Auggie
|
As many of you know, I'm not a huge fan of direct elections when it comes to leaders. I've said previously that in country that is a federation like Australia, and in one where the population of the country is lopsided, a direction election of President (i.e. one-man one-vote) would be skewed to favour the Eastern States.
Having looked at electoral statistics, I believe the numbers support my claim.
Enrolled electors:
NSW: 5,322,014;
VIC: 4,277,647
QLD 3,299,172
WA 1,669,646
SA 1,220,637
TAS 388,216
ACT 299,685
NT 140,502 ______ TOTAL: 16,567,519
------- If we calculate the total number of electors in the top 3 states: we get a total number of electors of is 12,848,833. If we calculate the percentage of these two totals then that means that NSW, VIC and QLD make up 77.5% of the votes. This means that the election is basically over when the count is finished in NSW, VIC and QLD. ------- Now here's my proposal:
Each State is entitled to 'electoral votes' which is equal to the total number of members in both Houses of Federal Parliament which each State is entitled. It would look like this (excluding the territories):
NSW: 59
VIC: 50
QLD: 42
WA: 28
SA: 22
TAS: 17 ____ TOTAL: 218
When a voter elects their president, they vote for the candidate directly; and the percentage of votes obtained by a candidate is then translated into the 'electoral vote'. For e.g. if Candidate A obtains 51% in NSW then they'll obtain 35 electoral votes. This is different from the American system whereby over there it's a winner-take-all system.
If we now calculate the total number of electoral votes held by NSW, VIC, and QLD = 151, this is equal to 69.2% of the total electoral votes, slightly less than 77.5%. As you can see, in the second method, the voting power of the smaller States is slightly more than the under a one-man one-vote system.
This concept is know as 'degressive proportionality'. Degressive proportionality is an approach to the allocation (between regions, states or other subdivisions) of seats in a legislature or other decision-making body. Degressive proportionality means that while the subdivisions do not each elect an equal number of members, smaller subdivisions are allocated more seats than would be allocated strictly in proportion to their population.
|