This is a regular election for the Prime Minister of the South Pacific held via instant-runoff vote where voters may list some or all candidates in descending order of preference.
Please note the following relevant information on how to cast a vote:
IMPORTANT
You may only cast a vote if you became a citizen before this date:
2024-01-19T19:00:00Z
Cast a vote via the following method:
Open a private message to the Election Commissioner through the button below.
The whole number of citizens eligible to vote for the Prime Minister of the South Pacific is 78; within that whole number, the number of citizens who cast a vote is 35 and the number of citizens who cast a valid vote is 26.
The state of the vote for the Prime Minister of the South Pacific is as follows:
PRIME MINISTER OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC
Drew Durrnil | 18 first preferences | 69.23% in the first round Elected
Re-Open Nominations | 8 first preferences | 30.77% in the first round
This proclamation shall serve as sufficient declaration that the individual signaled above has been duly elected for the term starting 2024-02-01T14:00:00Z.
The full repository of election results may be found in the Elections Portal.
I don’t mean to be that guy, but the instructions at the top of this thread quite clearly explain how to cast a vote. We can do all we want but at the end of the day people had very simple tools to know how to vote correctly.
It’s also not a shift to private ballots that caused the issue. We’ve had some elections as approval voting and some as IRV for years - that’s why ballots got discarded, not the newer changes.
I’m happy to re-propose this portion of the Election Act reform. It was dropped from the omnibus package after generating not insubstantial opposition. But it deserves to be considered independently.
Kris — that’s really tangential to my point. Any system that allows a third of a ballots to be disqualified is problematic. I don’t care how clearly your instructions are a properly functioning election system wouldn’t reject 1 out of every 3 ballots. That’s all there is to it.
As I’m not a legislator anymore, I’m not going to be proposing any changes, but I think it’s worth pointing out that if the region wants an inclusive governmental structure, something should be changed. Whether it’s Bel’s idea to go to all IRV voting or give people the chance to rectify votes the election commissioner deems ineligible, we shouldn’t tolerate this high of a rejection number.
I think that ignores the fact that the system itself isn't disenfranchising anyone nor does it have any artificial barriers to suffrage, if anything it goes out of its way to ensure that voters have an easy way to vote:
The voting booth provides a step-by-step guide on how to cast a vote, which includes images that show examples of each step, including an example of how a finalised vote should look.
There is a clickable button that lets voters open a message already addressed to the Election Commissioner, where they can input their vote.
There is a ballot template that already lists qualified candidates, so voters don’t run the risk of mistyping candidate names.
There is certainly always space for improvement, which I aim to do with future voting booth templates, but there also has to be a level of personal responsibility here. Voters are here because they applied for citizenship and that includes the responsibility to know what they are doing. It isn’t too much to ask that they understand how to cast a vote.
It also isn’t too much to ask that we change a system that has disenfranchised a 3rd of the active voting population, whether it be adopting a single voting system or allowing folks to edit their ballots after casting.
For starters only 1/4 of those who voted did so in validly, not a third.
More to the point though, like Pronoun has said nobody has been disenfranchised by the system. Voters were afforded the opportunity to vote and had easy tools to exercise their right. It’s on them that they did not take the time to understand how to properly cast a vote. Nobody here is illiterate, so they should be perfectly able to read the instructions, look at the sample images, and vote accordingly.
Kris — this wasn’t/isn’t meant to be a personal attack.
Regardless of the best intentions and efforts nearly a third of the population was disenfranchised because they didn’t fill out the ballot properly and the vote was tossed. If I was the only dumbass who filled the ballot out incorrectly, I wouldn’t raise this issue, but that clearly was not the case. You can frame it as “personal responsibility,” but that doesn’t change the effect of what happened and that it almost could have swayed the election.
I realize I’m just an old-timer who doesn’t get here as much as he used to, but honestly I’m disappointed to hear that the voters just need to do better. It’s not the spirit of the TSP I’ve been part of for the past 20 years, and I hope it’s not the sentiment the region embodies moving forward. We’re better than that — or at least we were.
