ABC Antony Green's Selective Analysis of Green's Peferences

Antony Green, ABC Electoral Analyst,  has produced another article on Green preferences in his blog but had failed to address the issue of optional preferential voting and the method of counting the Senate vote 

As a Party the Greens can not direct preferences in the lower house, in the upper-house yes, but only thanks to the above-the-line voting system, below-the-line voting they have no say.,

What is untested and a real potential problem, not just related to the Greens but for all parties including the ALP and the LNP is optional preferential voting. What happens if a party advocates to not preference anyone, and the voter only preferences the candidate/party of their choice without expressing a continuing preference? The system becomes by default a first-past-the-post ballot.

Analysis of the 2010 Victorian State upper-house vote shows that a number of exhausted BTL votes from the party votes does have a significant impact on the election outcome. IN Western Metropolitan for example Bob Smith lost his seat because a significant number of Family First, DLP and Liberal party votes exhausted and did not flow on to other parties, This gave the Greens a hidden advantage in that these votes did not flow on to the ALP as was the case with Ticket ATL votes

The Senate vote and party preferences
The other issue that also is a considerable concern is the method of counting the Senate vote., The System itself disports the outcome of the election and voters intentions.

In Queensland 2007 Larrisa Waters should have been elected to the Senate, the only reason she was not was due to the method of segmentation in the way the votes is counted., a system that was designed to facilitate the manual counting of the vote.
 
In Victoria 2007 David Feeney could have lost his seat, not because of the voters intention, but due to the method used in calculating the surplus transfer value.

Had Pauline Hanson's One Nation preferenced the Liberal Party, before the ALP and ahead of the Greens, David Feeney would have been defeated, contrary to the voters intentions. The system having delivered an additional value of 7000 votes to the Liberal Party ticket vote which favoured the Greens ahead of the ALP.

The value of the minor parties (The DLP, Family First and One Nation) was devalued and the Liberal party vote increased disproportionally). The system used to count the Senate vote is in need of serious overhaul. We no longer need to take short cuts to facilitate a manual count, short cuts that make the system inaccurate and unfair.

Whilst Antony Green has agreed with the analysis of the Victorian 2007 Senate count he continues to avoid undertaking a review of the 2007 Queensland Senate count.  If you recount the 2007 Queensland vote and exclude all candidates except the last seven candidates remaining in the count and redistribute the preferences accordingly, Larrisa Waters should have been elected ahead of the Labor Party's 3rd Candidate. The reason she was not was due to the method of segmentation in the way the vote is counted.

If you use the the same procedural methods that apply to the lower hose single member preferential count, and on exclusion of a candidate from the count and restart the count afresh the method of segmentation does not distort the outcome of the election result.   A re-iterative counting system is more accurate and with the aid of computer technology should be implemented.

Antony Green's confusing flaw explanation explained in more detail by example

Antony Green in explanation of the Senate and Victorian upper-house counting rules tried to outline the flaw in the calculation of the Surplus Transfer value used to transfer a candidate's excess value of votes.

In presenting his arguments Green uses quotas, which to some may be confusing and difficult to understand.

The Senate and Victorian formula used to calculate the Surplus Transfer Value is based on the number of ballot papers not the value of the vote and as a result this distorts the proportionality of the election count. In short the system used is not accurate. It was put in place to facilitate a manual counting of the Senate vote, last century, when they did not have computers to assist in the counting of the vote.

To try and limit the impact of this flaw they introduce segmentation - the breaking down of the vote count into parcels or bundles of votes that held a common value.   In Tasmania and the ACT they only use the last bundle of votes received to distribute a candidate's surplus. (This has another effect that is equally flawed in principle and its execution - details not covered in this discussion)

The use of a segmented count is akin to dealing from the bottom of the deck in a game of cards. It in itself distorts the outcome of the election as was the case in 2007 Queensland Senate count where Green candidate Larissa Waters was denied representation as a result of this flaw in the counting process.

Western Australia State Government legislated to correct the flaw in the Senate Surplus Transfer Value but they maintained the method of segmented distribution of excluded candidate votes.

With the use of computer aided counting systems there is no need or justification to retain the flawed surplus transfer value calculation and with a value based formula there is no need to retain segmentation either.  All votes should be transferred in a single transaction - one transaction per candidate.  Pure simple and proportional

Senate and Victorian Legislative Council formula

Surplus transfer value (Stv) equals Candidates surplus value (Csv) divided by the Candidate's total value of votes (Ctv) divided by the total number of ballot papers (Tbp).

The problem with the formula is that they use the number of ballot papers as the divisor not the value of the vote at the time it is being distributed . This problem is highlighted when a candidate is elected in  a deferred count where the value attributed to each ballot paper is significantly different. The impact of this flaw in the system is it inflated the value of the major party ticket vote and devalue the independent below-the-line Minor Party vote.

The impact of the distorion in the count can be explained by looking more closely at the 2010 NSW Senate count and the distribution of the Liberal National Parties third candidate surplus votes using real numbers not percentage of quotas as in the Green explanation. In NSW the distortion delivered the LNP ticket a bonus value of  14,317 equivalent votes which is enough in a close election to change the result

In 2007 Victorian Senate count  the distortion in the calculation of the Surplus transfer value came close to defeating ALP's Senator David Feeney as the LNP ticket gained a "bonus" of over 7,000 votes which was then transferred to the Greens candidate. The 7000 votes effectively "stolen" from Family First, the DLP and one Nation all of which opposed the Greens candidature.

If we counted money and dividends as we count votes our financial system would collapse over night