On the 2010 WA Senate Election Results

Firstly, all data here is taken from the AEC website.

Now I am not a fan of above the line voting, and to put it bluntly, if someone isn’t going to think enough about who they want to vote for to vote below the line, then their vote doesn’t deserve to count. So with this as a starting point, lets take a look at what the results would look like if only below the line votes were counted.

Rachel Sierwart of the Greens is now way out in front, with more than two quotas, with the first Liberal and Labor candidates each just short of a quota.

(name, party, votes, percent of below the line votes)
SIEWERT, Rachel The Greens 11694 30.96
CORMANN, Mathias Liberal 5215 13.81
EVANS, Chris Australian Labor Party 4692 12.42
MARTIN, Justine Australian Sex Party 2360 6.25
McCOURT, John The Nationals 1727 4.57
YOUNG, Trevor Christian Democratic Party 1436 3.8
CUNNINGHAM, Christine The Greens 855 2.26
ROSE, Linda Family First 758 2.01
YOUNG, Paul James Australian Democrats 613 1.62
PEAKE, Paul Shooters and Fishers 597 1.58
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GOODLAD, John 10 0.03.

Now unfortunately we don’t have the information available to us to compute a proper distribution of preferences based on these results – all we know is that Rachel Siewart would get re-elected (as happened in the real thing). In the absence of any other method available, I went to Anotony Green’s senate calculator and entered the percentage of below the line votes that each candidate received to produce a result. This calculator distributes preferences as if every vote was an above the line ticket vote.

And for the results, the following candidates would be elected:

1 Rachel SIEWERT Australian Greens
2 Mathias CORMANN Liberal Party
3 Chris EVANS Australian Labor Party
4 Kado MUIR Australian Greens
5 Trevor YOUNG Christian Democratic Party
6 Justine MARTIN Australian Sex Party

Wow! What an incredibly more awesome result than the 3 Liberal/2 Labor/1 Green that the election produced. If only …

To finish on a sadder note, the number of below the line votes (37773) was less than the number of informal votes (40490).