Stanhope celebrates 'historic win'
The ACT Labor Party has claimed victory in the Territory's sixth Legislative Assembly election and will govern in its own right for the first time.
The minor parties have been decimated.
With about half the vote counted, Labor could take up to 10 of the Assembly's 17 seats, the Liberals six and the Greens one.
Chief Minister Jon Stanhope declared the poll a win for Labor at 10:00pm, about four hours after the polls closed.
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ABC Canberra's Chris Uhlmann backgrounds the ACT election. Electoral Systems
http://www.abc.net.au/elections/act/2004/guide/system.htm
The ACT has had two electoral systems since self government, Modified d'Hondt and Hare-Clark. Both are proportional representation systems, similar in sentiment to the system that elects Senators to the Australian Parliament. In essence they are applied to multi-member electorates and candidates win when they gather a high enough percentage of the vote.
Modified d'Hondt was the result of what Canberra Times editor in Chief Jack Waterford described as a "bizarre compromise" in the Senate in the lead-up to self-government. It came about because the Liberals and the Democrats were worried that dividing the ACT into 17 single member electorates would see Labor take every one.
The call went out for "fairer" systems and the senators became enamoured of a little beauty devised by a Belgian professor, Victor d'Hondt in 1878. There was something of a craze for designing proportional election systems in the 19th Century: English lawyer, Sir Thomas Hare, devised one in 1859 and Tasmanian Attorney General, Andrew Inglis Clark, modified it and applied the system to state elections in Tasmania from 1897.
But rather than use d'Hondt in its pure form the Australian Senators decided to marry some Australian innovations to it and modified d'Hondt was born. To cut an incredibly tedious story short, at the first election the ACT was treated as a single electorate returning 17 members, each requiring a quota of the vote to get elected.
Modified d'Hondt was diabolically complicated took weeks to count and confused even the hardened professionals at the Australian Electoral Commission. It was dubbed "the electoral system from Hell". The AEC begged Federal Parliament to change it and a referendum on electoral systems was held in conjunction with the 1992 election. Although the population decided to ditch modified d'Hondt it did opt to keep a proportional system and Hare-Clark won the referendum beauty contest over single member electorates with 65.30 per cent of the vote.
Today the ACT is divided into three electorates, two returning five members (Brindabella and Ginninderra) and one returning seven (Molonglo). Once the vote is in the ACT Electoral Commission sets a quota for each electorate based on a formula that divides the number of formal votes by the number vacancies. If anyone gets enough primary votes to leap the quota bar then (as Jon Stanhope will and Kate Carnell did) then they are elected and their preferences distributed. Then the Electoral Commission cuts from the bottom, excluding the candidate with the lowest vote and distributing their preferences. The process continues until all positions are filled.
For a detailed explanation of how Hare-Clarke works go the ACT Electoral Commission site. http://www.elections.act.gov.au/hare.html