Australia 2013 - Results thread

[Gary J]

There has been a development in the count for the Queensland division of Fisher. The AEC had previously listed the seat as LNP ahead, on the basis of a two party preferred count against the ALP. However the PUP first preference vote, in third place, was not very far behind the ALP vote. Presumably transfers from the other seven candidates have pushed PUP above ALP, so that a full preference count is needed to decide if LNP or PUP have won the seat.

LNP only had 44.46% of the first preference vote, so a victory from the third first preference place might be possible.

[Gary J]

There seems to be some discussion in Australia about whether the courts might order a re-run of the whole Western Australian Senate election (all 6 seats) or just the 2 seats which are particularly in dispute.

There is a precedent, more than a century ago when the Senate was elected by the block vote system, where the High Court declared the election of one South Australian Senator void. It left the election of the other two Senators from the state in the half Senate election undisturbed. I do not see why that precedent would not apply, even with the current preferential voting system.

Senators whose election would not have been affected by the recount or the missing ballots should not have to face a re-vote. They have been validly elected and the court of disputed returns (in my totally non expert interpretation of Australian law) does not have power to set aside those undisputed returns.

[Gary J]

The Australian legislation seems to give the Court of Disputed Returns a very wide discretion. It can declare a candidate elected or not validly elected or that the election is absolutely void.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a precedent that some Senators can be validly elected even though another from the same state in the same election had a void election. I do not see why that precedent is not still valid, just because the electoral system now is different from when the precedent was set.

The court has been given an unusually wide discretion in this area, so it may not consider precedent to be as binding as in most areas of law. However, I do see an argument that the court should not declare the election of all six Senators void when certainly three and arguably four of them were indisputably validly elected by the people of Western Australia.

It really comes down to whether the court of disputed returns thinks it appropriate to take account of the likely political consequences of ordering a two seat re-vote (almost certainly electing 1 Labor and 1 Liberal Senator) compared to a six seat re-vote (my guess at the likely result 3 Liberal, 2 Labor and 1 Green/Palmer United/lucky micro party Senator). Either way the result would be different from that if the previous recount had been perfect.