Australian election: undemocratic voting system

Fair Vote Canada:

Australian election - yet another example of distorted results from winner-take-all voting

As Australians await the results on a few remaining swing seats, the election returns have already demonstrated, yet again, that winner-take-all voting systems have no place in 21st century democracies, said Fair Vote Canada, a national citizens’ campaign for voting system reform.

While Australia’s Liberal-National coalition received 44% of the votes and Labour only 38%, both will end up with about the same number of seats. Meanwhile, the Green Party, with more than 11% of the votes will have just one of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives.

Results in the Australian states are even more bizarre. In New South Wales, the Liberal-National Coalition won far more votes (45%) than Labour (37%), but Labour won far more seats (26) than the Liberal-National Coalition (20).

In Western Australia, the Coalition won 51% of the votes, but swept 11 of 14 seats. In Tasmania, Labour won all 4 seats with just 44% of the votes.

Australia is a particularly important case study in how voting systems affect results, because a proportional voting system is used for Senate elections. Forty of the Senate’s 76 seats were up for election.

In the Senate election, the Greens won 6 of the 40 seats being contested, which better reflects their level of support among voters – compared to the 1 seat out of 150 in the House of Representatives provided by the winner-take-all voting system.

Australia uses the Alternative Vote to elect its House of Representatives. Like Canada, one MP is elected in each district. But unlike Canada, voters rank candidates. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the lowest candidate is dropped and those ballots are assigned to the second choices, and so on, until one candidate has a majority of ballots.

“As the Australia results illustrate, this winner-take-all voting system creates the same key problems as Canada’s first-past-the-post system,” said Bronwen Bruch, President of Fair Vote Canada, an electoral reform organization. “Results are distorted and many voters do not get the representation they desire.”

“Politics have changed in Canada, the UK and Australia. Voters want more than two parties. They want representative parliaments and accountable politicians. That’s why Canada needs to scrap winner-take-all voting now and adopt a fair and proportional voting system”, said Larry Gordon, Executive Director of Fair Vote Canada.