote would result in an increase in the number of parliamentarians. In a nation not renowned for holding politicians in high esteem, this was a sound strategy.

Holt and his allies had the more complex task of advocating the breaking of the nexus in order to limit future increases in the number of MPs to the lower house only. Delivered on ABC TV and radio a mere twelve days before voting day, the prime minister’s “campaign” address was almost a case study in how not to resurrect a struggling cause. Well over 1000 words of detailed argument would have driven all but the most avid of political tragics either to a commercial alternative or to the kettle. By contrast, Holt’s advocacy on the more popular Aboriginal question was just a few hundred words.

In addition to their anti-MPs theme, the No advocates argued that the status of the Senate must be preserved in order to protect the smaller states. Any evidence that the Senate had ever played such a role had always been minimal, but the claim may have had some appeal to voters outside New South Wales and Victoria.

A poll taken a week before the vote indicated a 51–33 advantage to the No side, with 16 per cent undecided. Polling day revealed that the undecideds had broken marginally with the No side for a national vote of 40.25 per cent for and 59.75 per cent against. New South Wales was the only state to record a majority (51 per cent) for the Yes side, and while it was no surprise that Tasmania (23 per cent) and Western Australia (29 per cent) most favoured the status quo, the votes of Victoria and Queensland, as judged by today’s political culture, seem anomalous. The latter recorded the second-highest Yes vote of 44 per cent. Perhaps the absence of an upper house in that state may have left voters less concerned about a strong Senate, but the explanation remains elusive. The Victorian vote (a low 31 per cent) seems even more curious, judged from today’s perspective, in which the state is seen as a long-term bastion of progressivism. South Australians voted 34 per cent in favour.

The loss had several consequences. For Holt, it was the start of a poor electoral sequence that took much of the gloss off his record victory in November 1966. The referendum would be followed by the loss of a government seat in the Corio by-election, a loss in the Capricornia by-election (a Labor seat that he foolishly declared he might win), and a vastly reduced Senate vote in November 1967. At the time of his death in December, Holt no longer represented a self-evident electoral plus for the government.

For political scientists, the result confirmed the dictum that for a successful referendum, the support of government and opposition is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The opposition of the DLP and a few government dissidents, supported by some sections of the press, was enough to carry the day. In this, they were assisted by the ease with which an anti-politicians theme could be pursued, even though the argument was essentially dishonest and misleading.

The anti-politicians theme would rear its head again in the 1999 referendum on whether Australia should become a republic. Opportunist monarchists manufactured common ground with those republicans who favoured a directly elected head of state and opposed the “minimalist” model on offer on the grounds that politicians would probably choose another politician or a member of the “elite.” Any vote that can be represented as giving politicians a beating seems close to a sure bet.

While the referendum result didn’t preclude future increases in the size of parliament, Holt accepted the outcome as a vote against any increase in House numbers for the immediate future. Indeed, three governments (McMahon, Whitlam and Fraser) would fall before the Hawke government legislated to enlarge the House by twenty-four in 1984. With the nexus still in place, this necessitated an increase of twelve in the number of senators – and a consequent reduction in the quota for election in both half-Senate and double dissolution elections. Various micro-party candidates who may have been unsuccessful under a higher quota have since been elected as a result.

The more famous of the two 27 May 1967 votes, meanwhile, deleted that part of section 51 that had prohibited the Commonwealth from making laws with respect to “the aboriginal people in any State,” along with section 127, which had precluded “aboriginal natives” from being counted in “reckoning the numbers of people” in Australia. The 91 per cent vote in support was a record not surpassed by any referendum since then. If an enhanced constitutional recognition proposal is put to the electorate at some future date, it will be interesting to see whether that high-water mark can be matched. •

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The problem isn’t the record low turnout rate among voters, although it’s related to that. The official House of Representatives figure for the 2016 election was 91.0 per cent, down from 93.2 per cent in 2013 and the lowest turnout since the introduction of compulsory voting in 1924.

Those numbers are misleading. Official turnout was low because of the excellent state of the electoral rolls, which are estimated by the Australian Electoral Commission to contain 95 per cent of people in the country eligible to vote – the most complete electoral roll in recent history and, possibly, since the first Commonwealth roll was constructed in 1902.

Turnout as a proportion of estimated eligible voters – as opposed to names on the roll – actually increased a little on 2013, from 86.2 to 86.4 per cent. This, due to the improved roll, was a very fine thing.

This figure points to the contradiction at the heart of our system. Both enrolment and voting are compulsory for Australian federal elections, but the AEC (and, as a rule, though with exceptions, its state and territory counterparts) doesn’t prosecute non-enrollers. That’s mainly to encourage past transgressors to get themselves on the roll.

That’s the twist: if you’re not on the roll, you don’t have to vote (and in fact aren’t able to), but if you are enrolled and don’t vote you are pursued by authorities and hit with a fine if you don’t recite an appropriate reason.

In 2012, faced with a long-deteriorating electoral list, the Gillard government introduced automatic enrolment – the AEC prefers “direct enrolment” – which gave the commission the ability to use data from other government agencies to enrol Australians or change voters’ enrolment details. (Previously, the AEC had been allowed to use that information only to take a person off the roll – if he or she moved house, for example. The AEC would also send an enrolment form to that person’s new address, but these increasingly ended up in the bin. This was the major reason the roll was not as full as it used to be.)

At the next election, in 2013, comprehensiveness improved a little, to an estimated 92.4 per cent of eligibles. But it was during the 2013–16 term that the AEC’s data-matching really began to grunt, and that led to the 95.0 per cent figure last year.

That’s terrific, because it enables more people to vote. Generally, at modern elections, hundreds of thousands attempt to vote only to find they aren’t enrolled. A fuller roll meant fewer of them were turned away. But it also produced a disproportionate jump in numbers on the roll who don’t vote.

That wouldn’t matter if non-voters weren’t pursued by the authorities. But after every election the AEC sends these enrolled non-voters a please-explain letter. As the commission explains in its submission to the parliamentary inquiry into the 2016 election:

[If] the elector has not provided valid and sufficient reason for not voting, the elector is required to pay an administrative penalty of $20. In cases where neither a response to the notice or payment is received by the due date, the matter may be referred to court. In these cases, the individual is liable to pay a maximum fine of $180 (plus court costs), and a criminal conviction may be recorded against them.

The AEC sent 969,586 of these non-voter letters last year. To describe this as a record doesn’t do it justice: it represented a 46 per cent increase over 2013. The AEC wrote that this “flows on from the lower overall voter turnout for the 2016 federal election.” But, as we know, turnout was not lower as a proportion of eligible voters, just of those enrolled.

In net terms, more than a third – around 38 per cent – of the people who were added to the electoral roll from 2013 to 2016 stayed at home. It should not surprise us that the closer the roll gets to 100 per cent (it will never get quite there), the smaller the proportion of the freshly enrolled who will exercise their obligation to vote. This “high-hanging fruit” will include many who don’t know they’re enrolled, don’t read AEC letters, can’t read or can’t read English, are estranged from mainstream society, have an ideological objection to being dragooned to the ballot box, don’t know what an election is, are mad, bad or live in a cave, or all of the above.

These people are also relatively likely to ignore those “please explain” letters.

The AEC’s submission noted that the 2016 leap in non-voting letters “has cost and workload implications for the AEC around mailing, assessment, and prosecution processes.” It will also clog up the courts. But of greatest concern is all those hundreds of thousands of Australians affected, disproportionately with low incomes. (For example, Indigenous Australians are overrepresented among both non-enrolled and non-voting enrolled.)

Why is Australia one of the small handful of advanced democracies to force its resident citizens to register a (formal or informal) vote? Compulsion was introduced for Commonwealth elections in 1924 (in Queensland, the first state to bring it in, 1915) predominantly to address the low turnout levels that had followed the replacement of first-past-the-post with preferential voting in 1918. (Compulsory enrolment arrived in 1912.)

That’s the short answer. The longer one – why this nation responded to low turnout in a manner most would not even contemplate – goes to our national DNA, a coincidence of the timing of European settlement with the currency of certain ideas in Britain. Australians, unlike Americans, traditionally look to government to build infrastructure and provide solutions, and if on occasion that involves telling us what to do for our own good, then so be it.

This mindset has thrown up good as well as bad outcomes, including in the electoral arena. The “Australian ballot,” or secret ballot, devised in Victoria in January 1856, is probably the most obvious of the good outcomes. The idea of the state supplying voting papers containing candidates’ names, free of charge, along with private polling booths and all other accessories, was roundly condemned back in London as expensive overreach. But it made the secret vote mandatory – all but eradicating coerced and bribed votes – and was being used across most of the democratic world by 1900.

In forcing electors to register a vote, however, we remain a freakish outlier. And as the electoral roll improves, the number of people harassed for non-voting will continue increasing exponentially.

Yes, the AEC will accept “I was looking after my suddenly sick mother” as an excuse without sending in a private investigator. But incentivising lying to the government is less than ideal. And the commission has better things to do and better ways to use resources than to chase escalating numbers of non-voters.

How should the AEC respond to this problem? By not taking its enrolment obligations seriously? Or should it start fining the unenrolled?

The best solution would be to make both enrolment and voting voluntary, while giving the AEC the capacity to maintain as comprehensive an electoral roll as feasible. Perhaps electors would be entitled to take themselves off the roll if they wished.

Voluntarism would undoubtedly see turnout plummet over time, which would not be desirable. But all policy choices involve trade-offs. One upside would be that, if turnout is an indicator of civic engagement – as it is routinely believed to be, internationally – we would finally get a realistic measure for this country.

Supporters of the status quo point to the American experience as a warning against scrapping compulsion, as if it’s the only country in the world that has voluntary voting. But there are dozens of other developed democracies to look at instead, including one very close by, with similar history to ours, across the Tasman. They seem to do okay.

Compulsory voting enjoys wide support in the community. Only the Coalition would attempt to get rid of it, and any move would be interpreted by the electorate with much cynicism.

That’s why it probably won’t happen. But it should. •

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If those figures were accurate, they would represent a high proportion of the total nineteen million turnout in those states. Strategically subtract five million votes across the three states and they all move to Trump’s side of the ledger. But the most important driver of the new estimate, of course, is the amount by which Clinton outpolled Trump across the nation: 2.9 million. The number of fraudulent votes needs to be bigger than that.

Being seen as the less-popular candidate obviously irks the new leader. Since the first American presidential election in 1788, only five vote-losers have emerged victorious. The 2016 losing margin of 2.1 per cent was second only to 3 per cent in 1876.

In Australia, we’ve had five such outcomes at the federal level since the emergence of the two-party system around 1910: in 1954, 1961, 1969, 1990 and 1998. (1940 could conceivably join that list; analyst David Barry estimates the national two-party-preferred split as 50–50.)

The most recent occurrence, the first re-election of the Howard government in 1998, holds the record, with Labor receiving 2 per cent more of the vote than the Coalition.

Addressing the National Press Club in the wash-up eighteen years ago, Liberal Party federal director Lynton Crosby explained that the ambition was to “win the most lower-house seats… that is what our campaign was geared towards.” If the goal had been to win “a majority of the two-party-preferred vote… then you would run a completely different campaign.”

Which is, of course, completely true. The campaigning action takes place in the electorates that might conceivably change hands, just as in the United States it’s all about the “swing states,” those that could go one way or the other. (State size, and hence electoral college votes, is also a factor.)

But Crosby’s implied assumption that the Coalition’s strategic prowess would have prevailed in a national vote contest is certainly open to question. Political commentators mostly propagate the mythology of the genius campaigner – the campaigner who can win the vital seats and avoid wasting resources elsewhere – but a lot of post hoc logic and back-scratching by party figures goes into constructing these legends.

After November’s US election, the president-elect made the Crosby argument with characteristic grandiosity. Leaving nothing to implication, he tweeted that “if the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily.”

The nature of the “popular” or “national” vote differs between our two countries. Australia has preferential voting; America uses what is, in effect, first-past-the-post in differently sized, weighted electorates. Voting is compulsory here and optional there, with obvious repercussions for turnout. Most importantly, ours is a parliamentary system.

In the US, voters choose from a list of individuals for the position of president. The electoral college, which technically chooses the president, was designed in part as insurance lest the electors select someone unacceptable. Today, that function is anachronistic; the winner-take-all rule in nearly all states, which delivers 100 per cent of electoral college votes on even a meagre plurality, is the chief potential distorter of results.

On this side of the Pacific, citizens vote, at least in theory, for local members rather than leaders, and the national party vote is a construct. Our original Constitution, and early electoral acts, contained no mention of parties, let alone leaders.

The two-party-preferred vote has been with us since preferential voting was introduced before the 1919 election, though it didn’t enter the popular consciousness until it was popularised by psephologist Malcolm Mackerras in the late 1960s. The national two-party-preferred vote shows the proportion of all voters who ranked Labor higher than the Coalition, versus those who did the opposite. Like the national popular vote in the US, it is of interest, but ultimately irrelevant to the outcome of an election under the current system.

Does it matter if the loser of the national vote emerges victorious? I believe it does. One vote, one value is supposed to be a tenet of fair elections. And, like it or not, the vast majority of electors are driven by support for a party rather than for their local candidate.

In the US, the solution would be reasonably straightforward: abolish the electoral college and move to direct election of presidents using first-past-the-post, two-round or preferential voting (what they call the “ranked ballot”).

The solution for Australia is not so obvious. Since 1991, South Australia’s Election District Boundaries Commission has had a legislative duty to take account of “fairness” in drawing up boundaries, with the aim of ensuring that the winner of the statewide vote emerges with the most House of Assembly seats. In this aspiration it has failed miserably: the current Labor government, in office since 2002, has only won the popular vote once at the past four elections. Most egregiously, Labor survived in 2014 with just 47 per cent of the vote to the Liberals’ 53 per cent.

There is one way to guarantee that all votes are counted equally, and to eradicate the fetishisation of particular electorates and demographics, and that’s by employing proportional representation for elections to the House of Representatives. As I’ve previously written, it would have the added likely benefit of addressing the inter-cameral gridlock that characterises modern Australian politics. •

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In this light, a small fragment of good news – the success of measures on the ballot in four states to increase the minimum wage – might not seem much comfort. Yet the consequence of the initiative victories is that 2.1 million of America’s poorest workers will receive a direct, substantial pay rise on 1 January 2017, weeks before Donald Trump is inaugurated. And workers who earn just above the minimum wage are likely to benefit from a flow-on effect. As Democrats face the daunting task of rebuilding, this small victory may be a good starting point.

Voters in Arizona, Colorado and Maine all approved measures that will lift the minimum wage to US$12 an hour by 2020. That’s A$15.91, or almost two dollars less than Australia’s minimum wage right now. But in Arizona, where the minimum stands at US$8.05, and Colorado, where it’s US$8.31, the ballot wins entail a pay increase of almost 50 per cent over four years. In Maine, where the minimum was US$7.50, it will constitute a 60 per cent rise.

The story of a retail worker like Brandy Staples in Phippsburg, Maine, is instructive. Staples currently works two part-time jobs as well as helping her parents with their business. “I still don’t make enough to get by,” she told Mainers for Fair Wages. “At this point I don’t even have any retirement savings. I also had a potentially fatal illness and a lot of my income in the past few years has gone to a huge chunk of medical expenses.” At present in Maine, a minimum-wage worker can toil forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, to end up with an annual salary of only US$15,000. For a worker like Staples, the wage win matters.

