You May Have Voted, But Did Your Vote Count?

This article was originally published on October 18, 2020.

Yesterday was the ACT Election. While many people across Canberra had pre-polled, others, including me, waited until Election Day — mostly for the satisfaction of enjoying the reward for our civic responsibility in the form of a democracy sausage.

That evening, I noticed a few things. Parts of social media flooded with concerns that they didn’t realise they needed to vote before or on October 17. I also noticed many people not understanding exactly what they were meant to write in order to have their candidates voted.

The most interesting thing I noticed was the swing towards the Belco Party and the potential implications of that trend.

In the ACT, we use the Hare-Clark electoral system. This is a proportional representation system. Basically, this means that, in the case of the ACT, we have 25 elected representatives, 5 electorates and therefore 5 representatives per electorate. Hare-Clark is a nasty system because it requires party colleagues to go head-to-head for the vote… while still working together. It requires five Labor or Liberal representatives to compete for possibly only two or three seats.

If you are aware of the manner in which Hare-Clark votes are counted, this next part can be skipped over…