Australia is by far the most well established and best known example of Alternative Vote (AV), see Alternative Vote, in action. The system was introduced by the Nationalist government in Australia in 1918 to replace the existing first-past-the-post (FPTP), see First Past the Post (FPTP), system after it became clear that several aligned conservative candidates all standing in the same electorate could split their vote between them under first-past-the-post, thus handing victory to the less popular but more disciplined Labor Party forces. Its introduction was thus intimately related to the need to counter the possibilities of vote splitting and to encourage and reward collaboration or coalition arrangements between parties. This ability to aggregate aligned interests, rather than divide them, has long been a (largely unrecognised) feature of Australian electoral politics, but it has not been until relatively recently that the full potential of preference distribution as an instrument for influencing policy decisions has been made clear.
There is an important difference between 'full preferential' and 'optional preferential' versions of AV. If the decision to mark preferences beyond the first choice is left to the voter, rather than being made compulsory, then the winning candidate must gain an absolute majority of votes in the count, but not necessarily a majority of those cast. A ballot where preferences have not or cannot be assigned to a continuing candidate are said to 'exhaust'. By contrast, in Australia it is a legislative requirement for all preferences to be marked to cast a valid ballot. A major consequence of this is that parties distribute 'how to vote' cards to their supporters on voting day, giving them the party's preferred preference ordering for all candidates which can then be copied on to the ballot by the electors, large proportions of whom do just that.
Commentators on Australian politics historically tended to regard the alternative vote as a variation of FPTP, in most cases giving results nearly identical to that system in terms of election outcomes and the structure of party systems. Douglas Rae, for example, in his seminal work on the consequences of electoral laws, stated baldly that 'the Australian system behaves in all its particulars as if it were a single-member district plurality formula'. A number of other commentators have argued that preferential voting makes little difference to Australian electoral results and have not been central in determining how governments are constituted.
The common element in all these judgements is the fact that they were predominantly based on the Australian federal elections of the 1950s and 1960s where, with the notable exception of the role of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), preference distribution had little effect on electoral outcomes. Today preferences play a much more important role in deciding the outcome of Australian elections than in previous decades. It is not possible to assume that voters' primary choice would be replicated under a FPTP system, but if it were the results of the 1961, 1969, and 1990 elections would have been reversed. The decline of what was a very stable two party system, the rise of minor parties, and the increasing influence of independent candidates have all meant that the impact of preference voting has been higher during the 1990s than at any time in the past. Table 1 sets out the proportion of seats in which a distribution of preferences has been necessary to determine the result. The second column is the percentage of seats in which the eventual winner did not lead on first preferences, and thus produced a different outcome than would have been the case under FPTP.
Table 1: Proportion of Seats Where Preferences Distributed and Outcomes Changed, 1963-1996
| Election Year |
Preferences distributed (%) |
Outcomes changed (%) |
| 1963 |
19.2 |
6.6 |
| 1966 |
25.0 |
4.0 |
| 1969 |
32.0 |
9.6 |
| 1972 |
39.2 |
11.2 |
| 1974 |
26.0 |
7.9 |
| 1975 |
18.9 |
5.5 |
| 1977 |
36.2 |
3.1 |
| 1980 |
32.0 |
4.8 |
| 1983 |
24.8 |
1.6 |
| 1984 |
29.7 |
8.8 |
| 1987 |
36.5 |
2.7 |
| 1990 |
60.1 |
6.1 |
| 1993 |
42.2 |
8.2 |
| 1996 |
39.2 |
4.7 |
As the table indicates, almost half of all seats in recent elections have been determined by the distribution of preferences, although in most cases the number of winners who 'came from behind' to win a seat on preferences is small, averaging around six percent in the 1990s. Even this small amount would, however, have been enough to change government in several elections.
The most graphic example of preference votes directly affecting the choice of government occurred at the 1990 federal election, where the incumbent Australian Labor Party (ALP) was polling badly and looked to be heading for electoral defeat, and where voter support for left-of-centre parties such as the Australian Democrats and Greens reached its height. The ALP, under the influence of senior strategist Senator Graham Richardson, assiduously courted the green vote, both indirectly via interactions with the major environmental lobby groups and directly via media appeals to potential green voters, appealing directly for the second or third preferences of minor party supporters, offering policy concessions on key issues and arguing that the Labor Party was far closer to their core interests than the major alternative, the Liberal/National coalition. This strategy was markedly successful: with minor party support levels at an all time high of around 17 percent, the ALP was the beneficiary of around two-thirds of all preferences from Democrat and Green voters - a figure which probably made the difference between it winning and losing the election. This was thus a 'win-win' situation for both groups: the ALP gained government with less than 40 percent of the first-preference vote, while the minor parties, which did not win lower house seats, nonetheless saw their preferred major party in government and committed to favourable policies in their areas of concern.
To see how this type of preference swapping worked in practice, one needs only examine the victory of the ALP's Neville Newell in the seat of Richmond at the 1990 federal election. Newell scored only 27 percent of the first preference vote. The coalition candidate, and then leader of the National Party, Charles Blunt won over 41 percent of first preferences, and looked set for an easy victory. However, the count saw a combination of preferences from minor parties and independents, especially the anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott, flow through to Newell and enable him to win the seat with 50.5 percent of the full preference vote.
| Candidate |
First Count |
Second Count |
Third Count |
Fourth Count |
Fifth Count |
Sixth Count |
Final Count |
| Gibbs (Australian Democrats) |
4346 |
4380 |
4420 |
4504 |
4683 |
Excluded |
Excluded |
| Newell (Australian Labor Party) |
18423 |
18467 |
18484 |
18544 |
18683 |
20238 |
34664 (Elected) |
| Baillie (Independent) |
187 |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
| Sims (Call to Australia Party) |
1032 |
1053 |
1059 |
1116 |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
| Paterson (Independent) |
445 |
480 |
530 |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
| Leggett (Independent) |
279 |
294 |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
Excluded |
| Blunt (National Party) |
28257 |
28274 |
28303 |
28416 |
28978 |
29778 |
33980 |
| Caldicott (Independent) |
16072 |
16091 |
16237 |
16438 |
16658 |
18903 |
Excluded |
Newell won the seat because he was able to secure over 77% of Caldicott's preferences when she was excluded at the seventh count. Caldicott herself had received the majority of preferences from the other independent candidates. The ALP in Richmond, as in other seats, was thus the beneficiary of a strategy aimed at maximising not just its own vote but at maximising the preferences it received from others: the 'second preference' strategy. As support for the Australian Democrats and green parties reached its height in 1990, so the ALP's assiduous campaigning for second preferences saw it receive around two-thirds of the preferences from these parties, which proved decisive for their electoral victory.
The success of the ALP's strategy in 1990 was notable not least because historically the process of preference transfers has tended to benefit the non-Labor parties rather than the ALP. AV has had two main positive effects on the non-Labor parties: it facilitated the coalition arrangement between the Liberal and Country (now National) parties by enabling them both to stand candidates in some seats without the danger of vote splitting, and it enabled the preferences of one small party, the DLP, to flow predominantly against the ALP and hugely assist the coalition maintain government in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the ALP advocated a return to first-past-the-post (FPTP). But when the ALP regained office in 1983, its policy was to retain AV, but make the expression of preferences optional rather than compulsory.
Optional Preferential AV
Optional preferential AV is identical to full preferential AV except that voters are not required to express a preference for every candidate; if they wish, they can express a preference for only one. In the words of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, optional preferential voting is 'perhaps the only electoral procedure in the world which allows electors to express their indifference to candidates.' A national survey in 1979 showed that the majority of Australian electors favoured the optional version, with 72 percent for optional and only 26 percent favouring compulsory preference marking. One clear advantage of the optional version is that the problems of spoilt ballots due to numbering errors associated with the full preferential system are largely removed. For this reason, optional preference marking is probably the only form of AV suited to conditions of low literacy or numeracy.
Optional preferential AV is currently used for state elections in New South Wales, where it was introduced by the Wran Labor government in 1981, and in Queensland, where it was introduced in 1992 on the recommendation of the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission, who considered that full preferential voting forced voters to express preferences for candidates about whom they may know little or nothing. The rate of 'plumping' for one candidate only, without marking subsequent preferences, has increased over time in both these cases. The decision to express preferences also appears to be closely related to the recommendations made by parties on their 'how-to-vote' cards. In a survey conducted at two by-elections in 1992, fully 75 percent of electors followed party voting directions, resulting in plumping rates of 43 percent in one district (Gordon) and 63 percent in another (Kuring-gai). In the Kuring-gai case, less than 33 percent of electors filled in all squares on the ballot paper. In Queensland, plumping rates stood at 23 percent at the first OPV election in 1992, but were significantly higher in those cases where how-to-vote material from one of the major parties did not suggest preferences. There is also a clear partisan component to plumping rates, which reflects the long-standing coalition arrangements between the Liberal and National parties: in both NSW and Queensland. Labor voters are considerably more likely to 'plump' than supporters of the coalition parties.
The Effects of AV
In Australia, interest in preferential voting tends to increase with its perceived partisan effect. The influence of preferences on electoral outcomes has clearly increased in recent decades and played a crucial role in the 1990 Labor victory in particular. The collapse of the Democrat vote in 1993 and the Coalition landslide at the 1996 federal election has meant that the effects of preference distribution have received less attention since then, although it has facilitated the election of increasing numbers of independent candidates (two in 1993, five in 1996), most of whom win their seats by overtaking major party candidates on preferences.
Analyses of the effects of AV in Australia have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on its partisan impacts. Some commentators have seen the system as an instrument for maintaining the dominance of the two major parties, the ALP and the Liberal/National Coalition, and for restricting the role of minor parties in the lower house to one of influencing the policies of the major parties rather than gaining election themselves. Others claim that it can enhance the power and position of minor parties, especially if they have the potential to hold the balance of power between two major parties.
There is widespread agreement that AV has facilitated coalition arrangements such as that between the Liberal and National parties, and that it works to the advantage of centre candidates and parties, encouraging moderate policy positions and a search for the 'middle ground'. The sometimes fiery and aggressive rhetoric of Australian politics has often distracted observers from recognising just how much co-operative behaviour there is between parties - via preference swapping deals, for example - and how close the major parties are on most substantive policy issues. There is little doubt that the AV electoral system provides a significant institutional encouragement for these centrist tendencies.