Washington State won an even higher raise: US$13.50 an hour by 2020. Under a previous law – itself the product of a citizen initiative – the minimum hourly rate would have ticked up on 1 January, keeping pace with inflation, to US$9.55. Now, instead of an extra 18 cents, low-wage workers will receive a pay rise of US$1.53 an hour in the new year. By 2020, the new minimum wage will be US$3.21 higher than if it had simply kept up with the cost of living. Some 730,000 workers across Washington State will directly benefit.

Washington and Arizona’s measures also guarantee workers five days of sick leave per year (three for workers in businesses with fewer than fifteen employees in Arizona). That will benefit the 45 per cent of Arizonan workers, almost a million people, who have had no access to paid sick leave at all. Desiree Favela, a single mother of three, says that the lack of sick leave meant putting off cancer surgery because she couldn’t afford the lost income. Twenty-seven-year-old Riann Norton, a single mother, says that missing work when her chronically ill daughter needs care is an expensive option. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a full paycheque,” she told Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families.

On top of the wins in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington, South Dakotans vetoed a bill that removed minimum-wage coverage for workers under eighteen, previously passed by their elected representatives.

Last week’s ballot measures were only the most recent in a string of minimum-wage victories in the United States this decade. The veto referendum in South Dakota came after a 2014 initiative raised the minimum wage. Low-wage workers in Alaska, Arkansas and Nebraska also won pay increases via ballot measures that year.

Fight for $15, the campaign begun by striking McDonald’s workers in New York City, has achieved what many dismissed as impossible. First, in 2015, they won US$15 an hour across the state’s fast food industry. Then, in April this year, New York governor Andrew Cuomo signed a US$15 minimum wage (plus twelve weeks of paid family leave) into state law.

On the same day, California governor Jerry Brown did a similar thing in his state. As recently as January, Brown had signalled his view that the state’s US$10 minimum wage was at the right level. “Raise the minimum wage too much,” he said, “and you put a lot of poor people out of work.” But faced with the likely success of a popular ballot initiative, Brown and Democrat legislators sat down with unions and hammered out a deal involving incremental increases in the minimum wage until it reaches US$15 in 2022. The ballot measure was withdrawn.

Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of The Fairness Project, which played a pivotal role in the victories on 8 November, argues that the “ballot initiative wins in 2016 mark a new moment in American politics where voters will no longer wait for politicians – who have failed them time and time again – to fix our broken economy.” Suzanne Wilson from Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families, the coalition behind the minimum-wage measure in Arizona, agrees. “The passing of this proposition,” she says, “speaks resoundingly to the power of direct democracy. More and more voters are seizing the opportunity to do on their own what politicians or parties cannot, or will not do.”

The ballot successes will surely also feed into the conversation Democrats will have about where they go from here. In the wake of Trump’s election, Bernie Sanders has argued that “millions of Americans registered a protest vote on Tuesday, expressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their own.” Arguably, the success of minimum-wage measures vindicates Sanders’s emphasis on the issue in the primary.

One of the most striking things about the measures is their success in traditionally conservative states. In Arizona, John McCain spoke out against the minimum-wage increase, saying, “I’ve talked to groups of franchisees here in Arizona, Taco Bell and McDonald’s… They cannot raise the cost of their product or people will stop purchasing it. So what are they going to do? They’re going to automate. So somebody is going to have to convince me that it’s good for employment in America, and I don’t think it is.” While Arizonans re-elected McCain to the Senate with a comfortable margin, almost 60 per cent disagreed with him on the minimum wage and endorsed Proposition 206.

Prior to 8 November, the Republican-controlled state legislature and Arizona governor Doug Ducey conspired in a scheme to punish cities like Tucson, Tempe and Flagstaff if they went ahead and created local minimum wages. They passed a law enabling the state government to withhold revenue from any city with regulations in “conflict” with state laws. At the same time as Arizonans quashed this effort to suppress the minimum wage, they re-elected Republican majorities to both the state house and senate. (Governor Ducey won’t be up for re-election until 2018.)

In South Dakota, the pattern was the same. Seventy-one per cent of voters vetoed a law reducing the minimum wage for workers under eighteen from US$8.50 to US$7.50, but a majority re-elected the legislators who had passed the law in the first place.

Elected representatives make a plethora of decisions, only some of which a majority of their constituents agree with. Direct democracy can compensate for this problem. But the success of minimum-wage measures in red states is also evidence that campaigns for economic fairness are increasingly attracting bipartisan support. In Arizona, Suzanne Wilson contends that “the discussion over minimum wage and paid sick days is something that resonates… regardless of party affiliation.”

For Democrats, citizen initiatives may be the only viable means of working around features of the electoral system that put them at a distinct disadvantage. With the winner of the popular vote again missing out on the presidency at this election, attorney-general Eric Holder has called for the abolition of the electoral college. That’s very, very unlikely to happen: the necessary two-thirds majorities in the House and the Senate, or in the state legislatures, to amend the constitution would require far too many Republicans to vote against their own interests.

A more plausible means of eliminating the pernicious effects of the electoral college is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPVIC. Under the compact, the electoral college remains but states change their laws specifying the manner of appointing electors, so that all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. The laws only come into force if and when states with a total of 270 electoral college votes have signed on to the compact; so far, ten states and Washington, DC, with a combined total of 165 electoral college votes, have passed such laws.

Citizen initiatives may be the only available means for Democrats to pull red states into the NPVIC. Equally, ballot measures that create nonpartisan electoral commissions, such as Proposition 20 (passed in California in 2010), are likely the most realistic means of combatting Republican gerrymandering.

This isn’t to say that winning ballot-initiative campaigns is easy. It’s not. The likely repeal of Obamacare was not the only health-policy setback on 8 November. In Colorado, a citizen-initiated measure to create a universal public healthcare scheme was voted down. While that result was anticipated, the failure of Proposition 61 in California was not. The measure, which would have regulated pharmaceutical prices, had been polling very well prior to election day. It’s hard to imagine that the US$100 million-plus spent by large pharmaceutical companies to defeat the measure didn’t have an impact. Still, the failure of a healthcare measure like this in California – a state far removed from the America that elected Donald Trump president – shows just how hard change is.

Minimum-wage wins in 2016 will undoubtedly inspire groups like Arizona Healthy Families and The Fairness Project to advance similar measures in 2017 and 2018. With the Republican trifecta of the presidency, Senate and House, along with twenty-five state-level Republican trifectas and thirty-three Republican governorships, progressives will have little choice but to make the most of one of the few tools they have left. •

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This time I arrived on the eve of the federal election. That was Malcolm Turnbull’s idea. The original plan was to spend the school holidays visiting friends who’d relocated from Melbourne to take up a job at the Australian National University. It’s a common story in Canberra. The ANU has been buying in smart people since it opened in the 1950s.

Before I left Melbourne I was telling people I’d be in the capital on election night, when the verdict came down. Instead, it’s been a little bit like my kids were in the back of the car for most of the drive. Are we there yet? Well, finally, with Bill Shorten conceding, it seems we just might be… sort of… almost… just a little bit longer. How about another game of “I spy”?

I first visited Canberra in the late 1980s when Parliament House, the new one, was straight out of the box. And it showed. I remember the tour guide as the proud type, beaming like a child at Christmas as she trotted out a list of impressive statistics about concrete and marble, and unprecedented feats of engineering and logistics.

I’ve been back and forth to Canberra for various reasons over the years, but like everybody else, it seems, most of the time it’s been for work. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says around a third of the ACT’s workforce is employed by the Commonwealth. After I spent a few days traipsing between national institutions across large open fields, it seemed fair to assume that a significant chunk of them are in the lawn-mowing department.

Canberra, and the ACT, took a while to get going. Named as the Federal Capital Territory in late 1909, its development was slowed down early on by the first world war. The federal parliament eventually moved there from Melbourne in 1927, with just enough time to get settled in before the Great Depression hit.

It wasn’t really until the late fifties and the sixties that Canberra got moving. In 1973, at last, people surpassed sheep as the most numerous inhabitants. Forty years later, the ABS reported that “the gap between the two counts has continued to widen in people’s favour to the present day.” The best thing about that statistic is we’re still counting the sheep. In any case, if they are considering a comeback any time soon, “the best-lit paddocks in Australia” look good to go.

While I’d taken the early voting option back in Melbourne, our Canberra hosts were using the traditional approach. Election morning was crisp and clear, with the temperature nudging minus 4. With a forecast of minus 1, the deficit was bigger, fittingly enough, than expected.

At North Ainslie Primary School, Christina Hobbs, the Greens Senate candidate for the ACT, was out braving the cold distributing how-to-vote cards. Ultimately, it would turn out to be a long and fruitless day for Hobbs. As the ACT Senate count winds down, the Greens are tracking to record a sizeable swing in the wrong direction.

With two of us planning to vote in style, we headed off to Old Parliament House, where they were expecting six thousand people with a sense of history to exercise their democratic right. Gough Whitlam once described it as a building devoid of any architectural distinction, and if anyone had earned the right to a critique it was Whitlam. He’d moved to Canberra as a schoolboy in 1927 when the place was opened and returned in 1952 to spend twenty-five years working there as the member for Werriwa.

Despite Gough’s assessment, if you’re into wood panelling and tight corridors this is the place for you. Now home to the Museum of Australian Democracy, it’s also a place for history buffs. After all, its walls and halls bore witness to sixty years of government spanning the Great Depression, the second world war, Korea, Vietnam and the cold war, as well as Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975.

I steered the children around for a couple of hours, wandering in and out of long-vacated offices, many of which had been carefully preserved, right down to open soft-drink cans and open diaries from the 1980s. As I checked out the prime ministerial suite, last occupied by Bob Hawke before the house moved up the hill in 1988, I lost sight of my daughter and her friend. I found them not long after in the cabinet room, alone but for each other, sitting up at the cabinet table doing word puzzles. They weren’t the first to sit at that table with a problem in front of them.

We took a break in the old Senate chamber, where the children found the comfortable red leather benches to their liking. As I sank low into a chair across the aisle from where the Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine used to sit, I imagined how difficult it must have been to stay awake at times, particularly after a long lunch.

I knew I was sitting across from Harradine’s old chair because the lady who was now sitting in it told me so. She was a tour guide who’d been working there since about 1980, so she said. She also said that Harradine was a prickly type. That wasn’t exactly news; barely three minutes of research into Harradine will tell anyone that. And then she said what everybody says when describing Harradine: “But he got a lot for Tasmania.” Indeed he did.

By the time we left Old Parliament House, we’d spent half a day within its walls. As I exited the building and stood on the spot where, more than forty years earlier, Gough Whitlam had delivered his famous broadside to John Kerr and his “cur,” Malcolm Fraser, I noticed that the line-up for the Rotary Club of Tuggeranong’s sausage sizzle was almost as long as the one inside to vote.

I didn’t join it though. I’ve long considered the cheap sausage to be a pyrrhic victory of sorts. You know the one: where the losses are so great on the path to the win that the win itself is fraught. That has an ominous ring to it, actually. It sounds like the sort of thing Malcolm Turnbull might just have experienced. •

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There is the added problem, applying to all of the above, that the smaller the total major-party primary vote, the more rubbery the estimated (or even measured) two-party-preferred support. Take this morning’s Newspoll, for example, which puts after-preference support at 50.5 to 49.5 in the Coalition’s favour, from primary Coalition support of 42 per cent, Labor 35 and Greens 10.

Breaking with convention, Newspoll has helpfully itemised most of the 13 per cent “others.” The Nick Xenophon Team is on 2 per cent, it says, and “Family First is polling 2 per cent, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the Christian Democratic Party and Australian Liberty Alliance are on 1 per cent each, while others make up 6 per cent.”

Given the right-wing leanings of all those parties except NXT, whose preference flow is utterly unknowable, 49.5 per cent looks, on the back of my napkin, optimistic for Labor. The answer is obviously in the other 6 per cent, based on flows at the last election. But 2013 saw a historically favourable preference flow to Labor, say 60–40 in total.

And if the national result does wash through to 50.5 to 49.5, there is no reason to expect a “close” result – however you define “close.” In 1987 the Hawke Labor government netted eighty-six (out of 148) House of Representatives seats with just 50.8 per cent of national two-party-preferred support. A little over a decade later, in 1998, a larger national vote, 51 per cent (51.1 if you slot in an estimate for Newcastle, where a candidate died and the election was postponed) hauled the party just sixty-seven (of 148).

Not being sure which side will win is also no reason to expect a close result, let alone a hung parliament.

This election (like most of them) has seen a record proportion of pre-poll votes, but fear not: thanks to legislative changes made six years ago, the bulk of them, probably around 90 per cent, will be counted tonight (or at least included in the count – some safe seats will be deprioritised). That’s not the case with the growing number of postal votes, likely to be around 10 per cent of turnout this time, which must have been popped in the mail by yesterday and don’t close for two more weeks.

The betting markets, meanwhile, which to varying degrees have always favoured this government to be re-elected, moved in two seemingly contradictory directions this week. Punters have become more certain of the outcome, but the expected size of the win has narrowed. Until the previous week the most favoured five-seat band for the Coalition haul was eighty-one to eighty-five; it has finished up on seventy-six to eighty (out of 150, the smallest that still constitutes a majority). Betting markets are not the wonderful predictors some people insist, but they do efficiently distil general expectations.

So, here’s what I reckon will happen in the House of Representatives tonight. Seats will move in both directions, as they usually do. (The most recent exceptions are 2013, 1998, 1996 and 1983.) NXT looks even-money to pick up at least one lower house seat in South Australia. (Does that sentence contain enough caveats?) Non-major party MPs Andrew Wilkie, Adam Bandt, Bob Katter and Cathy McGowan are each more likely to survive than not. (They are listed here in decreasing order of likelihood.) The Greens will... I have no idea what the Greens will achieve in the lower house. Batman and Higgins will be interesting.

And returning to South Australia briefly, a fourteen-year-old Labor government has at least the potential to cause problems for federal ALP sitting members. Add to that the high NXT support, with unpredictable preference flows, and South Australia is the “expect the unexpected” state.

(In addition, the AEC must choose, when counting, which two candidates to distribute preferences between. If it discovers it’s chosen the wrong two it will have to start again. So this may mean delays in some seats in South Australia.)

Back in March, I suggested an easy Coalition win was likely, with a mid-point of expectations at eighty-five seats. The public and leaked polls aren’t really pointing to this, but none of them are what they’re cracked up to be. And don’t forget the undecideds.

So I still reckon it’ll all wash through to a comfortable Coalition victory. And my best guess remains around 85 out of 150 seats.

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In the United States, where they’ve been at it in significant numbers for a while, they call it convenience voting. In the states where it’s available, it’s mostly designed to reduce barriers and motivate people to vote at all. In general, though, researchers have found it hard to pinpoint whether convenience voting lifts participation rates or whether it’s just an option taken up by those who were going to vote anyway. The evidence leans a bit towards the latter.

In Australia, that question is largely irrelevant; we have to vote. And it might as well be convenient. We do so much else to accommodate the time-poor lives we’re told we all lead – catch-up television, education, shopping, work – so why not do democracy at our leisure too?

Some pundits don’t like it. They say that those who go early cast their vote with less information than those who wait. They’re right, of course. Consider that the polling places opened on 14 June, three days before the third leader’s debate and more than a week before Labor officially launched its campaign. Consider, too, that the Liberal Party only launched its campaign at the weekend. A week is a long time in politics, and there’s plenty of time yet for Mark Latham to get involved or at least for someone to burst out of a radio studio with his patented campaign handshake and shed a vote or two.

