Talk:2016 Australian Senate election

Date of announcement

"The final Senate result was announced on 4 August." This is not true. The outcome was not known until August 12, when the major parties announced that they would go against two bipartisan senate resolutions to use the new vote counting method. This did not become official until August 31, when the senate actually voted. Prior to August 12, everyone was expecting the major parties to keep the promises they made via senate resolutions in 1998 and 2010. Reneging on their promise changed the outcome of the election - the major parties got one extra seat each after 2019. The mainstream media has been lazy and incompetent in covering this (failing to mention the resolutions and describing it instead as "as per convention"). Wikipedia should not follow suit. A user (MelbourneStar) keeps removing my edits on this citing "neutrality".

Oz freediver (talk) 00:16, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Read your edits, then have a read of WP:NPOV -- you should then notice the issue one has with those aforementioned edits. Regards, —MelbourneStar☆^talk 03:01, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Party template creation needed

For Senate results for the Australian federal election, 2016 the national table uses manual entry, however the state-by-state tables are not manual entry based, which has resulted in several parties in these state-by-state tables having no article link or party colour. If someone wants to create the template articles to fix that it would be great. But then another issue remains... how do we get these non-manual entry tables to work with the joint tickets used at this election normally only associated with the Lib/Nat Coalition? Timeshift (talk) 07:38, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

It's possible to set up name and colour templates for joint tickets just as for normal parties. The only minor issues I can think of are that you have to decide which colour to choose (first listed I guess), and sometimes they are listed in different orders (so have to create two versions). --Canley (talk) 01:53, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Ungrouped candidates

Does anyone know why the AEC does not include the results of those ungrouped candidates representing registered parties, in the national total for their respective party? For eg. the Katter Party ran in two states (Qld & NSW) as a grouped party, and in a third (WA) with a single ungrouped candidate. KAP's results were QLD (48,807) + NSW (4,316) + WA (76) = 53,199. But the official figures ignore the 76 votes won in WA, giving KAP a National total of only 53,123. --Mrodowicz (talk) 14:29, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

The AEC isn't ignoring them, it's just that for concision the First preferences by group pages have been used as the references here, as opposed to the First preferences by candidate ones. It's a good point, I'll look at incorporating them into the national total table, although the differences will be very small. --Canley (talk) 01:33, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Why is Bob Day in strikethrough in the infobox?

Bob Day's name is in strikethrough font in the infobox? Why is this? Newystats (talk) 23:54, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

According to the comment and footnote of this edit, it was because he was found by the High Court to be ineligible to be elected. --Canley (talk) 04:23, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

I'd support removing the strikethrough. It takes historical revisionism a step too far. Frickeg (talk) 07:25, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Its a question of style & the particular infobox highlights the mixed approach adopted in that Bob Day is struck out of leader of Family First, but the party which no longer exists isn't. Perhaps it assists if we look at what we are trying to communicate. I'm thinking that we want to show that the election results were declared & people sat in Parliament. The High Court has since said that first 1, then 2 now 6 of those people were never eligible to be elected as Senators. The confusing aspect that arises from the fact that a by-election is not compatible with proportional representation & instead the results are recounted. I can think of at least 3 ways to show this:

1. Keep the article as the election was declared, use notes to indicate the people who were invalidly elected & who replaced them on the recount.
2. List the 12 people elected for each state, striking out the ones since declared not validly elected. This is mostly the way the article currently tries to simplify the issue.
3. Have a separate page showing the recounts, in the same way as the House of Reps has a separate page for each by-election. It would seem overkill for 1 recount, but perhaps it makes more sense with 6.

I can see valid arguments for each approach (& there are probably more) & don't have strong views either way. Find bruce (talk) 09:27, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

Definitely option #1. Given that we have a page for the whole citizenship debacle, I don't see the need for #3, and #2 I find completely unworkable. It's also worth bearing in mind that while countbacks are a rarity at federal level, they happen at state level in the WA upper house, as well as the Tasmanian and ACT lower houses. I have boldly removed the strikethroughs. Frickeg (talk) 11:07, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

