Talk:Fraser Anning

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John Stuart Mill quote

@Spaceboyjosh added this to the page:

• [...] despite receiving just 19 votes in the 2016 federal election, is somehow sitting for Queensland in the Australian Senate.{{efn|Proof, once again, that ''[[John Stuart Mill|"bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."]]''}}

I don't understand how this quote is relevant and I suspect this is due to a misunderstanding of how voting in the Senate is done in Australia. Is the implication that people did nothing because almost nobody showed up to vote? Voting in Australia is mandatory so that is not true. In Australia, voting in the Senate is done by either voting for parties (above the line) or individual candidates (below the line). Most people vote for the parties rather than ranking the individual candidates, so it is technically correct that Anning only received 19 first preference votes but it is misleading since his party received about 250 thousand votes and around 229 thousand of those votes were above the line. In terms of individual first choice preferences, Anning was far from popular (he received the second lowest amount of votes out of more than 100 candidates in his state) and was not even initially elected until it was discovered that another candidate in his "One Nation" party had dual citizenship. CowHouse (talk) 06:55, 15 April 2019 (UTC)