Face of Nation : Jim Molan’s campaign to get people to vote for him below-the-line has not been successful, with the NSW Liberal Senator conceding defeat today.
Senator Molan ruffled feathers during the federal election campaign when he urged people to vote for him directly, as a way of getting around the NSW Liberal Party’s decision to place him in an unwinnable fourth position on the ballot papers.
Voters were urged to ignore official how-to-vote cards issued by the Liberal Party and instead put Senator Molan at number one on their ballot papers.
So far Senator Molan has got more than 132,000 first-preference votes, making him the politician with the highest personal vote in the country.
Senator Molan got a high first-preference vote, it was still not enough to get him across the line.
In order to get elected, a candidate needs to get a “quota”, which is the number of votes the Australian Electoral Commission calculates a candidate needs to get across the line. It calculates this number by dividing the total number of formal ballot papers by the number of senators to be elected to be elected plus one, and then adding one to the result.
This year Senator Molan needed about 600,000 votes to secure him a Senate seat through first preferences.
It was always going to be difficult for him to achieve this as most Australians tend to vote for a party, not an individual in the Senate.In NSW the Liberal and Nationals got a total of 1.6 million votes and this will be enough for the Coalition to elect two candidates.
Liberal Hollie Hughes, who only got a personal vote of 27,266 votes, was placed at the top of the Coalition’s ticket followed by Liberal Andrew Bragg on 2435 votes. Despite their low personal vote, these two candidates will be elected to the Senate because they were listed in the top two positions for the Coalition.
However, it may not be the last Australians see of Senator Molan, who is still hopeful of replacing Senator Arthur Sinodinos when he takes up his new position as Australia’s ambassador to the US later this year.
