Steve Baron: Are our elections fair?

Steve Baron

A PSEPHOLOGIST (pronounced "sefologist") is a person who studies elections and trends in voting.

They do statistical studies about things like, for example, whether or not the voting papers we use at the next election should be in alphabetical order or randomised.

Recently, our district councillors voted to stay with an alphabetised voting ballot for the elections in October. Judging by the banter about the first letter of each councillor's name, I assume there were no psephologists around the council table.

Those whose name started with an A or a B seemed far more enthusiastic about alphabetisation than those with a V or a W. In the end there was a unanimous decision to stick with alphabetical order.

What was obvious to me was that not one councillor had done any research on the matter. If they had, they would have found a number of academic studies showing that being at the top of the ballot paper can improve your chances of being elected by anywhere from 1 per cent to 5 per cent.

That may not sound like much, but it could mean the difference between being elected and just missing out.

At first sight, the obvious answer would be to randomise ballot papers - and in 1984 the Australian Parliament did just that, switching from an alphabetically ordered ballot to a randomised ballot.

There was concern that too many people were "donkey voting" - that is, simply placing 1, 2, 3 etc, starting from the top of the ballot paper.

Why would people do that? Perhaps because voting in Australia is compulsory and you can be fined if you do not vote - so they voted but gave it no consideration.

The trouble with randomising ballot papers is that it does not extinguish ballot paper unfairness - it simply allocates the unfairness randomly! It is just a different set of candidates that get an unfair advantage.

In 1975, California started randomising ballot papers for statewide elections with a complex alphabet lottery. In addition to randomising ballot papers, candidate names are also rotated in each district.

This came about after the California Supreme Court struck down a law that reserved the first ballot position to existing representatives (prospective candidates came after them on the ballot paper).

Randomising every ballot paper in every district is a fairer system, but in Whanganui we only have one district.

For the process to be fair, what would be required is that multiple versions of each ballot paper would need to be printed, with an even proportion for every candidate to appear first on the ballot.

We could certainly do this but the downside is the cost - it is more expensive.

Randomising every ballot paper also makes it near impossible for the electoral officer to check if the ballot papers were printed correctly.

Also, the candidate booklet, which gives a brief description of each candidate, would still have to be printed in some sort of order, probably alphabetically, as it is a far bigger publication than the ballot paper.

It has been suggested that having randomised ballot papers but an alphabetised candidate booklet has the potential to confuse voters, though I am confident the people of Whanganui are smart enough to work that one out.

Interestingly, in 2001 a mayoral election result in Compton, California was overturned and the losing incumbent mayor reinstated because the city clerk had made a mistake when randomising the candidate names on the ballot.

What concerns me is a real lack of detail by our elected representatives when it comes to our democracy.

They also recently chose to stay with the old, outdated and unfair "first past the post" electoral system for electing councillors and the mayor, and that was a real shame.

The much fairer "single transferable vote" system - used to elect all district health boards in New Zealand - should be used in elections with more than two candidates.

-Steve Baron is a Whanganui-based political commentator, author and founder of Better Democracy NZ, and holds degrees in economics and political science. He is standing for Whanganui District Council in October - feedback to: steve@stevebaron.co.nz