Electoral system of Australia

[2] Special rules apply to citizens going or living outside the country,[2] to military personnel and to prisoners, all of which do not reside at their normal residential address for electoral purposes.

The AEC monitors house and apartment sales and sends a reminder (and the forms) to new residents if they have moved to another electorate, making compliance with the law easier.

The AEC conducts periodic door-to-door and postal campaigns to try to ensure that all eligible persons are registered in the correct electorate.

In 2010, a Victorian government review found only 26% of prisoners serving less than three year sentences were enrolled, despite them being eligible and legally obliged to do so.

[8] To receive federal public funding, a political party must be registered under the Electoral Act, which requires that they have at least 1500 members.

[12] The name and political affiliation of candidates who are disendorsed by or resign from a party after the close of nominations, continue to appear on the ballot paper, and they stand as independents.

The date and type of federal election is determined by the Prime Minister – after a consideration of constitutional requirements, legal requirements, as well as political considerations – who advises the Governor-General to set the process in motion by dissolving either or both houses and issuing writs for election for the House of Representatives and territorial senators.

Compulsory voting was not on the platform of either the Stanley Bruce-led Nationalist/Country party coalition government or the Matthew Charlton-led Labor opposition.

[40] Following the 2004 federal election, at which the Liberal–National coalition government won a majority in both houses, a senior minister, Senator Nick Minchin, said that he favoured the abolition of compulsory voting.

Some prominent Liberals, such as Petro Georgiou, former chair of the Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, have spoken in favour of compulsory voting.

[citation needed] In 1996 Albert Langer was jailed for three weeks on contempt charges in relation to a constitutional challenge on a legal way not to vote for either of the major parties.

Chong, Davidson and Fry, writing in the journal of the right wing think tank the CIS, argue that Australian compulsory voting is disreputable, paternalistic, disadvantages smaller political parties, and allows major parties to target marginal seats and make some savings in pork-barrelling because of this targeting.

[41] Tim Evans, a Director of Elections Systems and Policy of the AEC, wrote in 2006 that "It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions.

They also suggest jury duty and compulsory military service as vastly more onerous citizen's compulsions than attending a local voting booth once every few years.

In the form of single transferable voting, ranked voting was introduced in the Tasmanian House of Assembly in 1906 as a result of the work of Andrew Inglis Clark and Catherine Helen Spence, building on the original concept invented in 1859 by Briton Thomas Hare[citation needed], and following the use of STV in Tasmanian state elections in the 1890s.

To be valid, the voter placed sequential numbers against every candidate on the ballot paper, and the risk of error and invalidation of the vote was significant.

Malapportionment can occur through demographic change or through the deliberate weighting of different zones, such as rural v. urban areas.

In all states, electoral districts must have roughly the same number of voters, with variations allowed for rural areas due to their sparse population.

The gross inequities of this system came into sharp focus during three consecutive state elections in the 1960s: Playford's successor as LCL leader, Steele Hall, was highly embarrassed at the farcical manner in which he became Premier, and immediately set about enacting a fairer system: a few months after taking office, Hall enacted a new electoral map with 47 seats: 28 seats in Adelaide and 19 in the country.

Electorates with a land area of more than 100,000 km2 (39,000 sq mi) are permitted to have a variation of 20%, in recognition of the difficulty of representing the sparsely populated north and east of the state.

The low rate of informal voting is largely attributed to advertising from the various political parties indicating how a voter should number their ballot paper, called a How-to-Vote Card.

Since 1984, the listed order of candidates on the ballot paper has been determined by drawing lots, a ceremony performed publicly by electoral officials immediately after the appointed time for closure of nominations.

A hypothetical result might look like this: On election night, an interim distribution of preferences called a TCP (two-candidate-preferred) count is performed.

The exhausted counts correspond to votes that ought to be informal, if strictly following the rules above, but were deemed to have expressed some valid preferences.

Once the two-party majorities in all seats are known, they can then be arranged in a table to show the order in which they would be lost in the event of an adverse swing at the next election.

When the Commission determines that population shifts within a state have caused some seats to have too many or too few voters, a redistribution is called and new boundaries are drawn up.

If a member's seat becomes vacant mid-term, whether through disqualification, resignation, death or some other possible reason, a by-election may be held to fill the casual vacancy.

If at the end of the Senate count the two candidates remaining have an equal number of votes, the Australian Electoral Officer for the state shall select one at random.

This means that a government formed in the House of Representatives can be frustrated if a Senate majority rejects or delays passage of its legislative bills.

In such circumstances, Section 57 of the constitution empowers the Governor-General to dissolve both the House of Representatives and the Senate (termed a "double dissolution") and issue writs for an election in which every seat in Parliament is contested.