The Inner Machinations of the Democratic Process

Over the past few months, I have been working with the Qld Liberal National Party as part of their election team to help support my local candidate. This post is to give you an idea on some of the inner workings of how a campaign works and the sheer scale of what is involved on election day. I was forbidden from taking photographs, so I'm sorry that this post lacks any real visual stimuli

In QLD, the Liberal Party and National Party were combined some years ago to consolidate efforts and to reduce waste, this created the LNP. Unlike New South Wales, where the Liberals are VERY factional and controlled by vote stackers to control who runs in different seats, the QLD LNP is very much a grass roots driven party. At the local pre-selections, the room is made up of local members, as well as a number of sitting MP's and State Council members. Each person is given a vote, no vote weighs more than any other. So my vote as a fairly new member is worth just as much as the Prime Ministers vote.

So my neighbour was pre-selected to run in the North Brisbane seat of Morayfield and as the Morayfield electorate doesn't have a very strong representation, I was pulled in to assist with his communications and help the campaign along.

For the last year, there has been a tonne of lead up work. Even though the election was only called a month ago, the candidates had been working since Last December to build a following in the area. My guy had been door knocking nearly every weekend for 6months before the election was called. Every day the LNP Head Office in Brisbane would send out emails to everyone involved telling them the message of the day, what to target, any talking points etc. It was a massive number of emails, all of which had to be read and understood.

The thought in the community is that candidates are given money from big business or the LNP as a whole pay for the campaigns. This i can tell you is most certainly untrue. Every flyer and sign etc is paid for through the candidates own pocket or money they have been about to fund raise. The budget set out by the head office is about $50K. Most local businesses will actually refuse to support any candidates until the election is called, by then its generally too late.

So once the election is called, its all hands on deck. We are barraged with communications and the heat was turned up. The whole idea obviously is to get the name out there and push the party message. But what the party fails to realize in today's era of social media, the electorate doesn't really care what the party is going to do for the whole state, they want to know what you are going to do individually for the area. Also, negative campaigns really backfire. But this is all directed by the head office "tell them how useless Labor is" etc. This didn't go down very well on Facebook and appeared to have swung voters away. When you think about it, its really only the 2nd or 3rd election in Australia where Facebook at been a big influence. Smaller Parties do this much better.

Then we get to election day and we are expected to hand out How to Vote cards. Now you generally want to be in teams of 2, and if there are multiple entrances, you may need 4-6 people. In our electorate we had about 6 polling booths. This means at a minimum we need at least 12 people, and there's 12 hours to cover, so you need at least 20 people bare minimum just to hand out voting cards. This is a HARD job, you're on your feet ALL day, I did 10hours on voting cards on Saturday. Listening to hecklers and other parties spouting rubbish and hurling abuse. We were lucky this year as the Unions were very well behaved, in previous years they have verbally abused the LNP workers most of which are little old ladies.

So at 6pm the voting booths close then the hard work really begins. I was put forward to be one of the scrutineers of one of the polling booths. The doors of the booth are closed and we are locked in to witness and ensure the accuracy of the initial vote tally. We have representatives from Labor, LNP and One Nation in my booth, as well as 10 representatives of the QLD Electoral Commission to actually do the counting. We could not assist in any way at all, even if a form fell on the floor we had to just step back and tell them to pick them up.
Each of the forms had to be unfolded (DON'T FOLD YOUR BALLOTS) then separated into the first votes. We had to ensure that each of the ballots were filled out correctly with numbers 1-5 and no donkey votes. For a booth that had approximately 2600 votes, we had 107 donkey votes. That's approximately 4% of the vote and that's pretty sad.

Next the votes are bundled into the separate candidates and tied into groups of 50. Then they are tallied up. Again we had to count along with the QEC counters and watch the 1's to ensure they were all votes for our guy. Then we came up with the top 2 candidates. This is the PRIMARY Vote. This vote is run through to the Head Returning Officer and I had to ring it through to our party.

Then we count first preference. The 2 top candidates ballot papers are set aside and we begin with the lowest candidates. So the Independent Candidates ballots are re-opened and we look to see who has the highest preference of the 2 top candidates. It doesn't matter what preference number it is, just find the highest one. Then these votes are given to the top 2 candidates. So if Mr Independate has 100votes, and LNP get 60 preferences and and Labor gets 40, these numbers go towards their primary votes.
This goes on for all the other votes. This then gives the QEC the 2 Party Preference vote that is used on the TV on Election night. The entire exercise of counting was PURELY for TV on the night. The ballots are all then sent to Brisbane and re-counted and much more work on preferences is calculated.

With all this work and massive amounts of labour required, you can really see the benefit in a blockchain based solution to the election nightmare. An Australian company is currently building this exact platform, but it will be many years before it comes into the main stream.