The Poll Bludger

Bowman covers Brisbane’s coastal outer south from Thorneside through Capalaba and Sheldon to Redland Bay, and extends across the southern part of Moreton Bay to North Stradbroke Island. It has existed in name since 1949, but did not include any of its current territory until 1969, instead being based in Brisbane’s inner south-east. The 1969 redistribution caused the redrawn electorate to extend from the mouths of the Brisbane River in the north to the Logan River in the south, the latter also marking the Bowman’s southern extremity today. The area now covered by Bowman began to acquire its suburban character at around this time. With the redistribution of 1977, the southern part of the electorate came to be accommodated by the newly created electorate of Fadden. Bowman’s present dimensions were established when its northern neighbour Bonner was created to accommodate the Wynnum-Manly area at the 2004 election, setting Thorneside as the northern extremity of Bowman.

Bowman in its various permutations has been a marginal seat for most of its history, having been held by the Liberals throughout the Menzies and Holt years outside of a win by Labor as part of its near-victory at the 1961 election. It next changed hands with the big swing to Labor under Gough Whitlam’s leadership in 1969, and would henceforth go with the government of the day until 1998. Leonard Keogh held the seat for Labor from 1969 to 1975 and again after 1983, and also contested unsuccessfully in 1977 and 1980. Keogh was defeated for preselection in 1987 by Con Sciacca, who lost the seat to Liberal candidate Andrea West in 1996 before winning it back again in 1998. The Liberal member during the Fraser years was David Jull, who re-emerged as member for Fadden in 1984.

The reorganisation caused by the creation of Bonner in 2004 boosted the Liberal margin in Bowman by 4.4%, prompting Sciacca to unsuccessfully try his hand in Bonner. Bowman meanwhile was won by Liberal candidate Andrew Laming, an ophthalmologist and World Bank health consultant who added a solid 5.9% to the notional Liberal margin of 3.0%. Laming spent much of 2007 under the shadow of the “printgate” affair, in which he was investigated for allegedly claiming $67,000 to print campaign material for state election candidates, before being cleared two months before the election. After rumblings that the affair might cost him his preselection, Laming survived an 8.9% swing to Labor at the 2007 election to hold on by 64 votes. He had a much easier time of it in 2010, his 10.4% swing being strong even by the standards of Queensland at that election. There was a correction in Labor’s favour of 1.5% at the 2013 election, going slightly against the trend of a 1.3% statewide swing to the Liberal National Party.

Laming was promoted to the position of shadow parliamentary secretary for regional health services and indigenous health after the 2010 election, but was dropped after the Abbott government came to power.

Update (Saturday 11pm)

Two number-crunchers out in web-land have made the effort to identify which votes have gone missing by comparing booth results from the first and second counts, and they have reached the same conclusion: but for the missing votes, the result at the decisive point in the count would have been very close to a tie. One is Ben Raue at the Tally Room, while the other is an anonymous commenter on a pseudonymous blog – that of Truth Seeker, whose statistical work on the Senate count process has won great acclaim. Despite the obscurity of the latter source, he or she is clearly well on top of the situation.

It is clear that what has gone missing is bundles of votes for particular parties, the numbers of which can be determined with considerable precision despite the minor adjustments to the vote totals which legitimately resulted from the recount process. I will now deal with the four booths in turn, using the numbers determined by Anonymous. Keep in mind that the only votes with the capacity to change the result are those cast for Shooters & Fishers, Australian Christians or the smaller micro-parties which fed them preferences: Australian Independents and the Fishing & Lifestyle Party in the former case, No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics in the latter.

Mount Helena: This booth produced the most important discrepancy with the disappearance of its complement of above-the-line votes for Shooters & Fishers, of which there were 14. Also gone are the Liberals’ tally of 370 above-the-line votes, together with nine for Animal Justice.

Wundowie: Together with its 29 informal votes, the above-the-line votes of nine different parties have disappeared from this booth. Those relevant to the result are three votes for Australian Christians and one each for No Carbon Tax and Australian Independents. Also gone: 166 Liberal, 164 Labor, eight Smokers Rights, seven Help End Marijuana Prohibition, five Wikileaks, and one Katter’s Australian Party.

Bunbury East: The 152 votes missing from this booth appear to be the above-the-line votes for nine parties, the only ones relevant to the result being three for Australian Independents and one for No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics. The others were 112 votes for the Greens, 12 for Animal Justice, 11 for Family First, six for Wikileaks, three for Stop the Greens, two for Katter’s Australian Party and one for the Secular Party, together with 77 of the 81 informal votes cast at the booth.