I was unaware of this discussion and have put strikeouts for SA and Qld, but haven't got to the other states yet. Personally I think it is the correct thing to do because the struck-out senators were not legally elected, and the new senators were declared to be elected at the 2016 election. But if it gets reverted, there needs to be a proper pointer to 2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis - probably both in the lead and in the template. Adpete (talk) 01:07, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Actually it gets much more complicated for some of the other cases, e.g. in Tasmania Liberals were initially elected in positions 1 Abetz, 5 Parry, 7 Duniam, 9 Bushby; so when Parry was DQ'd I assume Duniam moves up to 5 (and a 6 year term), Bushby up to 7, and the new senator (Colbeck) I assume comes in at #9. But I can't find a recount reference anywhere, not even at the AEC site. Even once that is solved, how to display it is problematic. But I think it needs to go here, because the full recount information is not at 2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, and doesn't really belong there. It's much better here, which is more a "facts and figures" article, while the other is more a discussion of the crisis. Adpete (talk) 02:53, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

For future reference, recounts are here https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/Federal_Elections/2016/special-counts.htm . I'm leaning to two boxes to the right of the big results table for each state: one for initial results, one for amended results. There's plenty of whitespace there to do that. Adpete (talk) 04:32, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

I am totally opposed to this approach (although the "initially elected"/"elected" is at least better than the strikethrough, but it is still needlessly confusing). This is much better dealt with in footnotes where it can be properly explained, and anyway the main section of this page is about the 2016 results as they were declared, not later revisions to that. I would not necessarily be opposed to a kind of coda to this article detailing the subsequent counts and giving the new orders of election (i.e. a heading below the territories, "Subsequent recounts", with a new order of election with the date that it occurred). Frickeg (talk) 08:33, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Well we're going to have to work something else because I am totally on the other side! As some sort of analogy, the 1999-2005 Tours de France were not won by Lance Armstrong, he was disqualified, the result was overturned. In the same way, the original senators were not the ones legally elected; they were disqualified by the High Court, and the new senators were declared elected instead (as declared by the High Court). Also, the results pages linked to from the AEC site[1] calls them 2016 results, e.g. "Statement of Results Report. Event: 2016 Federal Election."[2] You say "the main section of this page is about the 2016 results as they were declared", but I disagree, the page is about the results of the 2016 election, period; and they shouldn't be relegated to the footnotes. Adpete (talk) 11:03, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

If you're concerned about avoiding "mess" and prefer footnotes, perhaps a better solution is to have the legally elected senators in the text, and the originally elected senators as footnotes, i.e. the reverse of what it is now. Adpete (talk) 05:28, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Sorry Adpete, I am with Frickeg, having been persuaded that it is best if the page reflects the results as they were initially declared & then track through the changes. My reasons are:

1. The election process for the senate is that writs for the election are issued by the governor for each state and those writs are returned, declaring the results. The writs are not re-issued & I am not aware of any reliable source that approaches the matter in the way you are suggesting.
2. Each of the affected people sat in the Senate & the High Court does not purport to re-write history & "undo" those results. That is, one of the "results" of the elction is that various people sat in the Senate despite being disqualified.
3. What follows is a not a fresh ballot or even a fresh count, but a special recount which deals with just the affected seat. Eg in the case of Bob Day, the High Court declared that "Lucy Muringo Gichuhi is duly elected as a senator for the State of South Australia for the place for which Robert John Day was returned."

Find bruce (talk) 02:27, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay - there have been other things happening in politics! - but I still think the correct thing to do is to list the correct results, as deemed by both the High Court and the AEC, to be in the main body, with the original (invalid) results in footnotes. In answer to Find bruce: (1 and 3) Surely the fact that there are no writs and no fresh ballots strengthens my case: it is the corrected results of the 2016 election, not new results. (2) The HC decision acknowledges that these people sat in the Senate, but it does not acknowledge that they were legally elected to be there. So again, when giving the results of the 2016 election, we should give the correct, legal, results. Furthermore, when someone far in the future is tracing the history of senators through different elections, surely it will be easier to follow if the final, correct results are shown. Adpete (talk) 04:33, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

Corrections and updates (June 2018)

As per my comment of 19 June 2018 on Talk:Australian federal election, 2016, I have checked each of the state tables on this Senate results page. I picked up four typos (2 in NSW, 1 each in VIC and QLD)—which were probably my error. However, SA and WA were completely different from the AEC results and it appears that AEC updated or amended their results at some stage, seemingly in May 2017 according to the timestamp on the Senate download files. Confusingly, the AEC also shows tables of results (marked as final) which differ from the downloads—the WA HTML table and CSV/text downloads match, but the National and SA tables are vastly different. Adam Carr's Psephos site had the same data as Wikipedia from August 2016 (not including the typos!), which seems to indicate that it was amended nearly a year later (the VEC did this in 2015, updating the results six months after they declared the "final" 2014 Victorian results). --Canley (talk) 13:45, 19 June 2018 (UTC)