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Nov. 24th, 2007 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringElection day today. DS gets to vote for the first time. I suspect that instead of my wife and I cancelling each other's votes out, that I shall be outvoted 3 to 1. Ahh, democracy!
Wouldn't have it any other way. It's days like this one that I love my fellow humans most of all, I think. It doesn't matter who you are, when they spread the ballot papers out on the tables and put them into piles, the vote of the millionaire has exactly the same value as the vote of the chap sleeping under the bridge.
Nobody asks why or how you are voting, or whether you have thought long and hard over the policies or you just think one candidate's eyes are too close together and he can't be a good'un. You just turn up and vote.
If I have a beef, it's that we don't get enough democracy. There's a move towards four year terms, and that's too long. I like having more chances to chuck the bastards out, rather than fewer. I also don't like "above the line" voting. Gives the parties too many chances to direct votes the way they want, rather than the way the voter would have it.
To my overseas friends, a few words. First of all, attendance at a polling booth is mandatory, and enforced by the courts. If you don't turn up and get your name checked off, they come and ask you why you didn't vote, and if you don't have a good excuse, you will be fined. Admittedly, you don't have to actually vote, and almost any excuse is accepted unless it's obviously spurious.
But the end result is that people are incentivated to turn up, and once they turn up, they might as well vote. So the politicians have to pitch their policies at everybody, and that includes the apathetic, the indigent, the hopeless and the lame, as well as more solid citizens. I was appalled when I visited Washington and saw people sleeping in the snow. A marble monument is somebody's home, so long as the design incorporates a flat surface and some protection.
I won't say that we have no homeless here, but generally in Australia, if somebody is living rough it's because they prefer it, not because they have no alternative. Mind you, we don't have a socialist nanny state, and people on the bottom do it tough. But nor do we have powerless people sleeping in the snow.
Second is the "Australian vote". One of my heroes is Catherine Helen Spence, the grand old lady of Australian federation. She was a big advocate of what she called effective voting, which is to say preferential. In other countries, if you have five candidates on the ballot, and they get votes A = 100 votes, B = 200 votes, C = 300 votes, D = 400 votes, E = 500 votes, it is candidate E who wins because he has 100 votes more than anyone else. Mind you, there's 1 000 votes for other candidates, so he's only got 33.3% support, but he still wins.
In Australia, we can give preference votes, ranking the candidates in our order of preference. So we can put a number against each candidate, A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, D = 4, E = 5. If candidate A is found to have the lowest number of votes after counting, then candidate A is eliminated, and each of those ballots is examined to see who has the number two preference. In my example above, candidate B gets the next preference, and their total goes up by one, the vote being passed on at full value. If candidate B is next eliminated, the preferences are again distributed, and candidate C will get an additional vote.
This process continues until one candidate has more than 50% of the total number of votes and is declared the winner. The winning candidate might not be everyone's first choice, but they are the one that most people prefer. Candidates with high minority support cannot win by exploiting the division of their several opponents. A vote for a minor candidate is not wasted. You can vote Green, knowing that the Green candidate is unlikely to win, and give the Democrat candidate your second preference. You might not want the Democrat as your representative, but you prefer her to the Republican.
Or whatever.
I can't pick the winner of this election. Howard has won four elections and is getting on a bit. Rudd is inexperienced, but is inoffensive. Rudd has been well ahead in the polls for the last year. My problem with Rudd winning is that no Labor leader has won from opposition without they have been a man of considerable charisma, and the best you can say for Rudd is that he smiles a lot. In political terms, I see Howard as a fox and Rudd as a goose, and while Rudd might seem to have a lot of support, it may be that that support is in the wrong places. It's no good winning a third of the seats with 75% support if you have 49% support in the remaining two-thirds.
We'll see tonight. My pick is for a Howard victory, though I think the outcome will hinge on a handful of seats that will be too close to call on the night.
I plan on driving in the afternoon and taking a few slow hours off from (say) seven to ten to channel surf and see how it's going, then spend the rest of the shift ferrying home the drunks. It's a full moon tonight, and I can see a lot of strong emotions being unleashed. Possibly some of them may be mine.
