Talk:Langer vote

where does this name come from?
the name "langer vote" is not used in any of the references. at the time i recal it being commonly called "optional preferential voting". are there any examples of the current article name ever being used? & might be more appropriate as merge with Optional Preferential Voting? &rArr; bsnowball 14:12, 3 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm no authority, but I believe the Langer vote was a way to force an Optional Preferential Vote, in a system which did not support OPV. I do not believe a merge is prudent, but maybe a See Also to Optional Preferential Voting. Parasite 03:17, 5 March 2007 (UTC)


 * . langer publicised the fact that opv was valid on federal senate votes. what caused the media attention was that publicising this fact was illegal, hence the court case. (strange but true, i asked an aec officer at the time, was told it was valid but asked not to tell anyone that he'd told me that.) the act has since been changed, opv is now invalid in all federal elections. this episode probably only needs mentioning in article on langer & is more notable for the oddity of legislation making it illegal to inform people about that legislation. & again, is there a source for the name you've given it? as i said the term 'langer vote' wasn't used (at least as far as i know) &rArr; bsnowball  11:19, 5 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Refer to Hansard on JOINT COMMITTEE ON ELECTORAL MATTERS, held Monday, 9 December 2002
 * Mr MELHAM—Yes. I am particularly concerned about that. Your research paper has a breakdown of what we call the Langer votes, which we can summarise as a deliberate vote of one and then a repetition of twos and then there is the non-sequential numbering, which is basically accidental—repetitive numbering. Parasite 03:55, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree that this article should not be named "Langer vote" unless there is clear evidence that this is the commonly used name for it. Multiple citations would be required to support this. I suspect Bsnowball is right: there should be an article on the introduction of section 329A, Langer's contempt charges etc. That article is currently Albert Langer, but perhaps it shouldn't be. Thayvian 04:20, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

A comment or three on some the matters mentioned here. 1) I would suggest changing the title of this article from "Langer vote" to "Langer-style vote", or better still "Langer-style voting". While the term "Langer vote" is not much used, those other two terms are in widespread use by the Australian Electoral Commission. As in the following press release, factsheet, and page from one of its research report, for example.

http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Media_releases/1998/Langer_Style_98.htm http://www.aec.gov.au/pdf/backgrounders/18/EB_18_Informal_Voting.pdf http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/Strategy_Research_Analysis/paper7/page03.htm

They can also be found in more occasional use in articles written for law and political science journals. For example:

"Protest or Error? Informal Voting and Compulsory Voting", by Lisa Hill and Sally Young, Australian Journal of Political Science, September 2007; Volume 42 No. 3, p516.

Plus they can also be found in reasonably widespread use on the Net (as a search with Google will attest).

2) The "Langer vote" article fails to point out that Langer-style voting really only applied to voting for the House of Representatives, if only to the extent that (AFAIK) Langer only ever advocated it for the House. IMHO the article needs to clarify this. (Whether the Langer voting method could used in Senate elections as well is a more complicated matter that I won't go into here. Note, though, that the 1998 amendments only repealed the House elements of section 270. The Senate ones remain in the Electoral Act.)

3) The material in the "Langer vote" article is otherwise basically correct (but see my Point 5 below). However, it tells only a small fragment of the story and leaves out important details. Here are a few of those details which someone might care to add at some point.

a) The "Langer vote" issue arose out of a blunder in changes made to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 in late 1983. Specifically, the blunder lay in section 270 of the Electoral Act. That blunder resulted in voters who knew about the blunder being able to mark their ballot-papers in such a way as to exercise a de facto optional preferential vote.

b) Strictly speaking the term "Langer-style voting" (or for that matter "Langer vote") arguably refers only to the "1, 2, 2, 2,..." sequence because (to the best of my knowledge) that was the one, and the only one, Albert Langer publicised. However, it was not the only one which allowed de facto OPV. So would sequences like "1, 3, 5, 7, 9..." or "1, 2, 4, 5, 6,..." or "1, 200, 300, 400,...", etc etc. The reason was section 270. That provision changed the House voting system in such a way:


 * That the only PREFERENCE (as distinct from NUMBER) required on a House ballot-paper was the number "1". There still had to be a number in most other voting squares, but for all practical purposes it no longer mattered what that number was.


