By Ava Carroll and Isabella Scotti
Both Australia and the United States, despite being democracies, have very different systems of voting which heavily impact the results of their elections. The United States runs on the Electoral College System, as well as only having voluntary voting. In comparison, Australia uses the preferential voting system, paired with compulsory voting as their methods for election. Though most may think democracies use the same systems, they do vary from country to country.
In the US the government is under a two party system, democrats and republicans, with some independent politicians. Unlike Australia, where you vote in a party to run government, and their leader becomes Prime Minister, when voting for president, you are voting for the individual candidate instead of just the party. To be voted in as president you have to win a majority of 270 electoral college votes. An electoral college an amount of votes that are assigned to each state based loosely on their population, with California having the most at 54. Whichever candidate receives the majority votes in the state will then receive all of the electoral college votes that the state holds.
In most democratic countries, including the USA, voting is optional. This optional voting has one unintended consequence, it creates more radical politicians. This is due to candidates having to not only convince people to vote for themselves but also to vote in general. In the previous two elections, there has been a large increase in American voters because of the radical political ideologies of Donald Trump. He has inspired many more voters than any politician for the past 30 years, not only has he increased the amount of people voting for himself and the Republican Party but also many more democrats who don’t support his ideas voted in both the 2020 and 2024 elections.
Australia uses a system called “Preferential Voting,” alongside compulsory voting to make elections as fair and democratic as possible, in an attempt to see the whole country’s view on the election. Preferential voting is used to determine an “absolute majority,” where one candidate gains fifty per cent or more of the votes within the count. On the ballot paper, the voter must mark their vote by writing the number one against the name of their preferred candidate, before continuing to rank the remaining candidates in consecutive numbers, from two, three, four and onwards. All the squares must be numbered, unless the last candidate preference is left blank, as long as a first preference has been marked. In the collection of votes, the first step is to count the first preferences marked for each individual candidate. If one candidate has an absolute majority, this being fifty percent plus one, they will be elected. The next step is to eliminate the candidate with the least amount of votes, and sort the ballot papers by their next preference, marked on the paper. This process is repeated until there are two candidates, even if one was previously elected in an earlier round of counting the votes. The preferential voting system was established to ensure that the election results are an accurate representation of the country’s feelings, in comparison to simply electing the candidate who received the most first preference votes, allowing for the possibility for the elected candidate to change based on other’s second, third, or so on preferences. Compulsory voting was first used in the 1915 Queensland state election. Following this, Queenslanders turned out to state and federal elections in higher numbers than the national average, encouraging changes at the federal level. In 1924, the Parliament of Australia altered the Electoral Act to make voting compulsory at federal elections. Compulsory voting is seen as more legitimate, with most citizens having their say through voting, the elected government seen as the majority’s choice, each vote treated equally.
Despite both being democracies, Australia and the United States have varying methods of election, Australia enforcing for all to vote, the United States offering for voting to be voluntary. Through the eyes of democracy, one must ask, which is fairer? And how would the election results be different in each country if they were to swap systems?
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