AEC hopes to get federal election voter queues moving faster than ever - Polidicks

It's a common complaint: lines on election day that make fulfilling your right and duty as a citizen — and getting a democracy sausage — a frustrating experience. But this time around, the Australian Electoral Commission is working with researchers to develop a mathematical model that it hopes will improve things. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is expected to fire the starter's pistol on the federal election campaign in coming days, possibly as soon as tomorrow. As soon as that happens, he and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten will begin criss-crossing the country to try and woo voters, while back in Canberra the AEC will ramp up its work to smoothly deliver one of the biggest events Australia stages. "We hire 80,000 staff, we've got polling at about 8,000 polling places … it's an intense logistical activity," Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers said. The AEC has hired researchers at Deakin University to help them improve the way polling places are laid out and staff are allocated, to keep the queues moving. "In their lives the average adult Australian will eat about 40 democracy sausages or election cakes … so it's important we get it right," Mr Rogers said. "If you've got 11 million people coming on one day there'll always be the issue of queueing, and people have different tolerance for queueing." The researchers created a simulated polling place on campus, and timed people filling out ballots and issuing votes. The data was then checked against real-world measurements from the Bennelong by-election in 2017, and was then fed into a computer model, which allowed them to test how small changes would affect queue lengths. As a result, when you go to vote on an as-yet-unknown Saturday in May, look forward to seeing more voting screens, more staff issuing ballot papers in busy periods, and "mini-queues", designed to reduce wasted time in polling places. Rather than one long line at the door of the local school hall or church, voters will be directed into shorter queues closer to polling clerks. "Hopefully, all of those things together will help us deal with that ongoing demand for people to get in and out as quickly as possible," Mr Rogers said. Nothing is certain, except death, taxes, and queueing While wait times are a common complaint, the electoral commission insists things aren't as bad as the headlines would have you believe. The AEC said that last election about three-quarters of voters were in and out of their polling place within 15 minutes. "They were eating their democracy sausage or election cake within that 15-minute window … that seems to be a bit of a sweet spot," Mr Rogers said. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-04/how-the-aec-is-working-to-reduce-waiting-times-during-elections/10967528 FYI when they say more voting screens, they mean the booths where you privately fill in your ballot papers

As any true Englishman will tell you, this makes me hard.

The queues are long because everyone wants to vote at 10am. I’ve never had to wait long when I vote early afternoon. And my dad always prepolls because fuck it.

At the last NSW election I went to vote at 8AM and it was practically dead. Got a park at the front door and was in and out in under 5 minutes, and that included fully preferencing the lower house ballot and preferencing multiple tickets for the upper house. Probably depends on the particular polling place as well. Also no sausage sizzle at that school I voted at

They could really shorten the queues if they had the ballots already filled out for you when you got there. Plus there'd be way less to think about. Ah well, we can only dream.

You joke about this (I really hope you are joking), but in Senate elections in the past, voters had to choose between either 1) individually preferencing ~80 candidates on the Senate ballot paper (takes at least half an hour), or vote for a ‘ticket’ which was like a preset of preferences for every candidate on the ballot. Each party offered their own tickets, and the preference flows were at their discretion. The system today is those tickets now only include the candidates within that party, so voters can now preference the tickets instead of picking just one ticket.

At first I was gonna say, "at least it's proportional representation." But then I did a bit of research. . .As you probably know, it's kind of proportional representation, but it's done by state. And even worse, EACH STATE HAS THE SAME NUMBER OF SENATORS REGARDLESS OF POPULATION!?!?!? This makes me want to puke. They were so close to a halfway decent democracy and then they were like "Wait guys! Senates are supposed to be undemocratic and treat pieces of land like they're people with equal say, rather than, well, the people living on them..."

Well yeah the Senate doesn’t proportionally represent the population, but that isn’t the purpose of the Senate. The House already proportionally represents the population. That idea for the Senate was so that New South Wales’, Queensland’s and Victoria’s massive populations wouldn’t lead to the parliament being ruled entirely by those eastern states - otherwise, Tasmania and Western Australia wouldn’t have joined the Commonwealth. If the election system for both the House and Senate were too similar to each other, that would almost defeat the point of a bicameral parliament to begin with. It’s not an ideal solution, no. But that’s the idea behind it. And if Australia is only a ‘halfway decent democracy’, then I don’t know what that says about the rest of the world, given that Australia consistently ranks within the top 10 most democratic nations in the entire world (whereas the US doesn’t even qualify as a full democracy).

The US is way worse, agreed. We're literally under minority rule, and voter ID laws, etc. etc., and yes, we are rated way worse, and deserve to be so, and are also probably worse in other more political theory-ish ways that don't even show in the ratings. Democracy ratings are done based on whether the contests themselves are free, fair, and competitive. As long as the system has contests where people have reasonable ability to run in elections and create political parties, and the elections themselves are conducted fairly and almost all adults can vote, no one has more than one vote, the outcome isn't influenced, etc. etc. What they don't take into account is the subversion of the idea of "one person, one vote" by having legislatures (usually upper houses, sometimes with significant political power) which give unequal numbers of people equal decision-making power in the government. This is not democratic, because it violates the principle that each person in a state should have equal decision making power in the election of national governing bodies. As it is, if you truly believe your argument that the states containing the majority of the population would steer the course of Australian government, then you should probably oppose this system as well. In this system, a coalition of representatives elected from the states of Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia, as well as the Capital Territory and Northern Territory, comprising 40/76 senators, could decide whether legislation passes the house or not. The populations of these areas is 5,480,097. The minority of senators are elected from the states of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, with 36/76 senators. The population of these three states, who elect a minority of the senators, is 19,212,900. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_and_territories_of_Australia#States,_territories,_and_external_territories) That's 22.2% of the population having the power to overrule 77.8% of the population. This is honestly worse than I thought. I really do wonder why people are so eager to defend replacing a tyranny of the majority with a tyranny of the minority.

I wasn’t even defending the way the Australian Senate is elected. I merely explained the rationale behind the system. If it were completely up to me, the Senate would instead be appointed by sortition, indiscriminately and on a national (rather than per state) basis.

Also the whole tyranny of the minority thing is arguably worse in the House, as a single party could theoretically hold a majority in the House despite receiving as little as 25% of the National vote after preferences. Worse indeed, because government is formed in the House.