The naysayers also worry about the fickle types among us, and the combined effect of opportunity and outrage. Perhaps you’re one of those nitpicky types. Perhaps you’re too principled for your own good. Perhaps you’ve just heard David Feeney has forgotten about a Northcote property he owns that’s worth a couple of million dollars. Perhaps you’ve just seen David Speers or Leigh Sales turn a hitherto political heavyweight into a quivering mess with a simple question about, I dunno, metadata or something. And perhaps you live a short walk from an early polling station. So you march in five minutes later to teach that buffoon a lesson. Have you really thought that one through?

Such fluid concerns, though, are really only the province of the swinging voter. For the rusted on, early voting makes a lot of sense. The queues are shorter, for one – and that seemed to be the principal reason among the voters in Fitzroy, at least. Though with the figures tracking at an historically large number of votes cast prior to Saturday, and from fewer polling stations, shorter queues are no guarantee.

Many also worry that going to the polls before election day means something more profound is lost: that we lose the ritual of the nation converging on our schools and our town and church halls, as one, to perform our most democratic duty. On this measure it might be the P&C associations and the local church and community groups that have the most to lose. Sausage sizzles and cake stalls across the country are staring at a large reduction in takings this Saturday. Perhaps they’ll pick up the slack at Bunnings, where the early voters will no doubt be swanning about unencumbered by urgent civic duties.

Early voting isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. You still need an excuse to do it. On that the rules are pretty clear. You must be eligible. If you’re going to be away on election day, or in prison, if you live in remote parts of the country, or are ill, working or indisposed in various other ways listed on the Electoral Commission’s website, then you can vote early.

Proving you’re in one of these categories is not necessarily the most onerous of tasks, however. When I early-voted – and yes, that’s a verb now – I was asked if I was eligible not why. “Yes,” I said. “Okay,” said the polling booth staffer, who then ticked me off the roll, handed me the ballot papers and directed me to the booths. I was in the car and on the way home in less than five minutes.

After the 2014 state election in Victoria, in which around 30 per cent of electors went to the polls before election day, the Palmer United Party candidate for the Northern Metropolitan Region, Maria Rigoni, sought to invalidate the election in the Victorian Supreme Court. She argued that the Victorian Electoral Commission was derelict in its duty when it failed to require early voters to make an explicit declaration of their eligibility. While Rigoni was unsuccessful both in the election and in the courts, her shot across the procedural bows appears to have scared no one at the Australian Electoral Commission – at least if straw polls at parties in Melbourne’s inner north are any guide. I was the only one surveyed who had even been asked if they were eligible. It turns out that I was the only one who had a valid reason, too.

While it’s not hard to see why many of us are attracted to the idea of early voting, it’s not as easy to see which party will benefit most. Given that the rise in popularity of early voting is no secret and that Turnbull called the election on a day when most of the nation is on school holidays, you would have to think that the Libs like the idea. They certainly don’t fear it; that much is clear. In any case, if a bird in the hand means anything then Turnbull should probably get as many votes in the box as possible before he loses any more skin in the personal approval ratings, particularly when Shorten keeps surprising people with his apparent talent for campaigning.

Returning to the question about who is taking the early-voting option and why, the speed of its uptake so far precludes a definitive answer. My Swinburne University colleague Nathaniel Reader says that there was a 300 per cent increase in early voting in Victorian state elections between 2006 and 2014. He suspects, like many others, that those who are voting early are the inner-city professional types from Melbourne and Sydney. On that point, though, like any good researcher, he also suspects that as the data piles up he may well be wrong. •

The post Early voting: the quiet electoral revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

Statistics like this contain several caveats. The number of eligible people is only an estimate. And the numerator – that 15.7 million – will certainly turn out to be padded: after every election, the AEC sends letters to people who didn’t vote asking them to please explain, and inevitably some of them no longer live at those addresses and need to be taken off the roll. This has traditionally meant a slump in the roll’s numbers about six months after the poll, although that slump has been less discernible in recent years.

Dwarfing that number are the roughly one million Australians living overseas, of whom just 27,000 were enrolled as of 31 May this year. Most of the rest couldn’t get onto the roll even if they wanted to (basically because if they don’t vote, or they allow their enrolment to lapse, they’re off the roll until they live here again) but many of them could. Yet while the 27,000 is included in the AEC’s 95.0 per cent, those other potential enrolments aren’t.

Once upon a time, in olde England, there was no electoral roll. Not many people had the right to vote; they all knew each other; and voting was open rather than secret. The 1832 Reform Act expanded voting rights and put in place a procedure for constructing an annual electoral list. People would hand in forms containing their name, address and qualification. Revisions courts would test any challenges.

So when Australia began holding colony-wide elections in the following decade, we inherited those arrangements. In South Australia they evolved into much more. The one-shilling registration fee was abolished and the government took greater responsibility for the roll, sending council workers and police out, on horseback, to deliver forms to households. With the world’s first permanent (part-time) electoral officials, a returning officer for each lower house seat, enrolment could be continuous, with forms handed in any time of the year.

After Federation in 1901, the South Australian model was adopted and the first Australia-wide electoral roll was compiled from scratch, again, largely by state police on horseback. In 1911 enrolment was made compulsory (voting followed suit in 1924) and in the 1970s the electoral office began habitation reviews, sending casual staff out to virtually every Australian address to check who was enrolled.

The AEC cut back on its home visits in 1999, replacing them with continuous roll update, which involved obtaining regular data from other government agencies and using that to identify who had moved. Continuous updating was very efficient, but its effect turned out to be lopsided: the commission could, on discovering that Jane Citizen had moved house, take her off the electoral roll for that address, but could not list her at her new address without receiving a filled-in and signed form. They sent these forms to voters at their new address, but increasingly the forms went straight into the rubbish bin. And many, particularly young, Australians just expect “the government” to update their details anyway.

The electoral commissioner before this one, Ed Killesteyn, pushed parliament hard to allow the AEC to change people’s details, or put them on the roll in the first place, without receiving that form. In other words, automatic enrolment and update (or, as the commission prefers, “direct” enrolment, because “automatic” might imply an absence of human intervention and discernment).

In 2012 the Gillard government, with Greens support in the Senate, legislated for Killesteyn’s plan in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Coalition, who claimed it would open the system up to abuse – an argument that made no sense at all because automation works against electoral fraud. The real reason the Liberals hated the idea was the same one Labor and the Greens rather liked it: the more comprehensive the roll (whether due to direct enrolment or simply to more engaged and motivated electors), the better for left-of-centre parties, because the people who tend to fall through the cracks – such as the young, renters, students and itinerant workers – tend to skew to the left.

But the extent of that benefit was obscenely overstated by the media – who can be relied on to opt for the dramatic story, particularly on a mundane topic such as enrolment – and even by some academics.

In any event, the AEC has been more conservative in directly enrolling people than, say, its NSW counterpart, and the data suggests that much of the improvement derives from the use of the online updating facility at the AEC’s website, introduced in its present form in 2013, which prevents people dropping off the list in the first place.

That might all sound fine, but does direct enrolment have drawbacks?

One argument is that it leads to a decrease in turnout, but that’s illusory. Yes, some people entered on the roll without their knowledge, or their consent, will continue to fail to vote but will now be counted as non-voters. So the number who turn out as a percentage of the roll will be smaller than it would otherwise have been. But as a percentage of eligible population, the turnout will rise because, in the past, hundreds of thousands have tried to vote and couldn’t because they weren’t on the roll.

In some countries, most of them in Europe, automatic enrolment is a corollary of national ID cards. In Germany, for example, enrolment is handled by local councils, whom residents must inform when they move address. Electors can opt off the roll if they wish.

The purpose of enrolment should be to help electors exercise their right to vote. In Australia, though, the discussion is muddied by that malformation in our arrangements, compulsion. (I’m not a fan.) In this context, direct enrolment can be cast as a heavy-handed way of forcing us to meet our obligations.

