Australia's electoral system is broken, especially NSW's. Less than one in three NSW voters receive lower house representation, because of Australia's under-reported wasted vote problem.
While regarded with pride by many Australians, the country's voting system is deeply flawed, and results in massive amounts of wasted vote in every lower house election, federal or state.
For a while now, I’ve been drawing the ire of a lot of people for pointing out an inconvenient fact: Preferential voting doesn’t solve the problem of wasted vote.
Australians are often taught that their preferential voting system is something to be proud of. While it’s certainly a modest improvement on FPTP, is still suffers from fundamental design problems that subvert democracy and result in highly undemocratic, unrepresentative outcomes.
There’s a more detailed background in this post, but the short version is that while the preferential system helps stop votes being wasted in 3rd place or worse, the single-member winner-takes-all nature of electorates means that losing votes, and excess winning votes nevertheless become wasted votes, because they don’t receive any representation in the final result.
This means that most votes don’t get any representation in parliament at all.
This can sound unintuitive, but the underlying reasoning is familiar to anybody who understands the concept of “swing seats” in election campaigning. Parties don’t bother campaigning in safe seats because any additional votes they generate will likely be wasted.
This creates election results, again and again, that are indistinguishable from gerrymandering. The federal election saw Labor win over 50% of lower house seats with only 32% of the vote.
In the New South Wales lower house election, the situation is even worse than normal, due to optional preferential voting. Not only can votes be wasted by being losing votes or excess winning votes, they can also become “exhausted” votes - because these voters didn’t number every box, and because all the candidates they did number were eliminated in the “instant runoff” process, they receive no representation either.
I ran the numbers on the previous NSW election result: 11.5% of all votes were wasted via exhaustion, with a further 55.7% being wasted as losing/excess winning votes.
That’s a total of 67.3% wasted vote. In other words: More than 2/3rds of NSW lower house votes go wasted and unrepresented. And this doesn’t even include “partially wasted vote” where my first preference doesn’t get representation, only a much lower one.
That is a crisis of democracy by any reasonable definition.
What’s sad, is that the people that many Australians look to as election experts, don’t seem to care. In fact, they become very rude and aggressive when you make these critiques.
Australia’s in-club of psephology rude boys
There is an odd little subculture on twitter of election focused accounts and their followers. The main goals of this crowd seem to be:
being smug about knowing how preferential voting works
getting extremely mad if anybody uses terms they consider pejorative to Australia’s voting system (eg “wasted vote”, “gerrymandering”)
The main accounts involved here are the AEC official account, Antony Green, Kevin Bonham, and Ben Raue.
Here’s a very classic example:
I ask a perfectly reasonable question - for some reason (I guess the wasted vote mention), Antony is very pissed off by it and does a rude response. Cue hundreds of likes and “slay, kween” quote tweets from this subculture.
Quite a toxic dynamic. Antony Green and the AEC twitter account in particular have the official status and audience to highlight these problems - but for some reason, don’t care.
The stakes are high
Australia’s electoral system is bad. Its non-proportional, single member design subverts any sense of representative outcome or genuine creation of democratic mandate. It’s time our so-called experts acknowledged this, instead of being defensive about it for smugness points.