|
|
Post by John Chanin on Dec 8, 2020 8:26:07 GMT
That is gerrymandering,- rigging the boundaries to ensure a majority of seats on a minority of votes. Malapportionment is not the same as gerrymandering. The former will give more seats to, say, rural voters by making the rural constituencies smaller than urban constituencies. This is not usually possible where a quota of voters per seat is enforced. Gerrymandering usually involves splitting an area so as to ensure one party wins by a huge margin in one seat while lots of others are lost by much smaller margins. Derry City, at one stage, split the council into three wards. One had a 90% + Nationalist/Republican majority while the other two had around 55% Unionist majorities. That delivered a Unionist majority with less than 40% of the vote. Gerrymandering is much harder to combat because they cannot be dealt with by administrative measures. The only way is to set some sort of criteria that would test the outcome of seats won against seats won. Some US states appear to be using this approach but gerrymandering is endemic to House elections. The Senate obviously uses malapportionment as all states get two Senators regardless of size. We will have to disagree. You are using a more restrictive definition of gerrymandering. I believe my more general usage is commonly understood. |
|
|
|
Post by IceAgeComing on Dec 8, 2020 11:48:13 GMT
The only way is to set some sort of criteria that would test the outcome of seats won against seats won The issue with this is that the assumption that 'fair' boundaries means that they match up with the votes cast isn't correct and voter distribution can make that impossible. South Australia, until recently, had something called the "fairness clause" in its constitution. Basically what that said was that when the Electoral Commission drew the state boundaries they had to take into account the Two Party Preferred vote (not the primary votes; just 2PP) and make sure that the party that won the state-wide two-party preferred vote notionally won the most seats. The issue in South Australia is that the distribution of voters makes that rather tricky: 2/3rds of the population are in Adelaide or its suburbs and the other third are in the rest of the state: the latter leans very, very heavily Liberal while the former is Labor friendly and in both 2010 and 2014 despite the Commission trying to draw 'fair' boundaries the ALP managed to win on a minority of the Two-Party Preferred vote; in 2014 it was 53%/47% towards the Liberals yet Labor got one more seat and governed as a minority. The head of the Electoral Commission basically said that the rule was unworkable unless they outright rigged things against the Labor Party and basically admitted to having to use the allowed population difference rules to legally malapportion against the ALP to try and get the Liberals ahead and in 2018 despite a 1% swing towards the ALP they finally lost an election. That last ALP government got rid of the fairness clause (probably politically motivated: but if the head of the group drawing the boundaries says that it is an unworkable rule then it makes sense to drop it) although with the recent redistribution not being great for the Liberals (they would still have won but it would have been very close) they might try to bring the damn thing back. Basically while partisan representation can be a sign of gerrymandering there are other ones: while it can be subtle the sort of gerrymandering you get in America is really rather obvious. However not all wrong-winner elections, even pretty conclusive ones, are signs of gerrymandering and if securing proportional representation is your goal then you'd be better served changing the voting system rather than fiddling with lines. |
|
timmullen1
Labour
Closing account as BossMan declines to respond to messages seeking support.
Posts: 11,823 
|
Post by timmullen1 on Dec 8, 2020 12:28:16 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by timrollpickering on Dec 8, 2020 13:24:14 GMT
Although you must remember that the state was heavily gerrymandered. This was the work of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It was malapportionment with heavy rural weighting, rather than gerrymandering, that was used to keep Labor out of power in Queensland. It was actually the work of Labor with a young Joh opposing it in the late 1940s. Then the split hit Labor in Queensland in 1957 and they were swept from power. The Country-Liberal coalition did tweak the system and introduced AV (previously they were on FPTP which had been changed from Contingent Vote - full preferential but the second round went straight to the top two - by Labor in 1942) which helped consolidate the Country-Liberal-Queensland/Democratic Labor vote and in nearly every election the Coalition was ahead on primaries anyway. The 2PP arrived in the 1980s, helpfully in time for the Coalition breaking down before the 1983 election, and the (now) Nationals' wins in 1983 (one seat short of a majority but two Liberals defected) and 1986 (their only ever outright majority) were with the 2PP behind them. There were occasional bits of gerrymandering under Joh (including drawing out one of his more prominent Liberal critics) but the Bjelkemander was primarily a malapportionment and criticised as such. That said its effects were more indirect than often claimed and it primarily worked to marginalise Labor in parliament and make their route back to power harder whilst also constraining the Liberals' position within the Coalition. If anything it was the Liberals who were hit the worst. "Wrong winner" elections are hard to determine given all the changing voting systems, the uneasy state of relations between the two conservative parties when separate and the lack of recorded 2PPs until the 1980s but on first preferences elections since the First World War they potentially include 1920 (*), 1923 (*), 1926, 1947 (**), 1950 (**), 1969, 1972, 1983 (***), 1986 (***) and 1995 (****). Note that in cases from the 1960s onwards third party transfers could make a difference and in both 1969 & 1972 the DLP polled over 7%. (* The right was in several parties in these elections with the Country Party, the National/United Party, the Northern Country, National Labor and various independent Country members all floating about. Exactly which if any should be added to the first two is debatable and makes a difference as to whether they outpolled Labor or not.) (** Although the state of relations between the Country Party and the Queensland People's Party - soon to become the state Liberals - was not as strong as it would later be.) (*** On first preferences Labor led the now separate Nationals. However the 2PP went against Labor.) (**** The now re-formed Coalition led on both primaries and 2PP but Labor won two more seats and there was one Independent. Then a court-ordered rerun in one seat led to a Liberal gain and the Coalition took power with the support of the Independent.) |
|
|
|
Post by John Chanin on Dec 8, 2020 13:34:43 GMT
That’s fascinating, to see how another FPTP country goes about boundary defining. |
|
timmullen1
Labour
Closing account as BossMan declines to respond to messages seeking support.