And to complicate things, the AEC fines people for not voting, but has not, since the 1980s, fined anyone for not enrolling. Yet compulsion discourages some long-term absentees from enrolling because they fear they’ll be punished for past misdeeds (despite the commission’s assurances otherwise).

And furthermore, thanks to direct enrolment, many Australians alienated from the political process, a lot of them poor, will for the first time be fined.

The worst aspect of compulsion is, well, the fact that it is enforced: that non-voting is followed up and penalised, disproportionately affecting disadvantaged Australians. Direct enrolment exacerbates this outcome. That’s its one drawback. •

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Election rules have long been prone to politicisation, but over the past decade this has become extreme, especially in states with Republican governors and legislatures. More states have passed laws pushing voters off electoral rolls than at any point since the Jim Crow era. More than fifty years after president Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, discrimination and flaws in the voting process have been shown to be deep and widespread.

The United States is one of only a handful of democracies whose constitution does not specifically deal with voting rights, and in practice this has meant there are no national rules for national elections. Enrolment, the provision and staffing of polling places, the design of the ballots, and the way votes are recorded and counted are all left to the states. Only some states allow independents to vote in Democrat and Republican primaries; some allow those who have been incarcerated to vote, others don’t.

Confusing and varying standards control which forms of identification are acceptable for registration and who can vote, and many states have made these requirements increasingly stringent. Voting always takes place on a work day, and a shortage of equipment and staff means that queues are often long. Early voting has become more widespread but there are often strict limitations on absentee and email voting. In some states people must come out to vote multiple times: committed New York voters, for instance, have presidential primaries on 19 April, federal primaries on 28 June, and state and local primaries on 13 September, all ahead of election day on 3 November. Small wonder that New York voter turnout is consistently among the lowest in the nation.

After the US civil war and the abolition of slavery, the 15th amendment to the constitution, which was ratified in 1870, prohibited states from denying (male) citizens the right to vote based on “race, colour or previous conditions of servitude.” Nevertheless, especially in the south, African Americans were often forced to take literacy tests, recite the constitution, or explain complex provisions of law. Poll taxes enacted in southern states between 1889 and 1910 also had the effect of disenfranchising many African Americans, along with poor whites, because payment of the tax was a prerequisite for voting.

Despite lobbying from civil rights leaders, the 1964 Civil Rights Act didn’t prohibit most forms of voting discrimination. But after the 1964 elections, in which Democrats gained overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate, President Johnson privately instructed his attorney-general to deal with the problem by drafting “the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act that you can devise.” A week after the March 1965 civil rights march on Selma, Johnson told a joint session of Congress that “the constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or colour. We have all sworn an oath before God to defend that constitution.” The bill was signed into law in August 1965 and has since been amended several times to strengthen its provisions.

Around the same time, in 1964, the 24th amendment to the constitution disallowed the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in federal elections. In 1966 this prohibition was extended to all elections by the Supreme Court, which ruled that such a tax violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the constitution.

These important legal changes didn’t eliminate the discrimination, but the most egregious instances were addressed by a provision of the Voting Rights Act that enabled the federal justice department to intervene when states were not acting in accordance with the law. These states included Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas, as well as some counties in California, Florida, New York and North Carolina.

More recently, problems with voting technologies and state political interference were highlighted by the Florida “hanging chads” debacle in 2000, which showed that even minor manipulations of election procedures can affect outcomes in close races. In its wake, Congress created the Election Assistance Commission to designvoluntary guidelines for voting systems, maintain a clearinghouse of information regarding election administration procedures, including testing and certification of election equipment, and make voting easier.

The Commission has been accused of being dominated by Republican interests, and it has certainly struggled to do its assigned work. In 2015 a report by the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice found that the US electoral system is headed for a crisis. The voting technology deployed by most states around the country is now so antiquated and unreliable that it is in danger of breaking down at any time. (Some states have even had to resort to eBay to buy spare parts for machines that are no longer manufactured.) Many states indicated they were unable to afford the needed new equipment. The jurisdictions with equipment reaching the end of its natural lifespan cover about forty million registered voters and account for 387 of the 538 electoral college votes that decide the presidency.

The reliance on mechanised forms of voting has other consequences, too. Many voting machines don’t allow voters to verify their vote before it is recorded; many votes are cast on touchscreens, most of which lack a means of verification; some machines have been shown not to record votes properly; and even new electronic machines can be hacked. Reports from Ohio in 2004 (where exit polls went to Kerry but the number of Bush votes in some counties exceeded the number of registered voters) found that problematic voting machines were purchased from a company with strong Republican links – the implication being that they were rigged. Demonstrations have shown that this is certainly easy enough to do.

Alongside these problems have been significant changes in electoral boundaries. Gerrymandering is not new, but in recent years Republican governors have used changes in electoral boundaries to help ensure Republican control of the House of Representatives. Over half the nation’s congressional districts have been redrawn to favour Republicans and only 10 per cent to favour Democrats. In Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, the efforts have been so extreme that the courts have intervened to ensure fairness.

All this is shocking enough, but there is worse. There is clear evidence in some states of concerted efforts to stop certain groups from voting. These were kickstarted after Republicans won a substantial number of state governorships and legislatures in 2010. There can be little doubt that the resulting changes to electoral processes are aimed at those population groups – African Americans, Hispanics, the poor and students – that are most likely to vote for Democrat candidates. The Brennan Center has found that the higher the 2008 increase in minority turnout, the more likely a state was to subsequently push laws cutting back on voter rights. Of the twelve states with the largest Hispanic populations in the 2010 census, nine have put new voting restrictions in place.

Putting such initiatives in place has been made much easier as a consequence of a 2013 Supreme Court decision. In the case Shelby County, Alabama v Holder, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 vote, held that a key part of the Voting Rights Act – the requirement that those states with histories of voting-related racial discrimination “pre-clear” any voting law changes with the federal Department of Justice – was invalid. Specifically, the majority opinion found that the remedy to reduce racial discrimination “must speak to current conditions,” implying that the discriminations that existed at the time the law was enacted do not exist today. This means that the Department of Justice now must wait for problematic laws to be enacted before it can intervene, and states like Texas and Arizona have been quick to act.

Some of these efforts have been done in the name of dealing with the problem of voter fraud. But in fact voter fraud is very rare and voter impersonation is nearly non-existent. Ongoing studies by the Brennan Center reveal most problems that have been identified as fraud are in fact unintentional mistakes by voters or election administrators. A common example is people who have voted early but, concerned about whether this vote will be counted, show up at the polling booth and are permitted to vote again.

In reality, ballot security initiatives suppress voting by creating unnecessary hurdles for eligible voters. Those that require identification such as passports or driving licences can be de facto poll taxes for those who are not well-off.

A recent study measuring the impact on voter turnout of strict voter identification laws in states like Texas, Georgia, Virginia and Wisconsin found a clear and significant dampening effect on minority turnout. In primary elections, these laws depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, African-American turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian-American turnout by 12.5 points. Similar effects are seen in general elections.

Given that minorities tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, it is not surprising that a key finding of this research was that Democrat turnout drops by an estimated 8.8 percentage points in general elections when strict photo identification laws are in place, compared to just 3.6 percentage points for Republicans. For those who identify as strongly liberal, the estimated drop in turnout in strict photo identification states is 7.9 percentage points. By contrast, strong conservatives actually vote at a slightly higher rate (up 4.8 points) in these states.

The primaries and caucuses in 2016 are the first voting procedures held under these new restrictive conditions and they serve to indicate how fraught the general elections will be. The list of problems to date includes:

• Maricopa County in Arizona, with a high population of Hispanics, had only one voting site for every 21,000 voters. Most counties averaged 2500 or fewer eligible voters per polling site.

• In multiple precincts in Georgia, Democrat voters were issued Republican ballots.

• More than half a million registered Texans didn’t have the correct identification to be able to vote in the Super Tuesday primary. Texas will accept a concealed carry permit for identification purposes but not a state-issued student card.

