Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
that the Centrist Conservative’s three most preferred candidates are automatically
elected. In closed list systems, parties and their members have a lot of control over
the selection of candidates, and we expect that candidates will react by focusing on
party members at the expense of their constituents (although little evidence exists
to support this hypothesis).
In an open party list system, voterscanvoteforwhichevercandidatetheylike
within a list. Often, open lists are randomised so that parties cannot indicate any
preference for individual candidates. Each vote – despite ostensibly being cast for
an individual candidate – is counted as a vote for the party first and the candidate
second. If the Centrist Conservatives win 30 per cent of the vote, they still win three
seats but the elected candidates are determined by the highest individual vote share.
The result is an outcome that prioritises parties over candidates, but does not give
parties total control over who is elected. Further, it makes elected representatives
accountable to voters, rather than just their parties; a candidate who is a favourite
ofpartyofficialswillnotbeelectedifvotersdonotknowthemordonotapprove
of them.
Beyond party-list systems, the other common means of electing consensual
governments is single transferable vote (STV). STV is used to elect the Australian
Senate, and variants of it are used to elect the ACT and Tasmanian governments.
The key feature of STV is that voters can rank individual candidates. Once a
candidate reaches a predetermined quota, any additional votes are transferred to
the candidates ranked second on each ballot paper. In the Australian Senate, the
quotaiscalculatedby:
The number of formal ballot papers cast
(Thenumberofsenatorstobeelected+one)roundeddown+one
Votes additional to this quota are transferred at a reduced value, calculated as:
Additional votes
Number of votes for candidate
As with preferential voting in majoritarian systems, the least popular candidate
is eliminated at the end of each round of counting. This candidate’s votes are
transferred to the next ranked candidates at the full value of the original vote (i.e.
onevote=onevote).TheformofSTVusedintheSenateisparticularlypartycentric:
candidates are grouped by the party that they are representing and listed
in the order predetermined by that party. Voters have the option of either ranking
individual candidates in the order they choose (see Figure 3) or (the much less timeconsuming
option) ranking the parties as groups of candidates and automatically
allocating their preferences per the parties’ predetermined candidate ranking
(Figure 4). Independent candidates can nominate for the Senate, and often choose
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