Voting System
The voting system for the Senate has changed twice since it was created. The original arrangement involved a first past the post block voting or "winner takes all" system, on a state-by-state basis. This was replaced in 1919 by preferential block voting. Block voting tended to grant landslide majorities and even "wipe-outs" very easily. For instance, from 1919 to 1922 the Nationalist Party of Australia had 35 of the 36 Senate seats, and from 1946 to 1949, the Australian Labor Party had 33 out of the 36 Senate seats.
In 1948, proportional representation on a state-by-state basis became the method for electing the Senate.
Read more about this topic: Senate (Australia), The Membership of The Senate
Famous quotes containing the words voting and/or system:
“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)