Henley Brook: This one was straightforward and, ultimately, not important: 349 Liberal above-the-line votes are missing, leaving 286 still in the count.

Tallying that up suggests Shooters & Fishers have lost 18 votes and Australian Christians five. Ben Raue’s calculation is very slightly different at nineteen and four, as he counts a missing Australian Fishing & Lifestyle Party vote and has one less vote missing for Australian Christians, which Anonymous thinks likely to have been genuine recount corrections. Either way, the numbers suggest that reverting to the first-count results for these booths, as I have been advocating, would cause the result to flip back to Louise Pratt and Dio Wang based on the smallest margins imaginable – one vote by Anonymous’s reckoning, and three by Ben Raue’s.

Original post

For the vast civilian majority in Western Australia that would sooner not have to vote again, today’s conclusion of the Senate election recount has delivered the worst possible outcome, with the original result overturned by an excruciatingly narrow margin. On the basis of the unquestionably flawed and incomplete recount, Greens Senator Scott Ludlam and Australian Sports Party candidate Wayne Dropulich will be declared the winners in place of Labor Senator Louise Pratt and Palmer United Party candidate Dio Wang.

The key to the result remains the point at which the lead candidates of either Shooters & Fishers or the Australian Christians are excluded. If it’s the former, Shooters & Fishers preferences sustain Dropulich at a point in the count where he would otherwise be excluded, ultimately allowing him to finish ahead of Wang off the base of a tiny primary vote after harvesting preferences left, right and centre. Wang’s preferences then flow to Ludlam, giving him victory ahead of Pratt. But if Shooters & Fishers stay in the count, Dropulich is unable to overtake them, a point arrives where he is excluded, and Shooters & Fishers themselves are ultimately unable to get ahead of Wang, who wins a seat when the various micro-party preferences are distributed. With Wang’s votes used to get himself elected, his exclusion does not provide Ludlam with the mass transfer of preferences he needs, causing him to be left holding the bag with Pratt’s election to the final seat.

In the original count, Count 139 famously delivered a 14-vote victory to the Shooters & Fishers candidate with the following numbers:

BOW (Shooters & Fishers) 23,515
VAN BURGEL (Australian Christians) 23,501

However, the recount has turned this into a 12-vote lead for Australian Christians at what’s now Count 141:

VAN BURGEL (Australian Christians) 23,526
BOW (Shooters & Fishers) 23,514

But of course, the latter result excludes the famous 1255 missing above-the-line votes, which were cast at the Bunbury East, Mount Helena, Henley Brook and Wundowie booths.

If I had anything to do with the matter, I’d be very determined to craft an outcome that didn’t require a fresh election, which will have a disastrous impact on the public’s confidence in the system. The best chance of avoiding that would have been for the recount to have reaffirmed the original result, which might have given the High Court the confidence to determine that the recount should stand, warts and all. However, that’s gone out the door now that counts have produced different results with respect to not one but two seats.

The other chance of an out involved the requirement that a discrepancy be big enough to be decisive before it can be used as a basis for overturning a result. Under happier circumstances, the availability of first count results from the four affected booths might have served as evidence that this wasn’t so. While 1255 votes sounds like a lot in the context of the margins under discussion, it must be kept in mind that the only votes which actually have the potential to affect the result are those cast either for Shooters & Fishers, Australian Christians or other micro-parties which fed them preferences (remembering we’re only dealing with predictable above-the-line votes here – below-the-line votes were not included in the recount process, presumably on the basis that they were thoroughly scrutineered during the data entry process). Those parties are the Australian Fishing & Lifestyle Party and Australian Voice in the case of Shooters & Fishers, and the Rise Up Australia Party in the case of Australian Christians. Based on the published results for the first count, the four polling booths at issue delivered 61 votes to the Shooters & Fishers and 60 votes to Australian Christians (UPDATE: The previous two sentences are not quite right – see the update at the top of the post for a more accurate account). However, it’s not enough simply to add those votes to the existing totals and achieve a hypothetical result, as not all of the votes from the four affected polling booths went missing. In short, the situation appears far too unclear to say that the missing votes could not have affected the result, given the narrowness of the margin involved.

My own preferred solution, which I advocated in an article for Crikey yesterday, was for the High Court to direct the Australian Electoral Commission to use the first count results from the four affected polling booths and the recount results from everywhere else. I wouldn’t presume to say that there are no legal difficulties involved in this, but it would appear to me to pass the common sense test. Given that the number of missing votes on which the result might hinge is around 120, and the likelihood that these particular votes were counted more-or-less correctly the first time around, it could have been hoped that the margin at the key point in the recount would have been big enough to allow such a result to proceed with an adequate level of confidence. But with just 12 votes in it, that becomes a lot harder to do.

