All your questions answered in one place.
By Topher Field.
[Editors Note: originally posted to Topher’s X account.]
There’s a lot of misinformation out there, let’s clear it up and give you the answers so you can tell others.
Australia has a Preferential System, meaning you get 1 vote but it travels from one candidate to another according to your preferences.
You number the boxes from 1 (most preferred) till the end (least preferred) and if your #1 gets knocked out, your vote travels to your #2. If they also get knocked out, it goes to your #3 etc.
The ONLY THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER IS TO PUT ALL THE ‘GOOD’ or ‘OK’ MINOR PARTIES FIRST, above any of the major parties, yes even above the major party you like better than the other one.
The temptation is to put your preferred minor party (such as Libertarian) at #1 then put your preferred major party (such as Liberal) at #2. This is a waste of the Preferential System as we’ll see further down. This mistake is the reason Tasmania did not elect me or the PHON or UAP candidates as Senators last election. Not a lack of votes between us, but a lack of Preferences.
MYTH: “There are too many freedom-friendly minor parties splitting the vote!!! They need to combine!!!”
The Preferential System is a GOOD thing because it avoids the problem of ‘splitting the vote’ like what they have in the USA or the UK.
For example:
Candidate A gets 55% of the vote
Candidate B gets 45%
Candidate A wins. Simple.
BUT if there’s a candidate C who ALSO appeals to the same demographics as Candidate A we get:
A: 35%
B: 45%
C: 20%
Now B wins even though a majority of voters would have PREFERRED A.
This is the problem with so many ‘similar’ parties, Libertarians, PHON, Family First, People First, UAP, TOP, etc… “They’re splitting the vote!” I hear you say.
Not if voters use their preferences correctly, because they can Vote #1 for C, and #2 for A, meaning that if C is eliminated they’ll still get A, which is preferred to B.
Problem solved.
MYTH: Parties direct the preferences.
This used to be true but hasn’t been true in Federal elections for a few elections now.
Only YOU decide where your preferences go via where you put the numbers on YOUR ballot.
The parties will create a ‘how to vote’ card, the ones they hand out in front of the polling booth, and those are how that party WANTS you to vote, but they do not DIRECT your preferences, ONLY you can do that via how you fill out your ballot. You do not have to follow their ‘how to vote’ card.
MYTH: Preferential voting guarantees the duopoly will win.
It’s true that you are required to put a number next to every party, including the major / duopoly parties, however your vote will only reach them if every other one of your PREFERENCES is eliminated first because they don’t have enough votes.
Ie, the duopoly parties win because not enough people vote for the other parties and use their preferences correctly, they do not win because you were ‘forced’ to vote for them, by the time your vote reaches them, the good options were already eliminated.
If enough people vote for a better party than the Duopoly, then the duopoly will get knocked out and that other party will win. The system is not broken, the voters are.
MYTH: “I was a scrutineer and they didn’t count the preferences properly, they just gave it to the big two!”
This is known as a 2 party preferred count, and it’s not election fraud, it makes perfect sense under the right circumstances.
Preferences only matter if they can combine and add up to an amount of votes that overtake the Number 2 party.
Example:
Liberal: 40%
Labor: 40%
All others combined: 20%
No matter what happens with the preferences amongst the ‘all others combined’ parties, they cannot and will not overtake the majors. There are not enough votes in total to do that.
In this circumstance it makes perfect sense to just allocate the 20% of ‘all others’ to whichever major party they have higher on their ballot, and declare a winner between those two because ONLY one of those two can win, none of the ‘others’ can.
“But the majors had low primary votes and the ‘other’ could have added up to more than one of the big two.”
Yes, but it CAN still makes sense to just count 2 Party Preferred.
Example:
Labor: 30%
Liberal: 30%
All others combined: 40%
Looks like the preferences for the ‘all others’ could add up to a win, right?
No.
The ‘all others’ in this case are not going to ‘combine’ because they are:
Greens: 15%
Libertarian: 10%
PHON: 10%
Other Marxists micro parties: 5%
Are they all going to preference each other before the majors? No.
Greens voters are not going to preference PHON above Labor so their preferences will not combine. Libertarian voters will not preference Marxist Micro Parties so we know that the 40% ‘other’ vote will not combine into a single large block, they will split and end up going to the Majors in pieces before adding up to be enough to overtake one of them. THEREFORE it still makes sense to just count 2 Party Preferred in this case.
“So what’s the point of the preferences if it always adds up to one of the majors winning?”
Because it doesn’t always, and it’s up to us to vote for the minor parties in large enough numbers to change that, by which I mean putting ALL the good minor parties ahead of ANY of the majors.
