My senate candidacy

Results

Well the results are in, and although only 75% of the first preference votes have been counted, the trend is obvious enough to declare the 6 winners from Victoria. Congratulations to them!

So far I have got 128 first preference votes. This may climb as high as 150, or even 170, but I do not expect it to be above 200 votes total.

As I have mentioned to some of you, 98% of the population vote above the line. And of the 2% that vote below the line, many still give their first preferences to the popular candidates, but are themselves in charge of who to give their remaining 67 preferences, when voting below the line. The 98% who vote above the line cannot vote for me because as an ungrouped candidate I didn't get an above the line Ticket box.

Results can be seen at http://vtr.aec.gov.au/, and if you drill down to Senate, Vic, scroll down right to the bottom of the page, you will see my results as the count continues. But the six vacancies have been provisionally filled with 3 from Labor and 3 from Liberal. The full count will begin on Tuesday Nov 27, and go on for probably another 4 weeks. And then the AEC will invite the press, candidates, and public to attend the declaration of the poll. To get an understanding of how the senate count works, have a look at the ABC's Victorian Senate Results. If you scroll down slowly, you can see that there is a gradual elimination of losing candidates (as their votes are transferred to their 2'nd preferences) and announcement of winning candidates. On that page it takes 26 counts before all 6 winners are announced. In the real count, when the AEC also includes the provisional, the postal, the below the line, and other types of votes, it may take anywhere up to 250 counts. But I doubt that it would change the fate of even the Greens (who at this stage got 0.9532 quota's).

On the first link above (from the top), it is possible to drill down even further to districts (My district is Dunkley, and it has 35 polling booths). There I can see that I obtained 4 votes from my district. As of midday 25 November. The rest of my first preference votes came from the remaining 36 districts throughout the state.

Where did the votes come from?

Now, I know I distributed 250 fliers within my suburb, and another 250 at the main Frankston polling booth. I also taped fliers to poles, walls, and trees near another 10 booths.

I can attribute probably 14 votes to family and friends. The rest of the votes would have had to come from a combination of my internet campaign, and those who vote to be different (eg I was also last on the ballot). I will check how the distribution is amongst the 37 districts, and if there is a concentration in some of them then I will (for now) assume they were internet voters, as they may be close to universities, be in areas having a higher concentration of intellectuals (below the line seem to largely come from within thinking groups, like intellectuals).

So in a sense I am glad I didn't rush out and second mortgage my home, and lash out on $30,000 newspaper ads, or a (minimum of) few thousand $$ on letterbox drops, or expensive radio / tv ads.

At best, if I had a few hundred thousand dollars, from donations say, I may have polled as high as a few, or maybe several tens of thousands of votes, but nowhere near the 500,000 votes required for a quota. The current quota is at 324,000 (see third link above), but by the time the full count is finished, it will be north of 428,000 (as it was in 2004).

AFAIK, Nick Xenophon is the only Independent that ever made it into Federal Senate. Nick is from South Australia, and he also ran with a running mate as a Group (unlike myself, being Ungrouped), and therefore Nick's group got a ticket box above the line, thus tapping into the 98% of voters who vote above the line. I would be curious to see Nicks Election return to see how much his campaign cost. By the way, if you are from outside Australia and curious, Nick ran in South Australia, our neighbouring, lesser populated state. Nick also apparently made it into State Parliament before this as an Independent (I don't know the full story of this), and thus his states voters had several years to get to know him and his performance as a representative.

Even if I had got everything right, right from the start, and had a group, I do not think I would have polled much better than the other lesser known groups. I know for example, the Shooters party, the Carers, the Australian Democrats, etc., spent hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars and still didn't get a candidate in. Similar to the Greens and Family First. Their national campaign advertising budget must have easily ran into the millions.

Will I run again?

I believe that my policies put some sort of pressure on the other candidates to match them, or to counter them in some way, to get my voters votes, and groups above them probably did the same to some degree and extent, and so on and so forth such that the sum of us all voters of minor candidates made a difference at the top. So, yes, myself and the people who voted for me probably have a right to 0.01% of the influence in the democratic process that elected our states senators.

Will I do it again? That depends. I think the answer lies in the main reason why I ran in the first place;

- that I was sufficiently upset/worried/concerned about the Howard Government's, foreign policies (war & all), their response to acts of terror by itself a tyranny over our freedoms, by their apparent utter disregard for the ordinary people (in favour of big corporate entities), and by the oppositions apparent failure to reign them in despite 3 elections,

I guess the motivation and the reason will have to be there again for me to run. And though I cannot exactly verbalise the full array of benefits, I know there is a lot of reasons in getting involved. And that one does not have to necessarily win to benefit from campaigning. Nevertheless, I am less likely to be motivated to run again, if, and especially if the Labor government does manage to reverse (or at least cease) the Howard Governments harmful foreign policies, does redress the social wrongs, and restores our trust and faith in government to represent us. Or approaches some semblance of them. Yes, I am happy that Labor finally made it into government. Even though the senate may still be in the hands of the Opposition (coalition now). :)

Removing my campaign material

The Australian Electoral Act has a few requirements, including that of any and all political advertising must have the authorizers and writers full details. Because I didn't have an agent, this meant that my personal details were on all my material online. Otherwise I face fines, and jeopardise my candidacy. However, putting up my personal details online does have it's risks. So to mitigate those risks at the first opportunity I will eventually take down my video clips, my main campaign page, and any other material that might complicate life for me further down the line. However those seriously interested in copies of any of the above mentioned material may eventually be able to access them through the Victorian State Library, or the National Library. As both have asked all candidates to provide samples of material for archival purposes, which I will do so, as I get around to it.

Thanks

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support in this. Without your support (morale), your guidance, your votes on youtube, etc., I wouldn't have been able to maximize the benefits to my candidacy, and in a small way, to Australians. Thank you ALL very much!

Tejay - 25 November 2007.