Electile Dysfunction

The NSW state elections, which I’ve mentioned before, were held on Saturday. The polling stations were open from 8am until 6pm. I initially thought that was odd, and wondered how workers would be able to vote, until I realised that this wasn’t such an issue when the election is on Saturday, as opposed to stupidly holding elections on Thursday as we do in the UK.

It’s compulsory to vote in Australia, and you can be fined for failing to vote. Not sure how I feel about that: it seems a bit harsh, but then again it would mean you don’t have elections with pitifully low turnouts (UK again!)

I won’t keep you in suspense any longer: The Labour party and Bob Carr – the incumbent state premier – won. John Brogden and his Liberals (Tories) lost ground and were worse off after than they were before (Don Bob shuts John’s Gob). This is, apparently, surprising and bad for the Liberals, who claimed a moral victory all the same (naturally).

So Bob Carr, beginning his third term in office, is on the way to becoming the longest serving state premier ever.

Many of the results were announced by 9pm – I guess they counted as the day went along, rather than closing the polling stations and the starting the count. They announce before all votes are counted – even on Monday morning when the results were in the paper they stated that only 80% of votes had been counted in some constituencies. Weird huh?

Voting is a little complicated. They have a preference voting system, so you number your candidates in order of preference, with your favourite candidate getting a number 1 next to their name. You have to fill in 1 to 16, and may go on to fill the sheet. With the ridiculous number of candidates here that can go on to nearly 300 in some places, and quite a few people fill the sheet! (I think the rules have changed to reduce the number of candidates recently – last time the ballot papers were so big they became known as “tablecloth ballots”!)

On counting, candidates are knocked out when they have the fewest votes, and the votes for that candidate are re-allocated to the next candidate on those ballot papers (the number 2s). This process continues until there are only two candidates left, and then whichever gets more than 50% wins. This can lead to a candidate who wins on Number 1 votes (but gets less than 50% of the total) losing the election – as I notice happened did in Manly on Saturday (click on link to see what I mean).

I know that no voting system is seen as perfect, but that must be a real downer for the loser! I guess it would stop the situation where a left-wing “issue” candidate with no hope of winning takes votes away from a Labour candidate and lets the Tories in, for example.

Anyway, this may seem a little dry but it’s quite interesting to watch an election taking place in a foreign country. Even if it is only Australia, which hardly seems foreign at all sometimes.