It's finally over

[resqgeek]

Well, the ugly, mud slinging contest that passed for Virginia's gubernatorial election is officially over. Now maybe we can clean up all the campaign signs that are littering the streets and highways, and we won't have to see a character assassination during every television commercial break.

As I was voting yesterday, I couldn't help but think of skyring and our discussions about the different voting systems in our countries. It would have been nice to have been able to rank the candidates on the ballot yesterday, the way they do in Australia.

There were three names on the ballot for Governor this year. There was one candidate that I actually wanted to vote for, the one who spoke his mind, even when what he had to say wasn't popular. Unfortunately, he had exactly ZERO chance of winning. Now if I was feeling ambivalent about the other two candidates (or if the outcome of the contest between the other two had been a foregone conclusion), I still might have voted for my favorite candidate. Unfortunately, I absolutely did NOT want one of the other two candidates to win, and the contest was too close to call going into yesterday. So, while I was lukewarm (at best) about the other major candidate, I voted for him as a defensive measure to ensure that the other guy didn't win.

Now if I could rank the candidates the way the Australians do, I could have picked the long-shot candidate as my favorite, and still been able to indicate my preferences between the two competitive candidates. Seems like that would let me feel better as I leave the voting booth.

Comments

[suellenr.livejournal.com]

I hate those lesser-of-two-evils decisions.

This is how much I cared--I still don't know the outcome.

[skyring.livejournal.com]

In local government and upper house elections here we usually have a lot of candidates. I was scrutineering for one election where the ballot paper was about a metre wide.

And when you have (say) 100 candidates to fill 20 seats, the final result can take weeks and is a bit of a crapshoot.

The first dozen or so elected are generally pretty obvious - they represent the big parties or are personally popular. It's when you get down to the second-string candidates of the big parties and the independents and the wackos that it all gets wildly exciting.

The system varies in details, but by and large if a candidate gets a surplus of votes, then the extra votes are transferred to the next candidate on the voter's ranking list. Sometimes they are transferred at full value, sometimes all the votes are discounted by a percentage "used", sometimes the voting officials take a "sample".

So votes flow down from the top and they generally (though by no means always) flow down along party lines.

When you get to the stage where there are candidates remaining who don't have a "quota" (50% of the votes plus one for a one seat election, 33.3% for two seats, 10% for 9 seats and so on), then the candidate with the lowest total is eliminated and their votes restributed according to the rankings, until all the seats are filled. It's a complex job, but it pretty much reflects community choices.

For example, we only have six States, and each State has twelve Senators, half of whom come up for election every three years. So you only need 14% of the vote to get elected for a six year term, and that means we generally get a number of minor party and independent Senators, who hold what is called "the balance of power" between the two major parties on the occasions when the majors choose to vote different ways, which they frequently do.

So folk like the Greens can have a significant voice in Parliament. They might never get to form a government, but they can have an impact, sometimes a crucial impact. The Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine at one stage held the sole say over whether or not a major tax reform package was passed.