Australian election result: a hung parliament?

[Jon Miller]

Sweden has sort of gone from a many parties to two alliances (of parties). This happened like 5 years ago. I think there is a 'far right' party which might get in next election, with 4% of the vote, but everyone else that matters is in one of the two 'big tents'.

JM

[Dale]

Yeah, I know, but according to Ritzau it wasn't blank votes. Sorry, can only find danish versions of it for the moment.

Edit: Just found this :

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-...stralian-poll/

Electoral Commission investigations in the past indicate these invalid votes are mainly from non-English speaking areas. Instructions on how to fill in are only in English.

Blank votes are called protest or donkey votes, a different category.

[notyoueither]

10% incidences of things happening about every 4 years means you're not going to live to see many.

Should you see many if the number of people voting for third parties is small?

I checked UK elections. Lib Dems have had far less impact than numbers of votes cast should lead one to expect. Perhaps that is changing.

Looking back at Canadian elections, I'm thinking third parties have had an effect out of proportion to their voter bases.

With FPTP, does it matter?

Vote splitting. In Canada one of the two major parties was destroyed in 1993 when a majority government was wiped out. The Progressive Conservatives won two seats with 16% of the vote. The two 'third' parties were regionally based and combined for 106 seats with 32% of the vote.

Despite there being a majority government and it not being noteworthy in the 9 of 23 figure, third parties had a significant impact. They pillaged the bases of support of one of the two large parties. The PCs never recovered, eventually a rump of them were absorbed by one of the regional parties that had been able to begin competing more or less nationally.

FPTP in Canada has been quite freindly to third parties. More so than in the UK up to now. Perhaps the different demographics and geography explains it.

[ricketyclik]

Proportional representation