Posts: 11,823
|
Post by timmullen1 on Dec 8, 2020 13:36:35 GMT
That’s fascinating, to see how another FPTP country goes about boundary defining. Australia isn’t a FPTP country, it works on Two Candidate Preferred. |
|
|
|
Post by John Chanin on Dec 8, 2020 13:38:43 GMT
That’s fascinating, to see how another FPTP country goes about boundary defining. Australia isn’t a FPTP country, it works on Two Candidate Preferred. Yes it’s AV but that makes no difference to boundary issues. You still have individual member constituencies. |
|
timmullen1
Labour
Closing account as BossMan declines to respond to messages seeking support.
Posts: 11,823
|
Post by timmullen1 on Dec 8, 2020 13:41:06 GMT
Australia isn’t a FPTP country, it works on Two Candidate Preferred. Yes it’s AV but that makes no difference to boundary issues. You still have individual member constituencies. In which case you might want to explore Antony’s blog further as I think each State/Territory have slightly different methods, and ACT and Tasmania have different electoral systems. |
|
|
|
Post by timrollpickering on Dec 8, 2020 13:48:06 GMT
South Australia, until recently, had something called the "fairness clause" in its constitution. Basically what that said was that when the Electoral Commission drew the state boundaries they had to take into account the Two Party Preferred vote (not the primary votes; just 2PP) and make sure that the party that won the state-wide two-party preferred vote notionally won the most seats. There was also a subclause that basically aimed to include third parties and independents who won seats with their "side" of politics based on political history. But this proved harder to operate than the writers envisaged with one notable feature of the state since the clause came in was the willingness of ex-Liberal independents and the state Nationals (who are about the most independent of Coalition of the state branches) to accept ministerial posts and/or the Speakership from Labor governments. These third party victories complicated things and the commission couldn't always determine in advance which of the two main parties various independents would support. IIRC there were three cases under the clause of one party winning the 2PP and the other government but in two of the three cases the Liberals actually won the 2PP in a majority of seats but the Nationals/Independents kept the seats out of their hands and gave a majority to Labor. ISTR there was a big row ahead of 2014 when the new boundaries did not create a notional Liberal majority. This did lead to some debate about whether the commission should be basing things on a single election or the longer flow in seats (and probably pushed them to go much further for 2018) and yes there were partisan concerns but also the sheer difficulty of achieving the aims had been exposed. |
|
john07
Labour & Co-operative
Posts: 15,785
Member is Online
|
Post by john07 on Dec 8, 2020 14:02:23 GMT
Malapportionment is not the same as gerrymandering. The former will give more seats to, say, rural voters by making the rural constituencies smaller than urban constituencies. This is not usually possible where a quota of voters per seat is enforced. Gerrymandering usually involves splitting an area so as to ensure one party wins by a huge margin in one seat while lots of others are lost by much smaller margins. Derry City, at one stage, split the council into three wards. One had a 90% + Nationalist/Republican majority while the other two had around 55% Unionist majorities. That delivered a Unionist majority with less than 40% of the vote. Gerrymandering is much harder to combat because they cannot be dealt with by administrative measures. The only way is to set some sort of criteria that would test the outcome of seats won against seats won. Some US states appear to be using this approach but gerrymandering is endemic to House elections. The Senate obviously uses malapportionment as all states get two Senators regardless of size. We will have to disagree. You are using a more restrictive definition of gerrymandering. I believe my more general usage is commonly understood. It doesn’t alter the fact that it is wrong. |
|
|
|
Post by IceAgeComing on Dec 8, 2020 19:30:20 GMT
South Australia, until recently, had something called the "fairness clause" in its constitution. Basically what that said was that when the Electoral Commission drew the state boundaries they had to take into account the Two Party Preferred vote (not the primary votes; just 2PP) and make sure that the party that won the state-wide two-party preferred vote notionally won the most seats. There was also a subclause that basically aimed to include third parties and independents who won seats with their "side" of politics based on political history. But this proved harder to operate than the writers envisaged with one notable feature of the state since the clause came in was the willingness of ex-Liberal independents and the state Nationals (who are about the most independent of Coalition of the state branches) to accept ministerial posts and/or the Speakership from Labor governments. These third party victories complicated things and the commission couldn't always determine in advance which of the two main parties various independents would support. IIRC there were three cases under the clause of one party winning the 2PP and the other government but in two of the three cases the Liberals actually won the 2PP in a majority of seats but the Nationals/Independents kept the seats out of their hands and gave a majority to Labor. ISTR there was a big row ahead of 2014 when the new boundaries did not create a notional Liberal majority. This did lead to some debate about