SA 2010: Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda Edition Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The final result for the South Australian (SA) 2010 Legislative Council election appears to be beyond doubt.

The split looks to be Liberals 4, Labor 4, Greens 1, Family First (FF) 1 and Dignity for Disability (D4D) 1.

My prediction was Liberals 5, Labor 4, Greens 1, Family First 1. The Liberals did slightly worse than I expected, falling 2% short of the final seat on about 6.5% of the vote at the last count (the quota is 8.33%). I think this near miss is not bad for my very first attempt at predicting a result!

The winners look to be (from the ABC):
David Ridgway (Libs), Paul Holloway (ALP), Stephen Wade (Libs), Gail Gago (ALP), Terry Stephens (Libs), Bernard Finnigan (ALP), Jing Lee (Libs), John Gazzola (ALP), Tammy Jennings (Greens), Robert Brokenshite (FF) and, excitingly, Kelly Vincent (D4D)

Rita Bouras (the fifth candidate for the Liberals) was not exactly unlucky to miss out, but I am going to say she came "12th" in the election (there are only 11 seats available).

As a follow up I have plugged the results into apollo and, now we have actual results and preference tickets, tried a few different scenarios to see what might have been. I hope you enjoy these "What If" scenarios.


What if the Australian Democrats and David Winderlich had tightly preferenced each other?

For some of us political tragics, one of the interesting things about this election was that David Winderlich was competing against his old party, the moribund Australian Democrats. Winderlich was trying to "pull a Xenophon" while the Democrats were probably hoping to rely on their highest vote anywhere in the country, since SA is their traditional stronghold.

On the day however, both fell short of the mark. In the actual result in apollo, Democrats (and their candidate Jeanie Walker) get ejected at count 374 and Winderlich at 377, before the Shooters Party and Fair Land Tax Party.

However, if we rejig their preferences so Winderlich preferences the Democrats first and the Democrats preference Winderlich first, the result of the election is changed. The Democrats still get ejected at count 374 but with Democrat votes,  Winderlich overtakes D4D at the crucial count and their candidate, Kelly Vincent, instead gets turfed.

With Australian Democrat preferences, David Winderlich would have been elected to the Legislative Council.

Over on the ABC blog, reader Les Patterson has done an interesting experiment where he combines the vote of the two (Winderlich and Dems) as if they were one candidate. Using Winderlich's preferences they get elected, but not the Democrats.

This shows that Winderlich had quite good preference deals (whereas the Democrats had very middle-of-the-road preference deals). Ideally, you would have wanted to have the Winderlich's better preferences, but the Democrat's higher vote!

Of course, there is no guarantee that Winderlich standing as a Democrat would have polled the combined 1.7% of the vote they got separately.


What if all the micro parties and independents had preferenced each other?

It seems common sense that micro parties and independents would follow a simple rule to maximise their chances of winning:

"Preference each other above the established parties"

However, this is not the case in SA 2010. While the Australian Labor Party (ALP) was on average everyone's equal 25th preference (out of 35), the Liberals were equal 21st, the Australian Greens were equal 20th and Family First were 18th. FF in particular did well out of the deals comparatively. These deals meant that the SA majors (in this case ALP, Libs, FF and Greens) were almost certainly guaranteed 10 seats and even all 11, despite the "Other" vote being 13% - nearly two quotas worth.

I was quite pleased with this scenario. I took all the group voting tickets and "bubbled" the micro parties to the top of each other's group voting tickets. For example, if Micro A had a group ticket with Micro B, Major C, Micro D, Major E, in this scenario, Micro D would bubble up so that Micro A's group ticket would be Micro B, Micro D, Major C, Major E, thus preserving the basic ideological underpinning of the group ticket as much as possible.

If the minors had preferenced each other, the major votes would have stalled (none get eliminated) on the last seat. In the simulation, Labor get four seats, Liberals 4, the Greens get elected to seat 9 on Labor preferences. D4D win seat 10 (instead of seat 11 in real life) and Independent Climate Sceptics defeats the Liberals for the last seat, mostly on Family First preferences.

If the micros and independents had preferenced each other above the established players, they could have doubled their representation in parliament. As it was, D4D was lucky to get a seat at all.




What if the two recreational shooters parties had preferenced each other?

Similar to Winderlich and the Democrats, what if the two like-minded parties, Fishing and Lifestyle Party and the Shooters Party, had tightly preferenced each other?

In apollo's simulation of the actual election, Fishing and Lifestyle are eliminated at count 372, Shooters get eliminated at count 380.

If they had preferenced each other they still get eliminated early at the same counts. Basically, these parties just did not do well enough in preference deals to ride high on their meagre votes.


What if the established parties had tightly preferenced each other?

My final "What If" for the 2010 SA Legislative Council election is the reverse of my "micro parties preference each other" scenario.

If the four established SA parties had preferenced each other, the simulation shows that at the final count, D4D would have been frozen out, with Labor votes going crucially to the Liberals, who get the last seat. The D4D stalls on 6.5% of the vote, almost an exact opposite of the real result (where the Libs stall on that).

However, unlike the earlier "what if" which seeks to show how to maximise the micro-party vote, this "What If" shows that the majors have reasons for not preferencing each other. Labor would probably prefer D4D to a result where the Liberals win more seats than Labor.