slickgoat
I’m afraid that I still don’t get it, most probably because I am thick.
Someone has to be eliminated. That’s the whole point of elections. OPV means that your choice counts, well your preferences do. It also means that you don’t have to vote for the person you don’t want to, but you can rank your preferences. It is very rare that I would rank a bunch of people the same value. It is generally easy to rank candidates.
In our senate we sometimes have to rank over 100 candidates. If you do that you must number every box and can’t make a mistake. Or, the parties have registered their preferences and you just tick one box for your chosen party and that’s it. So it’s either one box ticked or 100 or so. The optional thing is that you don’t have to pick all 100, but that changes sometimes due to party politics playing with the system. One the whole, our electoral system limits how much political parties can mess about with elections. For instance, no party chooses electoral boundaries. Gerrymandering doesn’t happen here anymore. It used to, but not now.
I shall have to investigate the STAR system.
Ok. But why rank them the same?
I don’t see the point. In preferential voting you choose your candidates in a ranked order, so if number 5 doesn’t make the cut in the final count, your next vote (number 4) kicks in, and so on. Not exactly - all number 1 votes are tallied, and the losers are eliminated and then the second vote from the loser candidate gets tallied and so on until the winner is chosen. In this way your ranked choice is never exhausted until a winner arises. Your number 3 choice may get voted in. All votes are potentially important. FPTP sounds like a crap shoot.
This story had no insights. Anybody alive during the last 9 years already knew all this.