By Stuart Martin
CANBERRA — The ban on handing out election material within 100 metres of polling booths and the Robson rotation method, which rotates candidate positions on the ballot paper, clearly affected the outcome of the February 21 ACT election.
One Greens candidate, who seemed sure to win, and possibly as many as four ALP left wingers, appear set to lose their seats. The declaration of the election will be delayed for almost two weeks due to a complete recount of the 80,000 votes in the seat of Molonglo.
Due to the defeat of the Greens' Shane Rattenbury by the right-wing Osborne Independent Group's Dave Rugendyke, the final composition of the Legislative Assembly is likely to be seven Liberals, six Labor, two Osborne Independents, one Green and independent Michael Moore. Within the ALP, the right wing could have a majority of Labor MLAs.
In part, this result is due to the 7% swing away from the Liberal and Labor parties, mainly to non-party alternatives. The Osborne Independent Group, the best publicised alternative, attracted the largest share of this swing.
The other factor was the decision by almost all parties not to direct preferences, even within their own ticket. In the case of Rugendyke's electorate, most Democrat voters did not give preferences beyond the five Democrat candidates and where they did, only a third gave their preferences to the Greens. The Greens did not direct preferences either. Their how-to-vote card stated, "After voting Green, continue voting for other candidates in the order of your choice".
The ALP chose to run a separate campaign for all 17 candidates. Each how-to-vote card stated "Vote 1" for a particular candidate but gave no order for the rest of the ticket. This meant that the majority of ALP voters followed the random order on the ballot papers.