Preferences Funnel Votes Back to Major Parties

Australia’s voting system combines preferential voting with single-member electorates.

Preferential voting means that parties receive not only primary votes but also secondary votes, which are really votes for other parties. The ALP, for example, wins many seats thanks to voters whose first choice was the Greens, but whose votes are eventually awarded to the ALP after the preferencing process. From the perspective of one of these voters, it’s obviously better for their vote to be given to a lower-preference party than eliminated entirely, as it would be under a first-past-the-post system.

First-past-the-post voting — used in the United Kingdom and the United States — doesn’t have preferences and simplistically awards victory to the candidate with the highest raw total. But the problem is vote-splitting. If Australia used a first-past-the-post system, one more vote for the Greens would be one less vote for Labor.

In 2022, this would have meant victory for the Coalition, which actually won more votes nationwide with 35.7 percent. However, because of preferential voting, Labor won thanks to Greens preferences, because most Greens voters directed their preferences to Labor above the Coalition.

But while preferential voting solves this vote-splitting problem, when used in combination with single-member electorates, it nevertheless creates a mechanism that reinforces the two-party duopoly on power by funneling minor-party votes back to major ones. This is because with single-member electorates, only one candidate can be elected.

The result isn’t as undemocratic as with first-past-the-post systems. But it still grants victory, representation, and government to a minority while reinforcing the two-party system. In the 2022 Australian election, the major parties won only 65 percent of the vote. But thanks to the combination of preferential voting and single-member electorates, they won 89 percent of parliamentary seats.

After forming government thanks to a progressive bloc of voters to its left, the ALP has been free to completely ignore it when it comes to issues like Palestine or housing. Labor knows that because Greens voters are overwhelmingly left-wing, they will keep preferencing the ALP above the even worse Coalition. So Labor can take Greens votes for granted.

Most Votes Are Thrown Out

Worse, voting systems based on single-member electorates mean that a huge number of voters — including those who support the major parties — receive no representation in the lower house at all. Their votes are, in effect, wasted.

It’s often claimed that preferential voting eliminates the “wasted vote” problem — the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) even claims this in its public communications. Relative to first-past-the-post, that’s true. Preferences ensure that every vote participates in the final two-way count of votes to determine a seat’s winning candidate. But the losing votes are still then wasted, as those voters are awarded no representation in the final elected parliament. In fact, excess votes for the winning candidate are also wasted.

To understand how, consider an example electorate where ten thousand (valid) votes are cast. After preferences are taken into account, the final result is that Candidate A beats Candidate B by six thousand votes to four thousand.

This means votes for B are wasted because A won the seat and B did not. The final allocation of seats is the same as if the result was six thousand to zero. Which is to say, 40 percent of the electorate receive no representation. Equally, all extra winning votes for A — except for the very first one above 50 percent — are wasted. Winning a seat by a crushing majority results in the same outcome representation-wise as winning by a razor-thin single-vote majority.

So in this hypothetical electorate, 5,999 votes are wasted. This figure is made up of 4,000 votes for the losing candidate plus the 1,999 votes for the winner above the minimum amount needed for victory (5,001).

This hypothetical is typical. In the most recent federal election, around 59 percent of lower house votes were wasted; that is, 59 percent of voters were awarded no representation whatsoever in the final allocation of seats.

While not usually spoken about in these terms, the mathematics is intuitively obvious to anybody who has been involved in election campaigning or understands the concept of a swing seat or target seat. In terms of seats, it’s a waste of time to boost the winning margin of an already very safe seat or, if you’re the opposition, to reduce the losing margin in a very hostile seat.

Instead, parties target seats they think they can win, which turns (wasted) losing votes into (mostly unwasted) winning votes.

This means that election results depend as much on where voters live as much as on the overall number of votes a party receives. This gives an advantage to parties with high concentrations of voters in particular seats. Take the National Party, for example. Last election, it received only 3.6 percent of the vote. Despite this low vote, it won ten seats, and that’s because Nationals voters are highly concentrated in certain rural seats.

The Greens, by contrast, won 12 percent of the vote but only four lower house seats. That’s because Greens voters, although most heavily concentrated in inner-urban seats, are much more uniformly spread across the country. To put it another way, it took 52,000 votes for the Nationals to win one seat as compared to 448,000 votes per seat for the Greens.

Simply because of how Nationals voters are geographically clustered, Australia’s voting system effectively treats them as ten times as important as Greens voters.

Paradoxically, this system — born from a desire for local representation — instead creates powerful incentives for parties and their volunteers to focus their efforts on swing seats and ignore the rest. If you don’t happen to live in a key swing seat, campaigning by convincing your neighbors is next to useless. Instead, it makes more sense tactically for parties to send volunteers to distant swing seats to knock doors in areas they may be entirely unfamiliar with.

Worse still, this incentive continues once elected. Governments are tempted to shower swing seats with attention while neglecting the rest. This even has the power to shape entire cities. For instance, it has often been speculated that the route of Victorian Labor’s Suburban Rail Loop — announced weeks before the 2018 election — was chosen at least in part because it would run through swing seats.

Scrap the Layers and Make It Proportional

The most straightforward alternative is proportional representation. In a proportional electoral system, the more votes, the more seats. This way, it doesn’t matter if they’re concentrated in one suburb or drawn from around the country.

There are some big advantages to proportional electoral systems — they nearly eliminate wasted votes because they distribute seats based on totals that include all votes nationwide. Additional votes always go toward additional seats rather than being essentially thrown in the bin. They also ensure representation for minor parties whose voters would otherwise be too geographically dispersed to win a seat.

