There must be a better way, surely

IT has been 11 days since Tasmania went to the polls and we still don’t really know who all the winners are.

Hare-Clark is a wonderful manifestation of the democratic urge. But the Tasmanian version is not exactly the author of swift and decisive outcomes.

We have waited for the last dusty, limping Australia Post pack mule to arrive from the outlying provinces with the postal votes.

And now the ballot papers, filled out by hand in pencil are being placed in piles and counted by hand. This is pointy end. We’ve had surpluses thrown, quotas proclaimed, candidates excluded, and preferences cast.

According to the Tasmanian Electoral Commission, some of the votes have been “exhausted”. It’s not hard to see how they feel.

The two or three people who actually understand how it all works promise it’s a great system that delivers a surer and more democratic result than other systems of finding winners that we haven’t tried in state elections, like paper, scissors, rock or logrolling or pillow fight knockout rounds. It’s also a fair bit more ponderous (and less fun).

While we’ve all been waiting, psephologists has been reading the entrails and sniffing the wind and the wonks have been dissecting their prognostications with glee. Candidate X could beat candidate Y, if the winds blow from the east on a night with full moon and the people who voted for candidate Z part their hair on the left.

While the excruciating painstaking nature of the count allows the poets, pundits and wits for fill their days with idle speculation — the rest of us just want to know who the government will be.

While it’s hard to imagine a slower system of figuring out who got enough votes to form government, it’s not hard to imagine a faster one. It’s worth remembering we’ve been in caretaker mode since the end of March. In a sense, nobody’s been running the shop for weeks. There haven’t been any major disasters.

Maybe that’s the way forward.