This article is a guest post by Ralph Hall, previously Coordinator of the National Coalition for Proportional Representation, who has also held a range of other electoral system roles in both the UK and New Zealand.
Tasmanian voters will have the benefit of using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) on Saturday in this Australian state election. The Tasmanian House of Assembly has used STV to elect all seats since 1907, the longest continuous use of STV for any legislature around the world.
STV is a form of proportional representation created in Britain, which the Electoral Reform Society has long supported. In Tasmania they call it the Hare-Clark system after the British founder of STV Thomas Hare and the Tasmanian STV advocate Andrew Inglis Clark.
Tasmania is the only one of Australia’s six states to use STV for lower house elections. In Australia’s Federal Parliament and in most states, STV is used for upper house elections, with Alternative Vote (AV) used for lower house elections. In Tasmania this is flipped, with STV used for the lower house and AV used for the upper house.
Outside of Australia, STV is also used for legislatures in Ireland, Malta and Northern Ireland and for all local elections in Scotland and some local elections in New Zealand and the United States.
STV involves voters ranking candidates that run in multi-member constituencies. Because multiple candidates are elected in each constituency, STV allows for a much more proportional outcome than the winner takes all First Past the Post (FPTP) which caused such a disproportionate result at the last UK General Election. Under STV, voters are very likely to have voted for at least one of the people elected, whereas in the UK General Election under FPTP 57.8% of voters are unrepresented in the UK House of Commons.
The Tasmanian election on Saturday is for 35 seats across five constituencies that each elect seven members. Voters in each of these five constituencies rank at least their top 7 candidates.
Multiple candidates can stand from each party, with their order on the voting paper randomised using what is known in Australia as the Robson Rotation. This randomised order ensures that voters have more control over which candidates from each party are elected.
The few opinion polls that have been done during the campaign have slightly different results, although all suggest that no one party will win a majority of the 35 seats. One poll had the Opposition Labor Party likely to win the most seats but most others suggest the incumbent Liberal Government will get more support. In all polls the Green Party look to have similar support to the last election when they won 14% of the seats on 14% of the first preference votes. Polling also shows that independents are likely to benefit from the decision by the populist Jacqui Lambi Network to not run candidates.
Whatever the outcome, voters can be confident that their voting preferences will be properly represented in the Tasmanian House of Assembly because of the STV system.