Dodgy First Nations Voice Results and Low Voter Turnout

A couple of weekends ago, South Australians (well, some South Australians) voted in the historic First Nations Voice Election, and now a couple of weeks later, the results are flowing in. (It’s a very sparsely populated state). On their homepage, you can view the results, and in this presentation, I’ll show you some of the results and how dodginess ensued.

There were a total of six electoral regions with only Region 1 – Central not yet counted (It’s the most populated region as it encompasses the capital city of Adelaide). I’ll analyse those results in a future video.

As an example of dodginess, I’ll show you the results of Region 2 – Far North. Here’s a map of Australia, and that greyed region is the Far North region of South Australia. In terms of land mass, the entire UK could quite easily fit into that region. It’s a massive area. How many people do you think voted? Well, here are the results: 305 total votes, four of which were informal. For this massive region, admittedly sparsely populated, only 300 or so people voted. How can this be?

Well, first of all, only those who identified as First Nations people were allowed to vote, a very questionable practice in my opinion. And secondly, voting in this election was not compulsory, which is at odds with every other state and federal election where voting is mandatory. Also, not to mention that in this entire massive region, there were only two polling booths. Imagine voting in the UK general election with only two voting booths, say one in Birmingham, and one in Edinburgh. It would be preposterous! Obviously, I’m having a bit of fun here.

To be fair to the Electoral Commission of South Australia, they did have a number of mobile polling booths, but I still feel that only 300 people voting was an incredibly low number.

And now the results, the dodgiest of all! I’ll put these into a spreadsheet, so it’s easier to do some calculations. Noting that there were seven positions to elect. So Mark Campbell with 70 votes got elected, of course, with the highest number of votes. Melissa Thompson was next with 52. Johnathon Lyons was third with 49 votes. Christopher Dodd was elected with 26 votes. Dharma Ducasse-Singer was also elected with 26 votes. So far so good. But hang on, what’s going on here? Dean Robin Walker was not elected, even though he got the next highest number of votes with 24. It looks like he got less votes due to preferences at 29 compared to Donald Fraser’s 35, despite Donald only getting 18 first preference votes. But the real oddity is Jonathon Fatt-Clifton who had the next highest votes at 14, but after preferences, he only got zero votes. All his votes were taken away from him, and instead, Dawn Brown was elected with less votes at 11. Why do you think this is? Why was Jonathon bumped and replaced with Dawn?

Well it becomes abundantly clear when you look at the election summary on the official website. “Number of positions to elect: 3 males, 3 females, and 1 any gender. Sorry Jonathon, you may have fit the prescribed ethnicity, but you are of the wrong gender! We can’t have five males representing the Far North. That would be unfair! Those 14 people who voted for Jonathon in the 400,000 square kilometre area that is the Far North, they’ve been robbed of their vote! This is unconscionable, is it not?

According to the website: “After the distribution of preferences, the following male candidates were elected. The following female candidates were elected, and, the candidate of any gender elected was: Donald Fraser”.

And just one more example, Region 6 – Yorke and Mid-North, which is the region north of Adelaide shown in grey. There were only 129 total formal votes in this region. So we can see that Raymond, Doug, Quentin, Joy, and Eddie were all elected somewhat fairly, noting that four of them are males, Joy being the only female. Sorry Rex, this has already turned into a sausage fest, so even though you got more votes than Kaylene, even after preferences, you don’t fit the prescribed gender. Your votes don’t count, and all those people who voted for you are completely disenfranchised. Same with you Ken, your big manly beard is not welcome here! Denise claims victory. Sorry, it looks like Denise actually beat Ken on preferences, so perhaps that was a fair one.

I haven’t analysed the rest of the regions, but I presume they’re equally dodgy. But is this not the natural consequence of identity politics? It’s no longer about who gets the most votes, it’s about who fits the prescribed ethnicity and gender. How far can this go until Australians say enough is enough? Anyway, I can’t wait to analyse the results for the Adelaide, Central Region, which has a huge number of candidates all vying for top dog. This is only some of them shown onscreen, as I couldn’t fit them all on. Who wins? You decide! Well, not you, but a handful of people will decide for you.

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn