Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc. (PRSA Inc.) is an electoral reform organisation in Australia. Its membership includes people that have successfully promoted electoral reform.[1]
The Society regularly reviews and makes submissions on electoral reform within Australia with a focus on multi-member single transferable vote – proportional representationvoting systems (PR-STV). It has made submissions to international organizations including the United Nations and the New Zealand Parliament.
History
A wall plaque at the Townhouse Hotel in Melrose, Scotland, dedicated to Catherine Helen Spence
Forerunners of the Society began before Australian Federation with Catherine Helen Spence as one of their founding members. See details of the growth and success of quota-preferential proportional representation (PR-STV)in Australia, particularly at the national level.
Catherine Helen Spence's 1861 booklet,[2]A Plea for Pure Democracy, and her other writings and activism encouraged the 1895 formation of a proportional representation group called the 'Effective Voting League of South Australia'. (Spence was the first female candidate at a public election in the then British Empire when she stood unsuccessfully (under the quite unfair multiple vote[3]) for election to the 1897 Australasian Federal Convention.)
A statue in Light Square in Adelaide, unveiled on 10 March 1986 by Queen Elizabeth II, commemorates Miss Spence. The PRSA reprinted her 1861 booklet. Her memory is also preserved in her published autobiography and the novels she wrote. In some places even outside Australia, PR-STV (and its single-winner version, instant-runoff voting) was referred to as Hare-Spence in honour of her work.[4]
She was depicted on the Australian $5 banknote issued for the Centenary of Federation, in 2001.
PRSA Inc's SA members (in the Electoral Reform Society of South Australia) influenced the replacement of the only party-list system used, briefly, for Australian parliamentary elections, introduced by the Dunstan Labor Government in 1973, by direct election using the present quota-preferential form of proportional representation (PR-STV) that the SA Electoral Act 1985 prescribes for elections for SA's Legislative Council. (The SA Constitution Act 1934 requires a referendum before either House can be abolished, but does not specify or entrench the electoral system.)
Advocacy
The Society advocates the use of Hare-Clark proportional voting, a form of the Single Transferable Vote method (PR-STV) currently in use for elections in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory.
It publishes a quarterly newsletter entitled Quota Notes.
The Society has also published educational documents and aids such as
The Gerrymander Wheel, a simple calculator to demonstrate the perceived futility of drawing geographical boundaries in a single-member electorate system.[6]
Issues
The Society has raised issues in relation to the conduct of public elections in Australia, which include:
Robson Rotation, the need to randomly order candidates' listings in the printing of ballot papers so as to minimize the effect of donkey voting[7]
The rules for the calculation of the surplus transfer value in the distribution of preferences in proportional representation counts.
Opposition to the voting device[8] still imposed on certain Australian proportional representation elections
Filling casual vacancies by countback,[9] which is a form of direct election,[10] rather than by the party appointment system used to fill Senate and Legislative Council casual vacancies, except for Western Australia's Legislative Council.[11]
Electronic voting, and the introduction and use of computer technology in the conduct of elections
Submissions to Government
Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc. has made submissions to governments that have influenced the development and formation of Australia's electoral systems, as can be seen at its News pages.
Public discussion and forums
The Society holds and participates in public meetings and forums on electoral reform in various parts of Australia. There is a 2009 presentation by Malcolm Mackerras AO, an electoral analyst and political journalist.
Vote-counting Service
PRSA Inc. also provides services in counting votes or fully conducting elections[12] for corporate and community organizations in Australia including economical computations of results by email. See its list of clients.
Proportional representation (PR) refers to any type of electoral system under which subgroups of an electorate are reflected proportionately in the elected body. The concept applies mainly to political divisions among voters. The essence of such systems is that all votes cast – or almost all votes cast – contribute to the result and are effectively used to help elect someone – not just a bare plurality or (exclusively) the majority – and that the system produces mixed, balanced representation reflecting how votes are cast.
The single transferable vote (STV), sometimes known as proportional ranked choice voting (P-RCV), is a multi-winner electoral system in which each voter casts a single vote in the form of a ranked-choice ballot. Voters have the option to rank candidates, and their vote may be transferred according to alternate preferences if their preferred candidate is eliminated or elected with surplus votes, so that their vote is used to elect someone they prefer over others in the running. STV aims to approach proportional representation based on votes cast in the district where it is used, so that each vote is worth about the same as another. Formally, STV satisfies a fairness criterion known as proportionality for solid coalitions.
Single non-transferable vote or SNTV is an electoral system used to elect multiple winners. It is a generalization of first-past-the-post, applied to multi-member districts with each voter casting just one vote. Unlike FPTP, which is a single-winner system, in SNTV multiple winners are elected, typically in electoral districts; additionally, unlike FPTP, SNTV produces mixed representation and makes it unlikely for a single party to take all the seats in a city or a set area, which can happen under FPTP.
The Droop quota is the quota most commonly used in elections held under the single transferable vote (STV) system. It is also sometimes used in elections held under the largest remainder method of party-list proportional representation. Any candidate that receives quota is declared elected. Under some STV systems, especially those of the full-preferential voting variant, all the winners receive the quota, but in others, of the optional-preferential voting or semi-optional preferential voting variants, it is common for as many as three winners in a district to be elected with less than quota.
The electoral system of Australia comprises the laws and processes used for the election of members of the Australian Parliament and is governed primarily by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. The system presently has a number of distinctive features including compulsory enrolment; compulsory voting; majority-preferential instant-runoff voting in single-member seats to elect the lower house, the House of Representatives; and the use of the single transferable vote proportional representation system to elect the upper house, the Senate.
Electoral systems of the Australian states and territories are broadly similar to the electoral system used in federal elections in Australia.
The Hare quota is a formula used under some forms of proportional representation. In these voting systems the quota is the number of votes that guarantees a candidate, or a party in some cases, captures a seat. The Hare quota is the total number of votes divided by the number of seats to be filled. This is the simplest quota, but the Droop quota is mostly used currently.
BC-STV is the proposed voting system recommended by the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform in October 2004 for use in British Columbia, and belongs to the single transferable vote family of voting systems. BC-STV was supported by a majority of the voters in a referendum held in 2005 but the government had legislated that it would not be bound by any vote lower than 60 percent in favour. Because of the strong majority support for BC-STV, the government elected to stage a second referendum in 2009, but with increased public funding for information campaigns to better inform the electorate about the differences between the existing and proposed systems. The leadership of both the "yes" side and the "no" side were assigned by the government. The proposal was rejected with 60.9 percent voting against, vs. 39.1 percent in favour, in the 2009 vote.
The single transferable vote (STV) is a proportional representation voting system that elects multiple winners. It is one of several ways of choosing winners from ballots that rank candidates by preference. Under STV, an elector's vote is initially allocated to their most-preferred candidate. Candidates are elected (winners) if their vote tally reaches quota. After this 1st Count, if seats still remain open, surplus votes are transferred from winners to remaining candidates (hopefuls) according to the surplus ballots' next usable back-up preference. if no surplus votes have to be transferred, then the least-popular candidate is eliminated so the vote has chance to be placed on a candidate who can use it.
The Edmonton provincial electoral district also known as Edmonton City from 1905 to 1909, was a provincial electoral district in Alberta, Canada mandated to return members to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta from 1905 to 1917 and again from 1921 to 1959.
Historically, the single transferable vote (STV) electoral system has seen a series of relatively modest periods of usage and disusage throughout the world; however, today it is seeing increasing popularity and proposed implementation as a method of proportional representation and a goal of electoral reform. STV has been used in many different local, regional and national electoral systems, as well as in various other types of bodies, around the world.
There are a number of complications and issues surrounding the application and use of single transferable vote proportional representation that form the basis of discussions between its advocates and detractors.
Electoral reform is a change in electoral systems which alters how public desires are expressed in election results.
An electoral system or voting system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums are conducted and how their results are determined. Electoral systems are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections may take place in business, non-profit organisations and informal organisations. These rules govern all aspects of the voting process: when elections occur, who is allowed to vote, who can stand as a candidate, how ballots are marked and cast, how the ballots are counted, how votes translate into the election outcome, limits on campaign spending, and other factors that can affect the result. Political electoral systems are defined by constitutions and electoral laws, are typically conducted by election commissions, and can use multiple types of elections for different offices.
The Proportional Representation League was an organization founded in 1893 in the campaign for the adoption of the Proportional representation system of voting at the city, state and federal level in the U.S. Many Canadians as well as Americans were active in the League. The date of its demise is unknown but its newsletter, The Proportional Representation Review, apparently ceased publication in 1932.
The Proportional Representation Society of Ireland was the principal electoral reform organisation in Ireland until the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. It was closely associated with the Irish Home Rule movement.
Hare-Clark is a type of single transferable vote electoral system of proportional representation used for elections in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. The method for the distribution of preferences is similar to other voting systems in Australia, such as for the Australian Senate.
A referendum on electoral reform took place by mail-in ballot between October 22 and December 7, 2018, in the Canadian province of British Columbia. 61.3 percent of voters supported maintaining the first-past-the-post voting system rather than switching to a proportional representation voting system, which was supported by 38.7 percent of voters. This was British Columbia's third referendum on electoral reform, following ones in 2005 and 2009.
Rural–urban proportional representation (RUP), also called flexible district PR, is a mixed electoral system which combines the use of single- and multi-member constituencies in a lower tier and top-up seats in an upper tier to meet the different needs of both rural and urban areas, while protecting the objective of proportionality. The term was coined by Fair Vote Canada, which devised a rural–urban system with the intention of meeting the special challenges of Canada's geography, which includes wide-flung, sparsely populated areas.
Indirect single transferable voting or Gove system is a version of single transferable vote (STV), where the vote transfer is determined by the candidate's instructions and not the individual voters choices. This system allows to achieve many of the benefits of STV without the complexity of implementing a ranked voting system.
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