Meet former Australian Senator Ricky Muir.
Ricky ran for office without an official platform, had no prior political experience, and when
asked about his position on car manufacturing in an interview responded, “well, there’s
the aftermarket industry, which could be supported, the people who are losing the jobs, uh, sorry
could we start that question again.”
He then attempted to answer again, got confused, asked to move on to another question, and
then when asked that other question—about what Ricky had meant when he said “aftermarket
industry”—said, “the aftermarket industry is an industry that is, um, deep breath, um,
can I go out for a minute?”
But hey, why would we expect this guy to know a lot about the aftermarket car industry,
something only motoring enthusiasts would know about?
It’s not as if he’s a member of some kind of Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party,
right?
Yeah, of course he is.
Ricky Muir maybe isn’t the kind of guy you’d vote for to be in the Australian Senate.
And that’s probably why not a lot of people voted for him when he ran for the Senate in
2013.
He got 0.51% of the vote in the 2013 Australian federal election when he stood for Senate
in Victoria.
And yet, despite having less support than Daddy Day Camp 2, on July 1st, 2014, Ricky
was sworn in as the newest member of Australia’s upper parliamentary house.
There are four key elements to understanding how this is possible: Multi-member districts,
ranked choice voting, group ticket voting, and the general laziness of the Australian
people.
Multi-member districts are ones in which multiple people represent the same area, and stand
for election at the same time.
Australia’s Senate is made up of 76 senators, with twelve from each of the six states, and
two from each territory.
Usually, half of those twelve—a number most mathematicians agree to be six—are elected
at a time… which raises the question: how do you simultaneously elect six people who
are all running against each other, and also against, like, three dozen other people?
The solution is simple: let me, Sam, decide.
But because the Australian Senate refuses to respond to my letters, they do it with
a quota system.
In order to get elected, a candidate must reach a certain quota of votes, which is calculated
as the total number of formal votes divided by the number of vacancies plus one, and then
add one to that number.
If you didn’t come to YouTube to learn math, this just means that if there are, say, six
vacancies, both candidates need just over a seventh of the votes to win.
But what if nobody hits the quota?
Or what if not enough people hit the quota?
Or what if Australians finally wake up to the fact that their country doesn’t exist
and has just been a collective delusion this whole time?
Well in the first two cases, the problem is solved by ranked choice voting.
To start, any candidate who was elected with more votes than the quota has their “surplus
votes” redistributed to those voters’ second choices… or, technically to a representative
average of all their voters’ second choices, but we don’t really have time to get into
that.
After that, if there still aren’t enough people elected, they go to a sort of Weakest
Link system, where whoever got the fewest votes is eliminated, and then their votes
are distributed to those voters’ next choice.
And then the next lowest vote getter is eliminated, and so on, and so on, until enough people
have hit the quota to fill all the vacancies, and Australia finally has enough senators
to pass a tariff on Hemsworth exports or whatever.
While these systems can often end up electing people who didn’t get a ton of support in
the first round of voting, electing someone with half a percentage of support still normally
shouldn’t happen.
The real key to how Ricky Muir ended up in the senate is something called the Group Voting
Ticket.
You see, people are lazy, and ranking dozens of candidates takes time, so back in 1984,
Australians asked themselves a classic Australian question: why spend time researching candidates
when I could be spending that same time chasing after a kangaroo that stole the $50,000 that
I owe to the mob?
So they developed group ticket voting, which allowed voters to simply vote for their preferred
party, and then that party could determine who their second and third and fourth and
so-on choice votes go to.
It was a great system for voters who don’t want to research dozens of candidates, and
it turns out it was also a great system for a guy named Glenn Druery, the so-called “preference
whisperer,” who decided to use it to essentially break Australian electoral politics.
Druery formed something called the Minor Party Alliance, which united all the minor parties
that never got elected—parties like the Smokers’ Rights Party, The Australian Stable
Population Party, Senator Online, The Australian Sex Party, The Wikileaks Party, The Hemp Party,
and, of course, the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party.
Led by Druery, the parties made an interconnected set of deals to give their votes to each other
if they lost, and not to any of the major parties.
So even though Ricky Muir only got 0.51% of the first vote, minor parties got around 25%
of the vote.
So when minor parties were eliminated, they gave all their votes to the remaining minor
parties, who were then eliminated, giving their votes to remaining minor parties, and
one man emerged with basically all the minor party votes: a man named Ricky Muir, of the
Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party.
But Ricky Muir, despite having such little support, made real change in Australia: mainly
in that his very election was considered so dumb that Australia actually got rid of the
Group Ticket Voting system before the next election, and now voters must rank at least
six parties in order to vote.
The Group Ticket Voting system was a flawed idea that was rightfully abolished.
But you know what’s a perfect idea that should be the opposite of abolished: you subscribing
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