R
At 10:52 AM 8/18/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>R wrote:
>
> >the answer for people who refuse to vote? the option -- "none of the
> above" -- has been on ballots in australia for years. anyone know why
> it's not on the US ballots?
>
>There is no such option printed on Australian ballot papers, in fact such
>an option is incompatible with the preferential system used throughout
>Australia. Of course it is possible to simply not mark the candidates on
>the ballot paper, or to write something across the ballot paper, but such
>votes are counted as informal.
>
>About 20 years ago in Tasmania there was a large write-in campaign during
>a referendum to decide the future of a proposed new hydro-electric
>project. The Hydro Electric Commission wanted to build a dam on the
>Franklin river in the SW wilderness, which environmentalists had been
>campaigning against for years. Under extreme pressure from protest
>campaign involving tens of thousands of people, the state government,
>which favoured the project, decided to hold a referendum which avoided the
>real issue, it called a plebiscite which gave voters a choice of location
>for the dam, instead of whether the dam should go ahead at all.
>
>The environmentalists called for voters to write "no dams" on their ballot
>paper, which about one-third of voters did. It was the most successful
>write-in campaign in memory, though the HEC's preferred dam still got a
>majority of votes. The dam was eventually halted by the federal government.
>
>But of course referenda are different from the election of representatives
>to parliament, in that they are not preferential ballots, but simply
>yes/no questions. Since all elections in Australia are conducted by a
>preferential system, where voters must preference more than one candidate,
>voters voting "1" for a candidate titled "None of the above" would then be
>required to place a "2" against their second preference candidate, "3"
>against their next preference, and so forth.
>
>Under federal election law in Australia, it is necessary to preference all
>candidates on the ballot. Otherwise your vote is informal and will not be
>counted at all towards the result. It would be comical to mark "None of
>the above", but then go on to mark your second, etc, preference. So
>obviously this idea is conceived in a primitive first-past-the-post system.
>
>In the under federal electoral laws, it is unlawful to advocate voting
>informal, which would include voting for none of the candidates. (Though
>it is perfectly legal to vote informal of course, since secret voting
>makes it impossible to proscribe this.) It is almost certain that a
>political party with a name such as "none of the above" would be refused
>registration, so could not get its name on federal ballots. However one
>person many years back did change his legal name to "Informal", then
>nominated as a candidate a few times. That may have been in a state poll,
>I can't recall.
>
>Its a nice concept to have the option of campaigning for no-one to be
>elected though. There's plenty of elections where the quality of the
>candidates makes that the rational choice.
>
>Bill Bartlett
>Bracknell Tas