 * If a ballot-paper contained one or more breaks in the sequence of numbers a voter pencilled in on a ballot-paper (eg the missing "3" in the example "1, 2, 4, 5, 6,..." it divided those numbers into two segments: one containing the numbers starting with "1" and running as far as the first break, and the other containing all the rest of the numbers. The second segment was discarded (the "4, 5, 6..." in our example), the first (the "1, 2" in our example) was declared to be the voter's preferences and passed on to other provisions for processing.

That was the basic mechanism underlying Langer-style voting

Even a sequence like "1, 2, 2, 2,..." ultimately relied on that mechanism. To understand how that sequence functioned it is only necessary to realise that section 270(3) dealt with repeated numbers on a ballot-paper by commanding the other parts of section 270 to ignore them. That meant that a sequence like "1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5..." was viewed by section 270 as if it actually ran: "1, 2, 4, 5...".

All of which meant that a sequence like "1, 2, 2, 2,..." would have appeared to section 270 as if only consisted of the number "1".

4) The Langer-style voting material in the wikipedia article on Albert Langer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer

arguably has errors in it. Or at least part of it approaches the issue from a rather slanted point of view which may be factually misleading. Specifically: "As an antidote to these kind of electoral tactics and to advocacy of voting informally the ALP government formulated section 329A of the electoral act."

Actually section 329A came out a recommendation of one of the reports (the one into the 1990 federal elections, IIRC; but I'm going from memory so don't quote me) of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM). On the one hand the ALP Government went further than the JSCEM recommended when it had Federal Parliament enact section 329A. On the other hand, IMHO the JSCEM itself crawled out onto a very shaky limb when it made that recommendation because (as the report itself makes clear) the committee had not yet studied the problem of Langer-style voting in enough detail to be able to formulate a solution. That made its recommendation which resulted in section 329A something of a stab in the dark.

It gets better. The JSCEM made another recommendation about Langer-style voting in that same report: for the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to study the matter further and make recommendations. That not only made the committee's section 329A recommendation a stab in the dark it could also be construed as an attempt to second-guess the AEC.

I also note that the Albert Langer article does not mention the reason section 329A was later repealed: it ultimately only made the problem of Langer-style voting worse.

5) Bearing all that in mind the final paragraph in the "Langer vote" article ("The Langer voting method was made invalid by amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act on July 17, 1998. The casting of a Langer vote is now considered an informal vote.") should be revised, if only because it conveys the impression that a Langer-style vote only became an "informal vote" after the 1998 amendments when the reality is that it was only ever VALID between the amendments passed in 1983 and those passed in 1998.

There also needs something in there explaining why the parts of the Act which made Langer-style voting possible (for the House) were removed by the 1998 amendments.129.78.64.102 (talk) 08:52, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Albert Langer
Albert Langer, back in the 1970s was a very fat, very radical Maoist, from a very rich family. I think that it is ironic that a man who supported a dictator who was about as interested in civil liberties and the niceties of voting as Stalin, should have ended up, in an accident of history, as a sort of Pickwickian martyr. Optional Preferential voting is now largely the rule in Australia just about everywhere, so his quixotic campaign has largely been won. He did spend some time in jail for his deeds, which was unfair, but then hardly anything like what the Great Helsmen would have done to him. And he still works in a Post Office somewhere, so I suppose he hasn't "sold out". We can grant him so much. And he was a lot of fun back in the 70s too. I have to admit that. Someone who, when asked by a magistrate to what date he wants his case aduourned replies "After the Revolution!" has got to be given some credit. Myles325a 13:48, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Langer voting in the states
I seem to recall reading that the various state laws differ on precise definitions of formality - are there any states where a Langer vote could still be cast and counted? Timrollpickering (talk) 13:03, 26 May 2012 (UTC)