With a federal election on 2 July now looking pretty much inevitable, voters will need to know about recent changes to the Senate voting system.
These changes don’t affect voting for our local federal parliamentarians in the House of Representatives (the smaller, usually green, ballot paper).
However, Senate voting (on the larger, usually white, ballot paper) will now be quite different. Instead of having to number a single box above the line, or many boxes below the line, voters will now be asked to number at least six boxes above the line, or 12 boxes below it.
These changes replace the previous registered ticket system, where parties and groups with above-the-line boxes determined the distribution of Senate preferences, usually as a result of complex negotiations between them.
Due to gaming of the registered ticket system, which often produced odd preference flows that would surprise many voters, micro parties could get elected to the Senate with a tiny primary vote.
In the last Senate election, for example, the No.1 candidate on the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party’s Victorian Senate ticket, which achieved only 0.51% of the primary vote, was elected in this way.
Under the recent changes, voters themselves will directly control their Senate preferences, just as they do in House of Representative elections.
In practical terms, this means that instead of numbering a single box above the line on the Senate ballot paper, voters will indicate their own above-the-line preferences by numbering at least six such boxes in their order of preference.
If you vote above-the-line, when your ballot paper is counted your preferences will be allocated down each of the relevant groups in the order you indicate.
So, if the group to which you give your first above-the-line preference has six candidates, your preferences will be allocated in order down that group as though you had numbered it one to six below-the-line.
Then, the group to which you gave your second above-the-line preference will receive your next preferences.
If your first preference group had six candidates, the candidate heading the group to which you gave your second above-the-line preference would actually receive your seventh preference, and so on, proceeding down each group in the order you’ve indicated above-the-line.
In past Senate elections, the vast majority of voters have voted above-the-line, and this is still likely to be the case in the forthcoming election.
However, if you don’t want your preferences to be allocated to candidates in the order that they appear in their groups on the Senate ballot paper, you can instead vote below-the-line, where you will be asked to number at least 12 boxes.
If you do this, you can number candidates in any order you want, and your preferences will flow to the individual candidates in exactly the order you indicate.
In previous Senate elections, below-the-line voting carried some risk of inadvertent informality (which means the ballot paper couldn’t be counted), due to the high minimum number of candidates that a voter had to indicate, and the consequent risk of making an unintended error.
Under the new system, voting below-the-line will be much easier and less risky. It will be interesting to see how many more voters take up the below-the-line option in the coming election.
However you intend to vote, preferences often determine the outcome of elections, especially in the Senate, so if you want your vote to be fully effective, you should use the preference power you have.
Information on the new Senate voting system is available from the Australian Electoral Commission website, at http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/