Update (Thursday 6pm):

The contents of the post below, written overnight, have been dramatically superseded by today’s events. Firstly and most straightforwardly, Clive Palmer has been declared the winner in Fairfax by 53 votes. Secondly and more dramatically, the Australian Electoral Commission has made the bombshell announcement that 1375 verified votes from the original count, including 1255 above-the-line and 120 informal votes, have gone missing during the recount process. The AEC will proceed with a declaration tomorrow, but the initial balance of opinion among noted authorities (by which I so far mean Antony Green and Nick Minchin) appears to be that this will be the subject of a successful legal challenge that will cause the result to be declared void, resulting in the entire state of Western Australia going back to the polls.

The legal issues involved in this are beyond my pay grade (paging Graeme Orr and Antony Green), but I am aware of two precedents worth examining:

• On February 15, 1908, a “special election” was held in South Australia to resolve a protracted dispute over the result of the election of December 12, 1906. The Senate election system at this time simply involved voters crossing boxes of three candidates (in the case of a half-Senate election), with the elected members being those to receive the most votes. Naturally enough, most voters voted for the three candidates of their favoured party. Support in South Australia being evenly balanced between Labor and “Anti-Socialist” (hitherto identified as “Free Trade”), this resulted in six candidates receiving very similar shares of the vote. Anti-Socialist Sir Josiah Symon and Labor’s William Russell emerged slightly ahead of the field and were clearly elected, but very little separated another Anti-Socialist candidate, Joseph Vardon, and two Labor candidates, D.A. Crosby and Reginald Blundell. The Court of Disputed Returns resolved that Vardon was the winner by two votes, but that it would have gone differently had it not been for the failure of a returning officer to initial ballot papers. The result with respect to Vardon was consequently declared void.

There followed a dispute as to whether this constituted a casual vacancy to be filled by the state parliament, which the Labor-controlled parliament of South Australia sought to do by selecting one of its own, James O’Loughlin. This was challenged by Vardon in the High Court, which determined that under the legislation existing at the time it was up to the Senate itself to decide if a vacancy existed. A bill was then passed to have this particular matter and all future recurrences referred to the High Court, which concurred with Vardon that a casual vacancy did not apply with respect to a void election result, and that a fresh election had to be held specifically with respect to the third seat. This was duly held with Vardon and O’Loughlin as the only candidates, with Vardon emerging the winner by 41,443 votes to 35,779 (source: Psephos).

So while there is certainly a precedent for an entire state to go back to the polls for a Senate election, it was conducted in the context of an entirely different electoral system. Presumably a new election would have to be for all six seats, and not simply a partial election as was held in 1908. The Vardon matter also involved the question of casual vacancies, which does not apply here – in Vardon’s case, the result was declared void after his term had begun, whereas the term for this election does not begin until the middle of next year.

• The other precedent which springs to mind for a re-staging of a multi-member election was that which followed the state election in Tasmania in 1979. Under its Hare-Clark system, each of Tasmania’s five electorates returned seven members (now five). The result for Denison in 1979, which returned four Labor and three Liberal members, was declared void because three of those elected were found to have exceeded statutory limits on campaign spending. This caused a new election for Denison to be held on February 16, 1980, this time resulting in Labor losing one of its four seats to Norm Sanders of the Australian Democrats.

Original post:

That election we had a while back is still in a sense not over, with recounts continuing for Fairfax and the Western Australian Senate. While these recounts are shortly to conclude, there is unfortunately a fairly big chance that the next stop will be the courts.

• The WA Senate recount was, last I heard, scheduled to be concluded either tomorrow or on Monday. The recount could potentially overturn the election of Labor’s Louise Pratt and the Palmer United Party’s Dio Wang in favour of Scott Ludlam of the Greens and Wayne Dropulich of the Australian Sports Party if it closes a 14-vote gap between Shooters and Fishers and Australian Christians at an early point in the count (although Labor reportedly plans a legal challenge if this occurs). Rechecking of over a million above-the-line votes has inevitably turned up anomalies, most notably a bundle of several hundred votes that were wrongly assigned to the informal pile, eliciting a predictably hyperbolic response from Clive Palmer. It should be observed that such votes will only have the potential to change the result if they affect the vote totals for Shooters and Fishers and Australian Christians, which applies only to votes cast for those parties or those which fed them preferences (No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics in the case of Australian Christians, Australian Voice, Australian Independents and Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party in the case of Shooters and Fishers) – about 3.6% of the total. UPDATE: Oh dear – the AEC reports “a serious administrative issue” in which 1375 verified votes from the original count, including 1255 above-the-line and 120 informal votes, have gone missing. Nick Minchin, who had ministerial oversight over electoral matters during the Howard years, suggests the entire election may have to be held again.