Wouldn't have it any other way. It's days like this one that I love my fellow humans most of all, I think. It doesn't matter who you are, when they spread the ballot papers out on the tables and put them into piles, the vote of the millionaire has exactly the same value as the vote of the chap sleeping under the bridge.
Nobody asks why or how you are voting, or whether you have thought long and hard over the policies or you just think one candidate's eyes are too close together and he can't be a good'un. You just turn up and vote.
If I have a beef, it's that we don't get enough democracy. There's a move towards four year terms, and that's too long. I like having more chances to chuck the bastards out, rather than fewer. I also don't like "above the line" voting. Gives the parties too many chances to direct votes the way they want, rather than the way the voter would have it.
To my overseas friends, a few words. First of all, attendance at a polling booth is mandatory, and enforced by the courts. If you don't turn up and get your name checked off, they come and ask you why you didn't vote, and if you don't have a good excuse, you will be fined. Admittedly, you don't have to actually vote, and almost any excuse is accepted unless it's obviously spurious.
But the end result is that people are incentivated to turn up, and once they turn up, they might as well vote. So the politicians have to pitch their policies at everybody, and that includes the apathetic, the indigent, the hopeless and the lame, as well as more solid citizens. I was appalled when I visited Washington and saw people sleeping in the snow. A marble monument is somebody's home, so long as the design incorporates a flat surface and some protection.
I won't say that we have no homeless here, but generally in Australia, if somebody is living rough it's because they prefer it, not because they have no alternative. Mind you, we don't have a socialist nanny state, and people on the bottom do it tough. But nor do we have powerless people sleeping in the snow.
Second is the "Australian vote". One of my heroes is Catherine Helen Spence, the grand old lady of Australian federation. She was a big advocate of what she called effective voting, which is to say preferential. In other countries, if you have five candidates on the ballot, and they get votes A = 100 votes, B = 200 votes, C = 300 votes, D = 400 votes, E = 500 votes, it is candidate E who wins because he has 100 votes more than anyone else. Mind you, there's 1 000 votes for other candidates, so he's only got 33.3% support, but he still wins.
In Australia, we can give preference votes, ranking the candidates in our order of preference. So we can put a number against each candidate, A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, D = 4, E = 5. If candidate A is found to have the lowest number of votes after counting, then candidate A is eliminated, and each of those ballots is examined to see who has the number two preference. In my example above, candidate B gets the next preference, and their total goes up by one, the vote being passed on at full value. If candidate B is next eliminated, the preferences are again distributed, and candidate C will get an additional vote.
This process continues until one candidate has more than 50% of the total number of votes and is declared the winner. The winning candidate might not be everyone's first choice, but they are the one that most people prefer. Candidates with high minority support cannot win by exploiting the division of their several opponents. A vote for a minor candidate is not wasted. You can vote Green, knowing that the Green candidate is unlikely to win, and give the Democrat candidate your second preference. You might not want the Democrat as your representative, but you prefer her to the Republican.
Or whatever.
I can't pick the winner of this election. Howard has won four elections and is getting on a bit. Rudd is inexperienced, but is inoffensive. Rudd has been well ahead in the polls for the last year. My problem with Rudd winning is that no Labor leader has won from opposition without they have been a man of considerable charisma, and the best you can say for Rudd is that he smiles a lot. In political terms, I see Howard as a fox and Rudd as a goose, and while Rudd might seem to have a lot of support, it may be that that support is in the wrong places. It's no good winning a third of the seats with 75% support if you have 49% support in the remaining two-thirds.
We'll see tonight. My pick is for a Howard victory, though I think the outcome will hinge on a handful of seats that will be too close to call on the night.
I plan on driving in the afternoon and taking a few slow hours off from (say) seven to ten to channel surf and see how it's going, then spend the rest of the shift ferrying home the drunks. It's a full moon tonight, and I can see a lot of strong emotions being unleashed. Possibly some of them may be mine.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-27 05:13 pm (UTC)