whether the commission should be basing things on a single election or the longer flow in seats (and probably pushed them to go much further for 2018) and yes there were partisan concerns but also the sheer difficulty of achieving the aims had been exposed. As far as I'm aware they used the two-party preferred numbers and just pretended that Independents didn't exist: in most Australian states and in Federal elections when they officially count the votes in addition to the former distribution of preferences they go right to the end of the process to get a two-candidate preferred number even if the 50% needed to win is hit earlier but if that race isn't Labor vs Liberal they do a recount just with the ALP vs Liberals to get an official two-party preferred number for that seat for statistical purposes. The issue in 2014 I think was that while the Liberals had a two-party preferred advantage in a majority of seats (which is legally what the commission was responsible in doing) that included several seats where the realistic contest was the Liberals against an Independent which realistically they would struggle to win. What didn't help is that the swings in the last few South Australian elections weren't uniform: in 2014 what happened was that there was a big swing against Labor in the rural seats which they weren't going to win while Adelaide swung towards the ALP and delivered the notional gains they needed to remain in office. If that trend carried on happening then you would have a situation where it would be impossible to draw up fair boundaries without doing some very strange things: luckily for the Liberals it didn't. It could have been even worse had SA Best done well last time and if the fairness clause was a thing: in a world where they got 25% of primary votes and won or finished second in a lot more seats it would rightly have been seen as farcical to have just pretended that they didn't exist to draw up "fair" boundaries using a metric that is meaningless in a three party system. The rural Independents supporting Labor governments thing isn't that uncommon in Australia: in 2014 the situation was from memory one where one of the Independents got diagnosed with cancer right after the election so the other had no real choice: if they'd backed the Liberals it would have been 23 vs 23; deadlock and another election which they didn't really want so they supported the ALP. The same thing happened Federally in 2010 as well: two of the three ex-National Party rural Independents backed the Gillard government (and the other was Bob Katter who, well, was a bit different from them) and a Queensland Independent backed minority Labor governments twice - I think in all of those cases the idea that going with the more stable option played a role in that decision.. |
|
|
|
Post by timrollpickering on Dec 8, 2020 19:56:20 GMT
I think the rural independents propping up Labor began in earnest in South Australia in 2002 though even earlier in several states Labor had realised that a good relationship with independents including helping them to win investment for their divisions helped keep seats that Labor could never reach out of Coalition or Liberal hands. The relevant sub clause was: "(3) For the purposes of this section a reference to a group of candidates includes not only candidates endorsed by the same political party but also candidates whose political stance is such that there is reason to believe that they would, if elected in sufficient numbers, be prepared to act in concert to form or support a government." This certainly did give the commission problems in earlier elections as they tried to factor in such victories but increasingly they focused on just the Labor-Liberal 2PP. For 2014 here are Antony Green's posts on the redistribution and the Liberal anger: www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-01/new-state-electoral-boundaries-proposed-for-south-australia/9390038(including: ) www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-14/final-boundaries-released-for-south-australian-redistribution/9390102The changes for 2014 did not notionally wipe out Labor's majority and require them to make gains to retain power - only two seats had a notional 2PP switch from Labor to Liberal (and one was Independent held anyway). The Liberals were outraged as they felt the boundaries should have delivered a notional majority starting point. Come 2018 the commission either accepted the logic or choose to avoid the shitstorm and so you had a rare notional transfer of majority before any votes were cast. |
|
|
|
Post by IceAgeComing on Dec 8, 2020 21:14:10 GMT
Its all one big mess and I hope that you don't get a Constitutional Amendment in South Australia. To link this back to the earlier Queensland chat this is all the legacy of a malapportionment as well: there was already a bias in favour of rural areas but Thomas Playford's government amended the rules to mandate that there be two seats outside Adelaide for every one in the city and that locked Labor out of office for 30 years: they won a majority of one in 1965 with 55% of the primary vote (the estimated 2PP is lower at 54% because of the Liberal and Country League being unopposed in some hyper safe seats); couldn't get any change through but then when the Liberals were returned to power two years later on a similar minority of the votes the new Premier was a bit embarrassed about the whole thing and based electoral reforms that basically legislated his government out of existence: and then the fairness clause was a response to Labor winning an election on a similar minority because of the voter distribution problems that the Liberals have and that didn't really solve the problem either.
