Low election turnout

It appears that the turnout in this election is significantly lower than in the previous one.

The Senate turnout appears to be almost 20% lower while the House of Representatives is 8.5% lower - all this in spite of compulsory voting.

I have not heard the expert commentators saying anything about this.

Is this a revolt against compulsory voting?

The low Senate vote is explained easily though.

The voters rejected the system.

Coalition voters shied away completely from risking dicey pre-arranged preferences.

In the Senate election, voters have the option to vote "above the line" or "under the line".

If they vote above the line (one mark only), most people have no idea of where there their preferences go because this is determined during various horse trading sessions amongst the parties at the time of nominating or even earlier.

The horse trading is not transparent and is subject to the most amazing deals, some of them quite unexpected, some quite unprincipled.

The alternative is to vote under the line that means, for example, in NSW this time filling in 79 squares correctly representing candidates in 25 parties and four independents.

A nightmare!

Only about three per cent of voters usually bother to do this, often making mistakes with the numbering and having to do it again or spoil their vote.

Frankly, this is a ridiculous system.

A massive improvement would be to adopt the Dutch and Scandinavian proportional electoral systems, where all parties produce a list of candidates, printed on one sheet, and the voter has to place one, just one, mark indicating simultaneously the party of his or her preference as well as a particular preferred candidate.

Seats are allocated to a party in proportion to the times the quota has been achieved: Completely transparent, highly democratic, no backdoor deals, very convenient to the voter and easy to count.

Now this would just be a start for electoral reform in this country.

Klaas Woldring Pearl Beach