Ticks and crosses

Australian readers will be aware that we are heading for a referendum later this year on a constitutional amendment to establish a “Voice” to represent the country’s Indigenous people. The date for the vote has not been announced, but last week a debate broke out over the voting method.

Most elections have a series of boxes in which voters place numbers, crosses, punch marks or whatever else the system requires. Anyone who’s ever worked on an election knows the importance of instructing people to do this the right way – for example, “Please use numbers, not ticks or crosses.” But a referendum question in Australia has only one box: voters are asked “Do you approve this proposed alteration?” and are directed to write either “yes” or “no” in the box.

Because it’s 24 years since the last referendum, a lot of people are obviously hazy about the process. Hence the anger (real or feigned) from the “No” camp when it dawned on them that a tick in the box would be counted as a yes, but a cross would count as informal. They argue that this gives the “Yes” side an unfair advantage, and some of them cast aspersions on the neutrality of the Australian Electoral Commission.

The latter charge is completely unfounded. You can read the AEC’s response here; it’s very clear, and if you want more detail you can read the latest edition of its formality guidelines here. Briefly, the legislation directs it to count referendum ballots if the voter’s intention is clear, and while a tick is unambiguously a positive response, a cross is unclear; it could be positive or negative.

Arguing that this unfairly advantages one side is circular: if crosses represent “no” votes, then of course excluding them is unfair to the “No” side. But the AEC’s point is that we can’t make that assumption. In many cases, we use a cross to indicate a positive response; this is particularly the case for voters who are used to elections overseas with list systems or first-past-the-post, where the normal means of voting is to put a single cross in the box for a party or candidate.

Parliament could, if it chose, legislate that ticks and crosses were never to be counted (it has done so for the House of Representatives, although not for the Senate). But since it hasn’t, the AEC has to do the best that it can with the rules as they stand. And to reject ballot papers with ticks would be to throw away votes with a clear intention for no good reason.

Could the ballot paper be redesigned to be fairer in appearance or effect? Kevin Bonham has a post on the issue that gives this question careful consideration, and he’s very sceptical about the possibility. From him I learned that up until 1951 a referendum question would have both a “yes” and a “no” box, with voters asked to mark one; Bonham points out that this could be disastrous in the case of a referendum held in conjunction with an election, because some voters will carry over the “just tick one box” approach into the election and thereby vote informal.

More to the point, having two boxes would not guarantee a solution to the current problem. A tick in just one box would be a clear indication, as would a tick in one with a cross in the other. But a cross in just one box would still be open to the objection that it could be either positive or negative, although ballot paper instructions could help to clarify that.

Then again, the existing ballot paper instructions are clear, and as the AEC points out, the vast majority of voters follow them and write “yes” or “no”. There’s no reason to think that the handful who don’t will disproportionately belong to one side or the other,* and the numbers are so small that the referendum would have to be unexpectedly close for it to have any chance of making a difference.

Things could still change, but at present the “No” campaign is on track for a clear victory, despite the supposed AEC conspiracy against it. It’s unlikely to need the crosses.

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* In an ordinary election we know that people who accidentally vote informal are more likely to be the less well-educated and the non-English speakers, and they tend to be Labor voters, but that may or may not tell us anything about how they’ll vote in the referendum.