The fundamental point in all of this really is that trying to enforce proportional representation with single-member districts or assuming that wrong winner elections must mean gerrymandering - both of which are things that you see in the gerrymandering debate in the US - sort of misses the point and sometimes, as in South Australia, voter distribution is inherently biased against one party and the only way to 'solve' that problem is to use some form of PR or to accept that under any system with single-member districts that those issues will always exist.
|
|
|
|
Post by timrollpickering on Dec 8, 2020 21:33:03 GMT
It was actually Richard Butler's government that enacted the malapportionment but Playford was the main beneficiary. I am not certain that South Australia before that was a haven of equal sized seats or for that matter Queensland pre 1949 despite later attempts to portray them as such. During the mining booms & busts of the late 19th century it was not uncommon to see some incredible distortions due to the electorate abandoning whole towns.
Malapportionment continues to be a thing in Western Australia. Reforms in the 2000s have basically removed it in the lower house (though there's a tolerance for lower electorates in very remote seats) but entrenched it in the upper house such that half of it is elected outside Perth. As Perth continues to expand and the population get transferred into the Metropolitan regions this means non-Perth voters' voting power expands ever more. The Legislative Council is elected by STV with six members in each of the six regions so as long as the overall result somewhat resembles the votes it may be bearable but changes to the way mining is done has reduced Labor's power in the most remote part of the state and changed things from the late 1980s Labor-National agreement that reformed the LC this way.
|
|
iain
Lib Dem
Posts: 11,433
Member is Online
|
Post by iain on Jan 23, 2021 23:52:03 GMT
|
|
Foggy
Non-Aligned
Yn Ennill Yma
Posts: 6,135
|
Post by Foggy on Jan 24, 2021 2:59:17 GMT
Extend their majority in the Legislative Assembly, yes. Achieving a majority of any sort in the upper house would be most remarkable. |
|
|
|
Post by timrollpickering on Feb 12, 2021 18:01:45 GMT
There's not a lot of social distancing on the Western Australian ballot papers with a record number of candidates in both houses. antonygreen.com.au/a-record-number-of-candidate-nominate-for-western-australian-election/No lower house seat has less than five candidates. 28 have between 5 & 7. 31 have 8 or more. The upper house ones have between 20 and 26 different groups all forcing the font size down with Group Voting Tickets in place and no less than three different parties with "Liberal" as the Flux Party have been able to change their name to "Liberal for Climate". There will almost certainly voters who vote for the first "Liberal" party they see on the ballot paper as they read from left to right. The draw has: Liberals first - Agriculture, North Metropolitan, Liberal for Climate first - East Metropolitan, Mining and Pastoral, South Metropolitan Liberal Democrats first - South West |
|
iain
Lib Dem
Posts: 11,433
Member is Online
|
Post by iain on Feb 21, 2021 16:06:41 GMT
The most recent Newspoll here had Labor polling at an astonishing 59% of the primary vote and 68% of the two party preferred. On uniform swing that would put the Liberals on just two seats. The Nationals would be on either three or four. I doubt things will end up going quite that well for Labor, but the fact it is even being talked about is astonishing.
|
|
timmullen1
Labour
Closing account as BossMan declines to respond to messages seeking support.
Posts: 11,823
|
Post by timmullen1 on Feb 21, 2021 16:11:00 GMT
The most recent Newspoll here had Labor polling at an astonishing 59% of the primary vote and 68% of the two party preferred. On uniform swing that would put the Liberals on just two seats. The Nationals would be on either three or four. I doubt things will end up going quite that well for Labor, but the fact it is even being talked about is astonishing. I did a month’s free trial to Crikey newsletter on the recommendation of the guy who dies The Poll Bludger blog and the last quote I saw from the Libs was best case scenario was double digits with the Nationals peaking at three. |
|
|
|
Post by Merseymike on Feb 21, 2021 17:07:18 GMT
Given that the Liberals hold 17 out of 28 seats in the National Parliament from WA, the implications are certainly concerning for them.....
|
|
