The Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre has published Will Sanders’s critique of the NT Local Government Electoral System, Fuelling Large Group Dominance and Repeating Past Mistakes (PDF). The paper compares the Northern Territory’s ‘exhaustive preferential’ local government electoral system with more common Australian electoral systems and argues that the NT system inappropriately transfers the fifty-per-cent-plus-one vote-counting rule for single member elections to multi-member elections. The effect is a form of ‘winner-takes-all’ majoritarianism in multi-member elections, in which large voting groups repeatedly win multiple seats and small voting groups repeatedly miss out. The paper examines alternative electoral options for Territory local government.
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