VOTING ? For Whom?
July 12th 2010 07:39
Voting in an election. How will you vote? For the party, or for the person you perceive will represent you reasonably well if elected to Parliament. I know voting is compulsory so you will vote for someone if you are over 18 years old; but how will you choose from the candidates available in your electorate?
A> The Party vote.
Every party wants you to go the Party way. By doing so you give your preferencial vote to the party to use at their discretion. The Preference vote was introduced so that each individual voter could have a second preference if his/her first didn’t do well enough to count. I don’t think it was ever intended for use by any political party. Its usage has, of course, been changed by the various parties. Preference votes are now bargaining tools for political favours. You know how it goes:” If you promise X party all your preference votes in this electorate which could go to either X or Y, we, if we win will take care of - - - - - .”
You, as a voter, have no say whatsoever in where your preference vote goes. The party machine takes over.
B> The personal vote.
You now have control of who gets your preference vote as well as your primary vote. This works just fine where there are four or five candidates to pick from. You simply put the numbers ,1 ,2,3 etc against the names on the ballot sheet. 1 being your first choice, 2 being your second, and so on. This is democracy at work as it should be.
But there is a problem when you get to the Senate vote. For some strange reason Senate seats are not necessarily representative of an electorate. Each voter is asked to vote for the number of senators running for election, the whole lot. This could mean that you will number maybe 75 candidates to complete your preference vote correctly. Time consuming, totally un-democratic because you don’t even know the names of most of the candidates until you get to voting day, and utterly boring.
Our political geniuses have an answer for that, vote for the party of your choice. Less time on polling day, sort of democratic but could be debateable, and you are not in the booth long enough to get bored.
Now you understand why the two houses of Parliament have different names: The ‘ House of Representatives’ does represent the people, each electorate elects one person to represent them in political affairs pertaining to Government.
The ‘Upper House’ is often called ‘The Senate’ and its members are not representing the people, just the party they belong to.
You won’t find Independent people in the Senate; the voting system precludes them from ever being elected. Party politics prevail in the Senate.
The House of Representatives does have members who are not Party members at all, they are simply trusted by their electorate to do their best for the electorate.
From my position as an ordinary voter who may vote for any party or an independent candidate, my vote counts for the House of Representatives election, but is pretty useless in the Senate election. I would prefer to have the Senate elected by electorates so that the member for my area can be held to account by those who voted him into office. Either that or dispense with the Senate altogether. As it stands now Senators have no responsibility at all and may well be the redundant remnants of what was once the “House of Lords”. Indeed, the ‘House of Lords’ still exists in England even though no one is elected at all.
I will leave this rant right here as it could get very complicated. This piece is my opinion of my perception of our political voting system. It could not be called Democratic with any real honesty. Democracy is Government OF the people, FOR the people, By the people. In the dictionary definition I see no reference to ‘Party’s’ at all.
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