…
Malcolm Roberts
Some in the love media have real trouble understanding preferential voting. Big numbers seem to confuse them.
There are headlines that Malcolm Roberts “only got 77 votes” as if to delegitamize the skeptic. The Courier Mail put it on the front page. What they couldn’t find was one voter who voted for Pauline Hanson who was unhappy about where their vote went. And there were plenty to ask: Hanson’s party got 593,000 first preference votes nationally and won four Senate seats.
Apparently to be considered a real senator the magic number of first preference votes this year is “100″.
In South Australia, Stirling Griff of the Nick Xenophon Team won “103″ votes, and Sky Kakosche-Moore won “129″. Alex Gallacher, Australian Labor Party, won with “330 votes”. No newspapers seem to be suggesting that they don’t deserve to be there, or that their success is a reason to axe preferential voting.
In WA, the Liberal Party won fully 3 of their 5 Senate seats on a average of just 600 “votes” each. Let’s ignore that the Liberal group ticket in WA had 510,000 votes. They ended up getting five senators elected with less votes than the Hanson party got. Welcome to Senate voting. So?
The AEC site tells me that at least 12 Senators were elected on less than 1,000 first preference votes. Who cares?
The media didn’t mention Malcolm Roberts or air his views before the election, but they now criticize him for the low profile that they created.
The media are the problem. They are not even trying to hide their bias.
UPDATE: For some mystery reason another post two days later replaced this one for a few hours. Fixed now.