• In Wisconsin a second world war veteran was unable to vote because his veterans’ card was not accepted as sufficient identification.

• Native Americans on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona faced a drive of several hours to register and to vote, yet the state has just enacted legislation that makes it a felony to collect other people’s ballots and bring them to polls.

• Wisconsin shut down the “Souls to the Polls” drive organised by African-American churches by eliminating weekend early voting.

• More than three million people (including Donald Trump’s children), or 27 per cent of registered voters, couldn’t participate in the New York primary because they are not specifically registered as a Democrat or a Republican – and the deadline to make the necessary changes was October 2015.

Not surprisingly, lawsuits and actions abound. In 2012 and again in 2014 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People appealed to the UN Human Rights Commission over the erosion of voting rights. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the Ohio secretary of state on the grounds that over the past five years around two million people have been automatically removed from the voter rolls because they have not voted in recent federal elections.

The Democratic Party and the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are together suing the state of Arizona over voter access to the polls after thousands of residents waiting as long as five hours to vote in the presidential primary. Other challenges to new voting requirements are under way in Ohio and North Carolina.

Minority voters are growing in numbers and are increasingly likely to vote, despite all the hurdles. In 2016 nearly one-in-three eligible voters (31 per cent) will be Hispanic, African-American, Asian or from another racial or ethnic minority, up from 29 per cent in 2012. By 2050 it is predicted that the minority groups that helped elect President Obama in 2012 will be a majority of the American population, and the record number of Hispanics who voted in the 2012 presidential election will double within the next generation. There are more nasty battles ahead, but ultimately the demographics mean that these Republican tactics will falter and fail. •

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THE PARLIAMENTARY inquiry into the 2013 election is under way, and its report on the Senate voting system was released last week. In a highly charged political environment, the Australian Electoral Commission, and Australia’s voting system more generally, is under intense and not always disinterested scrutiny. Swinburne University of Technology political scientist Brian Costar talks to Inside Story’s podcast editor, Peter Clarke, about the issues. Also: the problems the government faces getting its budget through the Senate.

Listen here

The post Fixing the Senate appeared first on Inside Story.

They are part of the Electoral Amendment Reform Bill 2013 which, as the LNP has about 90 per cent of the seats in the state’s single house of parliament, stands an excellent chance of becoming law.

The press release is here and the bill here.

The Electoral Act as it currently stands here.

Guarding against impersonation has been a thorny issue ever since the evolution of mass voting. In the very old days, in the United Kingdom, there was no problem because only the wealthy few men could vote, everyone knew who they were and voting was open. There was not even a written electoral roll.

This changed with the 1832 “Reform Act” which among other things expanded voting rights and laid out the procedure for producing the first codified rolls. When the Australian colonies began holding elections from the 1840s (in NSW) this was the procedure they inherited.

The risk of “personation” (as it was called then and some purists insist on doing today), or at least the perception of a risk, was ever present. Voting certificates, which electors got from the government in advance, were tried from time to time but were a hassle and expensive.

Like much of the argy-bargy around aspects of vote-enabling, the argument has long divided along “left” and “right” (or “progressive” and “conservative”) lines. People who don’t have voter ID are more likely to be poor and are more likely to vote left-of-centre.

In America, where the states determine who and how people vote for national elections, a slew of Republican administrations introduced voter ID laws between 2010 and 2012. There are several variations, as you can see here.

Political parties spend too much time playing politics with matters like this, damaging the public’s trust in electoral processes for, in the end, very little partisan gain.

It’s the fact of people being disenfranchised that matters, not their political persuasion.

The simple logistics of organising fraud along such lines in any meaningful way make it untenable. The numbers required would be large, and it’s never known in advance which electorates will be the closest ones.

After South Australia’s 2010 election someone wrote a letter to the state’s electoral commission and a newspaper claiming to (along with their family) have cast 159 fraudulent votes. The full letter has not, as far as I know, ever been published; but the available excerpts can be found on pages EM47–48 of this JSCEM transcript.

He or she wrote they “did this simply by using careful research and planning. The research provided names of those who could not vote, would not be voting, or needed assistance to vote.”

Writing a letter is easy, and no proof of anything. As far as I know they didn’t provide the list of people they impersonated, which would have added weight to their claim.

Like anonymously claiming to have poisoned a product in a supermarket, it’s just a form of vandalism, anti-social behaviour.

(The letter claimed “Our activities may or may not have influenced the outcome of the election” but 159 votes could not have changed the overall result.)

I understand why some people have an instinctive desire for the system to be less lax around the question of identification. But there is always a a trade-off between ID requirements and robbing people of their right to vote.

The way some, including politicians, jumped on the South Australian letter as “evidence” for something was worrying, and people who knowingly overstate the “problem” and consciously encourage lack of trust in the electoral process deserve contempt.

Anyway, Queensland’s “acceptable forms of ID,” according to the press release, will be:

• Current driver licence
• Current Australian passport
• Voter identification letter issued by the ECQ [Electoral Commission of Queensland] • Recent account or notice issued by a public utility [or] • Identification card issued by the Commonwealth or a State as evidence of the person’s entitlement to a financial benefit (eg. a Commonwealth seniors health card, Medicare card, pensioner concession card).

According to the Attorney-General’s office, that letter from the ECQ would be a recent standard piece of correspondence from the commission, for example verifying that an elector who has moved residence has had their details changed.

So what does happen when a person gives a name to the official, and that name is on the roll, but the person doesn’t have appropriate ID?

They “will be required to make a declaration vote, similar to people who vote outside of their electorate on polling day”. That is, they will fill in and sign a declaration, and put it, and their filled-in ballot paper, in an envelope. The details will be checked and if all is well their vote will be counted.

The checking, presumably, will be of the signature, and perhaps date of birth. And that no one else has voted under that name.

Technically, this procedure doesn’t guard against the 2010 South Australian claimed fraud, but in reality the requirement to fill in a form, and interact more fully with an official, would be a strong disincentive.

It makes voting a bigger hassle for people without ID, which would be more of an issue under a voluntary voting system.

But, importantly, it requires no further action of the voter. That is, after they leave the polling station they don’t have to do anything more (which is not the case with, for example, provisional voting).

That, in my humble opinion, is fine thing.

Without more knowledge of the planned procedure, this legislation seems a reasonable compromise between inclusiveness and integrity.

It might even indicate the Queensland government is driven, in this particular change, by concerns about integrity and not simple partisan advantage.

Fancy that. •

The post Voter ID coming to Queensland appeared first on Inside Story.

In his book Stealing Elections, published in 2004, the American journalist John Fund made a claim that took on a life of its own. “At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.” The implication that American electoral laws were so lax that terrorists could cast a vote touched a nerve, and has since been repeated again and again by conservative politicians and commentators in the United States. But is it true?

Fund’s sentence captured the central argument of his book: that the electoral system in the United States is riddled with opportunities for fraud and tougher laws are needed to make it much harder to enrol. The same argument is often heard in Australia around election time, and was part of the thinking behind the Howard government’s controversial 2006 amendments to the Electoral Act, major parts of which were struck down by the High Court.

After Stealing Elections was published, a New York–based think tank, Demos, commissioned the political scientist Lorraine Minnite to assess the evidence about voter fraud in the United States. By now, John Fund was telling interviewers that eight of the hijackers not only could but did enrol to vote. Minnite found that Fund’s claim was based on a highly dubious foundation. Some of the 9/11 hijackers, it seems, had fraudulently acquired driver’s licences in Virginia and Florida. Under a bill signed into law by Bill Clinton, anyone applying for a driver’s licence is automatically offered the opportunity to make an application to register as a voter.

