Why Australia’s elections are orderly and dependable and America’s are chaotic

America’s system for picking a president has barely changed since the Constitution was ratified. Rather than a direct popular vote for president, each state in the country appoints a certain number of ‘electors’ to vote for the presidential candidate for whom their state votes. There are 538 of these electors throughout the country, split across the states based on population. Together they are known as the electoral college.

Each state is allocated two electors, or electoral college votes, for each of their two Senators. Each state is then allocated one additional electoral college vote for each of its members of the US House of Representatives, which is proportionate to the state’s population.

California, for example, which has two Senators and 53 members of the House, receives 55 electoral college votes. Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming, which all have two Senators and one member of the House, receive three electoral college votes, as does Washington DC.

The next president of the United States will not be decided by who wins more votes throughout the country, but rather by who wins at least 270 electoral college votes.

Troubling origins

In countries where voters elect a President (unlike Australia where voters elect a party whose members select a Prime Minister) it is highly unusual not to use a popular-vote system where the presidential candidate with the greatest number of votes wins.

In the late 18^th and early 19^th century Constitutional Conventions, the Philadelphian James Wilson proposed this very method. But James Madison, representing the interests of Virginia and the American South, disagreed.

Unlike the Northern states, the farm-rich South still relied heavily on slavery — and slaves were not eligible to vote. A popular vote election would have favoured the states with more eligible voters, benefiting the North. An electoral college system, where the slaves could not vote in their state but could still be counted as part of their state’s population to determine its number of electoral college votes, would bring some electoral power back to the South. The framers reached a compromise that ultimately favoured the South, and a slave-owning Virginian occupied the presidency for 32 of the first 36 years.

The electoral college’s dark origins bear no relevance today, yet the system remains unchanged, and it continues to benefit conservative candidates.

In all states but Nebraska and Maine, votes are awarded based on a winner-take-all system. Assuming Kamala Harris beats Donald Trump in California, whether she does so by one vote or by 10 million votes is irrelevant; either way she will receive all 55 electoral college votes, and all 55 electors will place their votes for her.

Winner-takes-all usually benefits Republican voters, who tend to be spread more evenly across very small states (each of which gets at least two electoral votes because of their two Senators), compared to Democrats who are often concentrated in populous states with large urban centres. It means millions of Democratic votes are often ‘wasted’ compared to Republicans’, and it is for this reason that despite winning the popular vote in five of the last six elections, the Democratic candidate has assumed the presidency just three of those times.

Most of the states with Democratic leadership have proposed reforming the system by reducing the power of the small states and tinkering with the winner-take-all system, or even abolishing the electoral college entirely in place of a direct popular vote for president. But without support from their Republican counterparts, the electoral college will stay as it is. In this election, it means seven swing states will determine the result: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Preferential voting

Australians are often surprised to learn that many Western democracies use first-past-the-post instead of preferential voting.

Every vote counts in a typical federal election in Australia, because no matter who you vote for in the House of Representatives, your vote will eventually be added to the tally of one of the two remaining candidates.

It’s a different story in America, where voters ‘vote 1’, and leave the rest of the ballot paper blank. In the 2016 Presidential Election, Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in each of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan was smaller than the number of votes for the Greens candidate, Jill Stein. Had preferential voting existed, and presuming Stein would have encouraged her supporters to preference the Democrats, Clinton would have become President. Instead, the votes for Stein were futile.

This November, Maine and Alaska will use preferential voting (known as ‘ranked-choice voting’ in the US), while all others will retain first-past-the-post. Several more states are pushing for its future introduction, while 10 heavily Republican states have banned it as an option. Jill Stein is again a candidate in 2024, as are several others who are mostly to the left of Harris. It is possible that their share of the votes will prove decisive again.

Get out the vote

The US Presidential Election occurs every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. It is not a public holiday and voting is optional.

In the 1800s, holding elections on a Tuesday ensured farmers could attend church on a Sunday and still have enough time to depart to the polling centre on horse and kart arrive with time to vote.

Like the electoral college, it is a remnant of America’s agricultural past.

Election day in the US is an enormous contrast to Australia’s, which takes place on a Saturday, where voting is required, and where the entire day feels like a celebration of democracy. In the most recent Australian federal election, 92% of the voting eligible population cast a ballot. In the 2020 US Presidential race, turnout was 66%, which was the highest turnout in history by a considerable margin.

Less emphasis on the importance and celebration of voting in America means the candidates and their campaigns need to do everything they can to “get out the vote”. A huge proportion of funds are allocated towards this effort, with campaigns devising ingenious strategies to ensure that ‘likely’ and ‘potential’ voters become actual voters for their candidate on election day.

Campaigns organise buses to transport voters to the polls; they host parties for young people — the least likely voting bloc group— to “Rock the Vote!”; in some states they even deliver, collect and drop off ballots on voters’ behalf — all in the name of turnout.

Turnout is vital. Historically, traditional Republican voters — older, whiter and more affluent — have been more likely to vote than Democratic voters, which means Republicans have benefited from low-turnout elections.

It is not clear how turnout will affect this year’s election. The conventional wisdom is shifting as Democratic voters become the more educated group. High turnout is expected on both sides, with both campaigns doing everything they can to ensure every one of their supporters has the time, resources and motivation to show up and vote.

Partisan election authorities

Perhaps the most treasured aspect of Australian elections is its independent and non-partisan election authority, the Australian Electoral Commission — one of the most trusted institutions in Australia.

The AEC and its army of volunteers oversee the federal elections in every electorate across the country. They manage each polling place, they count and release the votes quickly, and they maintain an open line of communication with the parties and the public. It’s no surprise that Australian elections are some of the most trusted in the world.

In America, the opposite is true. Election administration in the US is almost entirely decentralised. Up to 10,000 local and state election authorities administer the elections, and almost all of these entities are led by elected officials. Many of them make decisions without fear or favour, working only to ensure a fair and safe election. Many others are highly partisan operatives with enormous power to influence the election to benefit their party.

These officials have the power to decide on the location and quantity of polling places and ballot drop-boxes in their country and have been known to make it easier to vote in areas with more voters who support their candidate.

Secretaries of states frequently ‘purge’ the rolls of voters simply because they haven’t voted for a long time, and some have confined voting to 6:00am – 6:00pm, making voting more difficult for shift workers and those unable to take a break.

And instead of an AEC-style independent redistribution process based on population changes and incorporating community sentiment, US states have almost unchecked power to shape and re-shape their districts in such a way that spreads their supporters across multiple seats and packs their opposition into one.

In such an enormous country, with so many states and with so many individual elections on the one day, it would be near impossible for a centralised national election commission to manage US elections like the AEC does in Australia. But the partisan-nature of the many thousands of decentralised institutions continues to threaten to the safety and trustworthiness of American elections.