inclusive gregory

Time to Change the Electoral Act to Fix Faults in Senate Counting

When NSW Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi reached quota and was declared elected at this year’s Senate election, something very odd happened with her votes.

Faruqi’s total of 761,249 votes on election included 3,145 Coalition first preference votes. These votes had been distributed to Faruqi based on the preferences Coalition voters had written on their ballot papers. These Coalition votes represented just 0.4% of Faruqi’s total vote.

The quota for election was 712,405, so the next step in the count was to distributed Faruqi’s surplus of 48,889 votes.

At which point the count went weird.

Suddenly the number of Coalition first preference votes increased to 7,549, an inflation of 140%. Instead of Coalition votes representing 0.4% of Faruqi’s surplus, they represented 15.9%.

Of Faruqi’s total vote on election, 72.4% were first preference votes. But this was reduced to 61.0% in her surplus. On the distribution of Faruqi’s surplus, Green votes and preferences received from all other candidates were crowded out and replaced by Coalition votes. And those Coalition ballot papers that were worth 3,145 votes on receipt, suddenly became 7,549 votes when distributed as preferences.

Only two candidates remained in the count after Faruqi’s election, One Nation’s Warwick Stacey leading Labor’s Emilija Beljic in the race for the final seat. Preferences split 31,233 to Labor and 4,117 to One Nation with 13,539 votes exhausting. This narrowed Stacey’s eventual margin of victory over Beljic to just 17,326 votes or 0.35%.

The distortion in Faruqi’s surplus was not responsible for Beljic failing to pass Stacey. But everything we know about preference flows for Green and Liberal voters tells us that the final margin would have been narrower without the distortion.

The threat of this problem altering the result in close Senate contests remains. But why does it happen? In this post I’ll try to explain the problem and outline how the Electoral Act should be changed.Read More »Time to Change the Electoral Act to Fix Faults in Senate Counting

Inclusive Gregory – another serious problem with the Victorian Legislative Council’s Electoral System

My criticism of Group Voting Tickets at upper house elections is well known, but in the past I have also criticised the formula used at Senate and the Victorian Legislative Council elections to distribute surplus-to-quota preferences.

I’ll get into the technical detail of the problem inside the post, but the problem is that Victoria uses the “Inclusive Gregory (IG)” method to determine how to distribute surplus-to-quota preferences.

This method weights the transfer of surplus-to-quota votes in favour of parties that have already elected members, and weights against parties with no elected members.

Essentially ballot papers that have already played a part in electing members are given greater weight than ballot papers that have elected nobody.

I wrote about this problem back in 2014 when the use of IG resulted in the election of an extra Labor MLC for Northern Victoria Region ahead of a Country Alliance candidate.

And the problem has reared its head again in 2022 in the count for South-Eastern Metropolitan Region.

The output of my ABC Legislative Council Calculator for South-Eastern Metropolitan Region reveals the problem. (The problem currently appears as outlined below but may change with further counting.)

As it currently appears, after the election of the Legalise Cannabis candidate Rachel Payne, the IG method causes her surplus to massively over-represent Labor’s preference tickets and under-represent ballot papers for the Greens and Legalise Cannabis.

This over-representation brings Liberal Democrat David Limbrick close to winning the final seat, and the only reason Limbrick is even close to election is the distortion caused by the IG method.Read More »Inclusive Gregory – another serious problem with the Victorian Legislative Council’s Electoral System