Supporters of Australia’s electoral system argue that it doesn’t matter that the House of Representatives (the lower house) isn’t elected proportionally because the Senate (the upper house) is. Government, however, is formed from the lower house. And anyway, the Senate isn’t elected on a nationwide proportional system. Rather, senators are elected on a state-by-state basis, with each state receiving the same number of senators despite population differences. This results in what’s known as malapportionment. Equal representation per state means that smaller states are overrepresented while larger states are underrepresented.

For example, there are 407,691 enrolled voters in Tasmania, Australia’s smallest state. In Victoria, there are 4,588,454. Both states, however, elect twelve senators. A Tasmanian senator represents 33,974 voters, while a Victorian senator represents 382,371.

That means the senate vote of one Tasmanian is worth just over eleven Victorian senate votes. It’s extremely undemocratic, and the US Senate has a similar problem.

The obvious solution is to abolish the Senate and elect the House of Representatives on a nationwide, proportional basis. Why do we need an upper house, anyway? New Zealand, for instance, has a single house of government.

Indeed, New Zealand’s electoral system (mostly) solves the wasted vote problem. Known as mixed member proportional (MMP), under New Zealand’s system, every voter receives two votes, one for an electorate and one for a party.

An important feature of the New Zealand–style MMP is that, while a voter’s electorate vote determines the local representative, the party vote is the much more important one as it determines the overall result. This is because a party that wins 20 percent of the party vote necessarily receives 20 percent of seats in parliament. And this is true even if it wins zero local electorates. In such cases, parties are awarded top-up seats called “list seats.”

As a disclaimer, this summary of New Zealand’s version of MMP leaves out a few technicalities for the sake of brevity. Nevertheless, it illustrates the point that New Zealand’s system results in a much more representative parliament. Indeed, as well as ensuring proportionality of the overall result, MMP means ballots are much simpler — all voters need to do is vote for a local candidate and a party.

The other key difference between Australia and New Zealand is that New Zealand doesn’t have state governments, only local and national. Local governments in New Zealand are much bigger and carry out many of the functions of state governments in Australia.

Consequently, there’s no real need for an MMP system federally in Australia — why retain local representation at the federal level when there’s already such an abundance of smaller-scale, localized government at the state and local levels? Instead, a unicameral federal parliament elected proportionately would be perfectly fair and extremely simple.

State governments also ought to have a single, proportional house. Adopting an MMP-style system for state parliaments would allow for some local representation at the state level while also making them much more representative.

Intentionally Wasting Votes Is a Kind of Corruption

Many people handwave away the nonproportionality or wasted vote problem in Australia’s voting systems as a benign oddity or a historical quirk. But this ignores the fact that the major parties routinely exploit these flaws to their advantage.

Consider the problem of gerrymandering, in which electoral boundaries are moved in order to redistribute voters into different seats for electoral advantage. Gerrymandering works by manipulating wasted votes to the advantage of the party redrawing electorate boundaries.

A party with a large majority in Electorate A might try to have the boundaries redrawn so that some of their excess winning voters are moved into the swing seat of Electorate B. This can help win the seat by converting wasted excess votes from Electorate A into useful votes in Electorate B. And this also converts wasted losing votes in Electorate B into winning votes in the process.

In Australia, gerrymandering in the typical sense is too difficult to be an effective strategy, largely because governments don’t directly define seat boundaries. Instead, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and similar state bodies determine the boundary lines on a relatively independent basis.

But major parties use other tricks to accomplish a similar result indirectly. For example, former Victorian ALP minister, Adem Somyurek — who was booted from the party for branch-stacking — brought in a series of reforms to local government elections. Previously, local governments were elected on a reasonably proportional basis, using larger multimember wards. Somyurek’s reforms — taking effect for the first time at this year’s local elections — switched many local governments to single-member wards.

Multimember wards (or electorates), whose representatives are determined roughly proportionally within each ward, ensure that fewer votes are wasted, especially for minor parties. In a single-member system, many more votes will end up in the wasted basket, making it easier for major parties to dominate local government with relatively slim minorities.

It’s the exact same mechanism as traditional gerrymandering, just more subtle, thanks to its veneer of neutrality. Instead of moving the boundaries of the seats, Somyurek accomplished the same thing by making them smaller.

Of course, federal and most state elections already use single-member electorates, and the ALP and Coalition already benefit from this legitimized form of gerrymandering. That’s why the Victorian Labor government wanted single-member local government wards — it was a way to disenfranchise minor parties by abolishing a version of proportionate representation.

Minor Parties Beget Minor Parties

Even with an ideal electoral system, capitalism itself undermines democracy. Like the rest of us, billionaires only get to vote once. But they can effectively buy millions of votes by funding candidates and campaigns — if not directly, then via media ownership. And this says nothing of the power of the major corporations that govern our working lives. Under capitalism, democracy will always be dysfunctional.

But Australia’s voting laws play a key reinforcing role in this dysfunction. Parties that win few seats are easily dismissed as minor, irrelevant, and unserious. That means a continual uphill battle of fewer votes, less media coverage, and less power for minor parties.

At the same time, the major parties can stack campaign finance laws in their favor by awarding themselves the lion’s share of public funding and by entirely exempting their main sources of cash from donor restrictions designed to sabotage grassroots campaigns. Even when growing numbers realize — correctly — that the game is rigged, the major parties happily continue to claim majorities and mandates far beyond their real support.

Nevertheless, a dodgy electoral system is part of the problem. And even many progressive voters and minor-party supporters fail to realize the extent of it, having been told by the media (and their social studies teachers) that the preferential nature of the voting system makes Australia’s system fair and democratic.

To meaningfully challenge the major-party stranglehold — and to build a genuine democracy — the Left also needs to challenge the electoral system itself.