the period 1915–31 it prevailed in Alabama under the aegis of the Temperance
Union and the Ku Klux Klan. But in Australia it began earlier and has endured
longer than anywhere else. It is an unchallenged piece of the institutional
furniture, assimilated into the Australian way of doing things, and successfully
proselytized to neighbouring countries in a dependent relation to Australia.^11
It was in 1893 in Queensland, a ready forge of electoral contrivances, that a
form of PV—‘contingent voting’—first appeared. It was presented by the
government as a more convenient form of the double ballot that had estab-
lished itself in Europe: any candidate who came neitherfirst nor second infirst
preferences would be deemed to have lost, and their votes would be allocated
between the top two candidates, according to preferences indicated on the
ballots. It has been explained by some historians as a response by the anti-
Labor parties to the Labor menace. Indeed, the Labor leader opposed by the
government had won his own seat with less than 50 per cent of the vote; but
in parliamentary debates he seemed not very aware of any threat in the
legislation. He dismissed contingent voting as‘tinkering’and opposed it only
on the grounds that it would increase informal votes.^12 In the event, Labor had
no cause to be exercised;^13 the result of not a single seat in the subsequent
election was decided by the new voting system. In fact, in the approximately
one thousand Queensland electoral contests over the subsequentfifty years,
only twelve were decided by preferences. This irrelevance may be part of the
explanation of the system’s pervasive and perennial endurance.
The example of Queensland was not immediately imitated at the federal
level upon federation in 1901. The political triangle of Protection, Free Trade,
and Labor would seem a fertilefield for preferencing, and the Protectionist’s
Deakin and Labor’s Watson did consider the advantage of swapping prefer-
ences through PV (Reilly 2004, p. 84). But the formation of a two-party system
by 1914 appeared to make PV irrelevant. It was the sudden emergence of a
third party at the close of the First World War that incited the establishment of
PV nationally. The emergence of the Country Party split the anti-Labor vote
between itself and the Nationalist Party, and minority Labor victories were in
prospect. The Nationalist Party passed the 1918 Commonwealth Electoral Act
instituting PV in the House of Representatives.
Thus, whereas the secret ballot and PR can claim, at least in part, some
foundation in ideas and ideals, PV is squarely the child of political advantage—
in spite of the fact that the democratic credentials of PV are plainer to see.^14
(^11) Thus in 1995 Fiji adapted PV with considerable assistance from the AEC, and with arguably
injurious results (Fraenkel 2010; Rydon 2001). 12
13 Several members of the government voted against the measure.
The Labor leader, Thomas Glassey, did, in the event, lose his own seat. But he faced only one
other candidate. 14
In a three-candidatefield, no Condorcet loser can ever win under PV.
Australia’s Electoral Idiosyncrasies