Example:
Labor: 30%
Liberal: 25%
PHON: 12%
Greens: 11%
Libertarians: 10%
Family First: 8%
Trumpet of Patriots: 4%
To create a SUPER simplistic example from this scenario:
Trumpet of Patriots is eliminated first. HALF their voters (or 2%) put the Libertarians as their 2nd preference, half put PHON as their 2nd preference.
The new order after the 1st round of preferences is:
Labor: 30%
Liberal: 25%
PHON: 14%
Libertarians: 12%
Greens: 11%
Family First: 8%
Trumpet of Patriots: Eliminated
Now Family First are eliminated because they are next lowest, their voters also split their #2 spot (or #3, some might have put TOP at #2 but because they’ve been eliminated they get skipped) between Libertarians and PHON meaning:
Labor: 30%
Liberal: 25%
PHON: 18%
Libertarians: 16%
Greens: 11%
Family First: Eliminated
Trumpet of Patriots: Eliminated
Now the Greens are next to get the chop. Let’s assume ALL their preferences go to Labor:
Labor: 41%
Liberal: 25%
PHON: 18%
Libertarians: 16%
Greens: Eliminated
Family First: Eliminated
Trumpet of Patriots: Eliminated
Labor are in a commanding lead, but there’s still 59% of the vote available and all the parties remaining are aligned (somewhat) politically, so IF everyone did the right thing with the preferences then:
The Libertarians are next to get eliminated but ALL their voters preferences PHON above the Liberal Party (again I’m simplifying here) so now:
Labor: 41%
PHON: 34%
Liberal: 25%
Libertarian: Eliminated
Greens: Eliminated
Family First: Eliminated
Trumpet of Patriots: Eliminated
See how one of the minor parties just overtook a major party BECAUSE OF PREFERENCES?
This is how it’s done.
Now it’s the LIBERAL party getting eliminated next because they are next lowest after this many rounds of preferences. Let’s assume that some of the Liberal Party voters put Labor above PHON, but most put PHON above Labor, so after this round we get:
PHON: 54%
Labor: 46%
Liberal: Eliminated
Libertarian: Eliminated
Greens: Eliminated
Family First: Eliminated
Trumpet of Patriots: Eliminated
And thanks to preferences a Minor Party wins a Lower House seat.
“Be realistic that’s not going to happen.”
Not with that attitude it won’t. But the fact is the primary votes for the Major Parties is falling, and the combined vote for the Freedom Friendly Minor Parties is growing. The only thing missing is Preferencing DISCIPLINE, where voters put ALL the decent minor parties before ANY of the majors.
It’s not easy to win seats for the minor parties (that’s why we call them ‘minor’) but it can be done.
I’ll prove it. I ran for the Senate in Tasmania in 2022. I campaigned in partnership with the PHON and UAP candidates and we ALL said the same thing:
“Put us three as your top three in whatever order suits you best.”
It was a unity message, and it fell on deaf ears.
Nearly 80% of the people who voted #1 for me, or for PHON or for UAP at that election, voted #2 for the Liberal Party. They did NOT put the three of us in the 1-2-3 positions as we’d urged them to do.
As a result not one of us three got elected.
HOWEVER if just 50% of our voters had listened (instead of the 20% who listened) and put the three of us 1-2-3 in whatever order… just 50% of them… then one of us three would be a Senator right now. I don’t even care whether it would be me or one of those two, it would be better than the Jacqui Lambie Network candidate who got that Senate spot instead.
This is VERY do-able in the Senate, and possible in rare circumstances in the Lower House too, the missing piece is PREFERENCING DISCIPLINE.
MYTH: Don’t bother voting, it’s ‘selected not elected’, or my favorite, ‘They’ decide who win.
Wrong. I’m no fan of the AEC nor of government, but Australia’s electoral system is remarkably good BECAUSE it remains very manual. If you don’t believe me, volunteer to be a scrutineer and see for yourself.
Also consider, ‘they’ wanted the Voice to Parliament… but didn’t get it.
‘They’ wanted the mis-dis bill, but didn’t get it.
‘They’ wanted a carbon tax and emissions trading scheme, but didn’t get it…
…maybe ‘they’ don’t have as much power as you think? And maybe ‘they’ are the ones convincing you not to try and stop them… because they’re afraid that if we work together and actually try… then we might succeed?
Shared with encouragement from his X post.
Topher Field is a 2 x Australian Libertarian of the Year, Award winning director of Battleground Melbourne and Author of Good People Break Bad Laws.
Please also watch his Preferential Voting System Explainer Video here:
https://x.com/qbccintegrity/status/1876502687245897849?s=46&t=VuTFmHKj0-OqhRFEzVHHxQ
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