Comment on Attacks on Australia’s preferential voting system are ludicrous. We can be proud of it | Kevin Bonham

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abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

we here in Australia had another parallel to your election.

I didn't realize this, but this is really interesting. