[G]
Please assign the candidates according to how you feel about them. Give
them a rating of 1 (or 0) if you dont like them to 10 to give full
support. [...]
How is this counted? All the numbers are added together for each party.
Preferencial voting would have to be scrapped in the senate elections.
Quotas are formed by adding All of the numbers together.
[AL]
There is an extensive literature on electoral systems and the
mathematics of voting systems. You might find it useful to do a search
for web sites about these issues and provide a page of links for
future inclusion on the web site.
One of the interesting things about the "alternative vote" method
used in Australian elections (whether with optional or compulsory
preferences and assuming that voters are entitled to reject any
candidates they choose) is that it simply does not work unless the
candidates fall into two broad camps.
There are numerous "paradoxes" among which are the fact that a candidate
who would otherwise have won can be defeated as a result of getting
increased support.
Alexander Downing referred to this when he complained that the reason he
might lose to the Democrat candidate was because the ALP "ran dead".
If the ALP had polled ahead of the democrats in his seat as usual then
he would have been elected with a comfortable margin as usual when the
Democrat preferences were split between himself, the leading candidate
and his ALP opponent running second. But because the ALP came third, and
their preferences went overwhelmingly to the Democrats, he was almost
defeated.
In Phil Cleary's seat of Wills an Independent Labor candidate actually
did defeat the ALP because the Liberals came third and their preferences
went to the Independent Labor candidate rather than the ALP, so in a
three way contest, Cleary was elected with a substantial majority
against the leading ALP candidate.
If between 4000 and 9000 ALP voters had voted Liberal instead, then even
if they had put the ALP last, the Liberals would have come second
instead of third, Cleary would have been eliminated and his preferences
would have elected the ALP by a substantial majority against the Liberal
candidate.
Thus the ALP lost Wills because too many of their supporters voted for
them instead of voting for their main opponent.
These and similar absurdities should be widely publicized as part of
discrediting the present electoral system, but in doing so we need to be
careful to avoid distracting attention from the actual illegality of
coercing electors to vote in favor of candidates they want to vote
against, and to emphasis the need for PR.
The method you propose has similar paradoxes though not quite as
dramatic as the "alternative vote". For example if the strongest
candidates are Blue and Orange, a voter who would actually rate Blue as
8 and Orange as 4 would be better off marking Blue as 10 and Orange as
1. This would add 9 votes to the difference between the scores of Blue
and Orange and therefore maximize the chances of that voter's preferred
candidate among the two winning, whereas a "sincere" vote would only add
4 votes to the difference and might result in the less preferred Orange
winning.
