'above-the-line' voting for the Australian Senate

[IH Farrow]

Gary Swing [SMTP:gwswing at ouray.cudenver.edu] wrote (in relation to 'above-the-line' voting in elections for Australian Senate):

>I find it very interesting that most voters would choose to cast a single
> vote for their party, rather than choosing individual candidates. Is this
> true in all party list systems where voters have an option of voting
> either for a pre-ordered list or selecting individual candidates of their
> own choice?

I suggest that part of the answer to this question is that the Australian Senate usually has a large number of candidates and groups contesting.  Details of candidates and groups nominating for the Australian Senate and the percentage using the 'above-the-line' system of voting at the Federal Election in 1996 are as follows:

			Seats	Cands	Grps	Ungrp	ATL
NSW			6	63	18	9	95.8%
Victoria			6	44	12	6	95.4%
Queensland		6	48	18	4	95.6%
Western Australia	6	29	  9	4	94.2%
South Australia		6	31	12	1	93.9%
Tasmania		6	19	  8	0	72.6%
ACT			2	14	  5	4	83.5%
NT			2	  7	  3	1	81.4%

Not only is voting compulsory in Australia, but in Federal elections the formal marking of the ballot papers requires an ordinal mark in every square - compulsory voting and compulsory preferences.  In other words, if a voter in NSW did not wish to use the 'above-the-line' system of marking the ballot paper, the voter would have had to number each of the 63 squares adjacent to the names of the candidates.  This was the situation prior to 1984, and most voters simply followed the 'how-to-vote' card advice distributed by party activists outside polling places.

The propensity of voters to use the abbreviated 'above-the-line' system is reasonably correlated with the number of candidates contesting and to some extent experience with STV proportional representation.  Note that Tasmania, with about 80 years of STV proportional representation experience for the House of Assembly, has the lowest percentage using the 'above-the-line' vote.

Australian Senate elections are (in my view mistakenly) regarded as being of lesser importance by voters than the House of Representatives.  With some exceptions, most voters would have difficulty in identifying more than one of the Senators that represents their State.  The party discipline in the Senate means that Senators are effectively ciphers for party decisions in any case.

Notwithstanding what I consider to be the deleterious effects of 'above-the-line' voting in enhancing the power of political parties, the fact is that a large majority of Australian voters appear to regard it as convenient.  A parallel phenomenon might be in the use of voting machines in United States elections.


Ian Farrow	
e-mail: 	ifarrow at aip.com.au
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