“But being presented with an opportunity to register does not make a person eligible to vote,” writes Minnite in her new book, The Myth of Voter Fraud. To register to vote, “any applicant would have had to affirmatively assert citizenship.” In theory, they could have made that assertion; in practice, it’s hard to see why they would have bothered. On top of that, an FBI representative told one of Minnite’s researchers that the agency’s own investigation had established that none of the hijackers was registered. But Fund’s claim about the link between two unrelated phenomena – the very real attacks on September 11 and the chimera of voter fraud – succeeded in promoting what Minnite calls “voter fraud politics.”

Why would Fund – and the people who have taken up his claim, and others who have long campaigned on the issue in America and elsewhere – want to make it more difficult for people to vote? In the United States, the answer is clear: the people most likely to be discouraged from voting by more stringent requirements are people who are least likely to support the Republican Party – particularly people on low incomes and or non-English-speaking backgrounds. In a country where voting isn’t compulsory, tighter rules mean that even larger numbers of potential voters can’t enrol and will never become part of the electoral process.

Then there is a whole class of Americans who are disenfranchised by routine operation of the justice system. Because of laws in most states preventing convicted felons from voting, an estimated 5.3 million people – including 13 per cent of black males – cannot vote. Four million of them have served their sentence and are back living in the community, but they might never be able to vote again because of state laws. With Afro-American voters favouring the Democratic Party at least eight-to-one, these laws have undoubtedly had an impact on the results of many US elections, including presidential elections. Despite reforms in some states, the overall number of Americans deprived of their voting rights in this way continues to rise.

Not only is voting voluntary in the United States, so too is registering as a voter. This means that no one knows the full number and distribution of eligible adults in each state, which makes the job of drawing up accurate electoral boundaries very difficult. And that job – “redistricting” as it’s called – is almost exclusively in the hands of state legislators and governors who represent political parties and have no qualms about fixing the boundaries to disadvantage their opponents. While a handful of states have bipartisan redistricting panels, none are non-partisan.

In most states the top electoral officials are elected representatives of political parties; they are permitted to design ballot papers to benefit their party’s candidates and, during and after the vote, they routinely make decisions that affect the results. In each of Florida and Ohio, for example – states crucial to the outcome of the presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 respectively – the top electoral official also served on the Bush–Cheney election committee.

Despite the best efforts of John Fund and other campaigners – including John Ashcroft, attorney-general in the Bush administration, and the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck – a five-year investigation initiated by George W. Bush unearthed a remarkably small number of offences, many of which proved to be errors made by people with poor English skills. Pressure on prosecutors to seek jail terms for alleged fraudsters resulted in the jailing of some people, including a woman on probation in Milwaukee, who mistakenly voted when they weren’t eligible.

If the inquiry had found “a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant,” Richard L. Hasen from the Loyola Law School told the New York Times. “But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.”

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t dubious practices affecting the outcomes of elections in the United States. But they are usually perpetrated by political parties, state and county governments, and associated organisations. As well as boundary rigging and other sharp practices, polling booths have in some cases been sited in such a way as to discourage certain groups of voters from casting their vote. In other cases curiously timed roadworks, suspiciously long queues and on-the-spot challenges to individuals’ right to vote have acted as strong disincentives.

Although Australia has among the best electoral administration machinery in the world – a national set of laws, free from political interference, run by the highly respected Australian Electoral Commission – we haven’t been immune to allegations that our system is vulnerable to fraudsters. But the quality of our system means that the evidence of fraud is even scarcer than it is in the United States. So scarce, in fact, that Curacao Fischer Catt often appears as the chief witness for the prosecution.

Mr Catt’s occupation was given as “pest exterminator” on his voter registration form and, as his name suggests, he was indeed a cat. In 1990 his owner successfully enrolled him to vote in the seat of Macquarie, and he even received a letter from the local member welcoming him to the electorate. This prank was in no way an attempt to influence an election outcome. And more importantly, the fact that this new voter wasn’t a human was picked up after the welcoming letter was returned to the MP and the Electoral Commission investigated. Yet this case turns up again and again in parliamentary debates, quoted frequently by Coalition MPs in defence of the Howard government’s contentious 2006 electoral reforms and, more recently, to justify their opposition to Labor’s attempts to increase the proportion of people who are enrolled.

Another, more serious, case of fraud involved not a state or federal election but three attempts to influence Labor Party preselection ballots in Queensland. Only party members who were on the electoral roll for the division could vote in the ballot, so a number of people fraudulently claimed to be living in Herbert in order to support their preferred candidate. The Electoral Commission staff processing their enrolment forms noted some irregularities and turned the evidence over to the federal police. Prosecutions were eventually made under the Crimes Act.

One of the three accused Labor members alleged that electoral fraud was widespread in Queensland, and an inquiry was held to probe four preselection ballots and one parliamentary by-election. “The information gathered during the inquiry clearly established that the practice of making consensual false enrolments to bolster the chances of specific candidates in preselections was regarded by some party members as a legitimate campaign tactic,” the inquiry concluded. “No evidence, however, was revealed indicating that the tactic had been generally used to influence the outcome of public elections.”

A final case also comes from Queensland. In last year’s state election Labor’s Steve Kilburn unexpectedly won the seat of Chatsworth, and by only seventy-four votes. The Liberal National Party alleged that some absentee ballots were fraudulent and threatened to challenge the result in the Supreme Court. Claims followed that deceased residents had voted, that there was widespread multiple voting and that Labor activists had impersonated voters. Given the intensity of this campaign, it came as a surprise when the barrister representing the unsuccessful candidate opened the case simply by drawing attention to administrative and clerical errors in the voting process. While a few people had “inadvertently” voted twice, he observed, there was “nothing sinister” about it. The judge detected fourteen clerical irregularities but concluded that the Electoral Commission had conducted the election “carefully and competently” – and increased Mr Kilburn’s winning margin from seventy-four votes to eighty-five.

And that’s about it. Scour the records and there are scarcely any other cases, real or alleged. When you consider how many voters there are in Australia, and how many elections, the evidence that the system is open to widespread fraud is remarkably thin. In fact, after conducting a detailed study of the integrity of the electoral roll in 2002, the Commonwealth auditor-general concluded that “overall, the Australian electoral roll is one of high integrity” and “can be relied on for electoral purposes.”

The reason fraud attempts aren’t more common isn’t hard to find. In order to rig an election result, a very large number of fraudulent voters would need to be concentrated in those parts of Australia that will determine who wins government. The conspirators would need to be able to predict in advance which seats they would be. As the pattern of voting in several states in last month’s federal election showed, making that prediction wouldn’t be easy. And yet the electoral fraud argument continues to be used in federal parliament to oppose measures (including later closing of the rolls) designed to allow as many eligible people as possible to enrol to vote.

The next big battle over electoral laws in Australia will be about what’s called “direct enrolment.” Currently, the Australian Electoral Commission can use the information it receives from various government agencies – Australia Post and Centrelink, for example – to strike people off the roll or to initiate a letter seeking an enrolment or a change of details. It can’t use that information, no matter how reliable, to enrol a voter or change details itself. In other words, it’s easier for the commission to remove people from the roll than to add them. As a result, an estimated 1.4 million eligible adults were missing from the roll when Australia voted on 21 August.

The NSW parliament (with all-party support) and the Victorian parliament have already passed legislation enabling their state electoral commissions to automatically enrol eligible individuals who come to their attention via information provided by government agencies. The commissions then send out a letter giving the voter the option of disputing or modifying the enrolment. It sounds simple, but the federal Coalition has already said it will oppose any attempt to introduce automatic enrolment federally.

In the current, highly polarised political atmosphere of the United States, it’s unlikely that the sweeping electoral reforms needed to modernise that country’s electoral system would win bipartisan support. In Australia we have a slightly greater chance that all parties in parliament, together with the independents, can calmly discuss how best to ensure that the maximum number of people vote at future elections. It would be a pity if the reform process didn’t get started until the new Senate takes its place next July. •

UPDATE: Federal parliament passed legislation in 2012 to allow the AEC to directly enrol and update the details of electors based on data from other government agencies.

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