• The Fairfax recount grinds on even more laboriously, owing to the Clive Palmer camp’s tactic of challenging literally every vote that goes against them, requiring them to be sent to the state’s chief electoral officer for determination. The tactic seems to have worked, because the recount process has seen Palmer’s lead steadily inflate from seven to 58. The ABC reports the recount should be concluded either by tomorrow or early next week. However, the Liberal National Party is reportedly set to launch a legal challenge against the result which, if the experience of the Victorian seat of McEwen at the 2007 election is anything to go by, will result in the Federal Court reaching determinations of its own on the status of disputed ballot papers.

• Meanwhile, Kevin Bonham comprehensively catalogues points at issue in the Senate electoral system and the relative merits of proposed solutions, and a piece from Antony Green on the South Australian Legislative Council system also has a lot to say about the Senate.

Red and green numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Labor and the Greens. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Wills covers an area of Melbourne’s middle north, from long-established Brunswick in the south and Coburg in the centre to post-war suburbs further north. Like its eastern neighbour Batman, it straddles the divide between the Greens stronghold of the inner city and the expansive Labor heartland of Melbourne’s northern suburbs. However, the former area carries lesser weight in Wills than in Batman, being confined to the area around Brunswick, which makes the seat substantially more secure for Labor. The electorate was created with the expansion of parliament in 1949, though at that time its southern end was covered by the since-abolished electorate of Burke (an unrelated electorate of the same name covered Melbourne’s outer north from 1969 to 2004). Prior to 1949, an electorate called Bourke had boundaries similar to those Wills has had since Burke was abolished in 1955. Labor’s strength in the area was established early, with Bourke being held by either Labor or socialist independents from 1910 until it was abolished.

The inaugural member for Wills was Bill Bryson, who had won Bourke for Labor in 1943 before losing to an independent in 1946. Bryson was among seven Victorian “groupers” who were expelled from the party during the split of 1955, and he contested that year’s election as the candidate of the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which would shortly evolve into the Democratic Labor Party. However, Bryson was defeated by Labor candidate Gordon Bryant, who went on to serve as Aboriginal Affairs Minister in the Whitlam government. When Bryant retired in 1980, the seat was used to accommodate Bob Hawke’s long-anticipated entry to parliament, enabling him to assume the prime ministership three years later.

Hawke resigned from parliament immediately after losing the leadership in December 1991, providing Paul Keating with an early electoral test in the form of a by-election for a seat the party had never lost before. The test was failed disastrously: in a record field of 22 candidates, local football identity Phil Cleary outpolled the Labor candidate 33.5% to 29.4%, prevailing by 15.7% after preferences. The result was declared void the following November when the High Court ruled Cleary had not been qualified to nominate as his job as a teacher constituted “an office of profit under the Crown”. The imminence of the 1993 election meant no new by-election was held, but Cleary won the seat at the ensuing election by a margin of 2.4%. Cleary’s position was subsequently weakened when redistribution pushed the seat westwards, and Labor candidate Kelvin Thomson provided his party with a rare highlight at the 1996 election when he polled 50.0% of the primary vote to prevail over Cleary by 5.8% after preferences.

A member of the Labor Unity (Right) faction, Thomson entered politics as the state member for Pascoe Vale in 1988, and served in the shadow ministry following the Kirner government’s defeat in 1992. He was elevated to the federal shadow ministry in 1997, serving in portfolios including environment and regional development. However, he resigned from the front bench in March 2007 when it emerged he had given a reference to colourful Melbourne identity Tony Mokbel. From February 2013 until the government’s defeat he served as a parliamentary secretary, first in the trade portfolio and then in schools after Kevin Rudd resumed the leadership in June, after which he returned to the back bench. Thomson supported Julia Gillard in the February 2012 leadership ballot, but was among those who defected to the Rudd camp in June 2013. Together with the rest of his faction, he supported Bill Shorten in the post-election leadership contest. While Thomson’s electoral position has at all times remained secure, the Greens achieved a minor milestone at the 2013 election when they finished ahead of the Liberals to secure second place, ending up 15.2% arrears after the distribution of preferences.