As Forests, says, the "above the line" prxoy voting is only a feature of the Senate, the PR house.
I agree with James Gilmour the Australian election of federal senators is a perversion of STV. The parties do not publicise their proxy ranking of the candidates, anc consequently, voters don't know who they are voting for. There were numerous small parties with catchy names designed to attract the voter and then to allocate preferences to whichevev major party secretly supported/funded/created them. I don't think that proxy voting should be allowed where it ranks opponent candidates. The incentive for running dummy parties is too great. I think I even agree further with James, that there should not be any proxy option, as it comes with such problems as above, and the benefits are unimportant. RE: the requirement to rank all candidates, there is no reasonable case to be made for this. The instructions on my bollat said that I had to rank all 78 candidates (for 6 winners). I didn't even recognise many of the parties. I'd suggest that an instruction to rank at least twice as many candidates as winners (ie. 12), would be more appropriate, and then to count all votes even if that instruction is ignored. I do, however, support the arranging of candidates names into groups according to party. --- Forest W Simmons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As I understand it, voting "above the line" for a party rather than > > ranking the candidates is only a feature of the multi-winner races. > > However in the single winner races, it is common for candidates to > publish "candidate cards" which are how-to-vote recommendations > from > the candidates. It seems that in these elections the vast majority > of > the voters follow these recommendations. In most seats, the two major parties dominate. Some ~80% of voters give first preference to a major party. Under IRV, if your first preference goes to one of the top two, your preferences will not even be read. Therefore, these ~80% have no reason to fiddle with the lesser preferences, and they may as well just follow their chosen how to vote card, as they have to rank every candidate for their vote to count. What of the other ~20%? Apparently they don't necessarily follow how to vote cards. I heard one bit of statistics, though I cannot source it: "When the Greens direct their preferences to Labor, 77% of Greens voters do that, when the greens direct their preferences against Labor, 74% of Greens voters continue to give preferences to Labor". In other words: When the preferences are expected to be counted, the voters don't blindly follow the directions of the party of their first preference. Anthony Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
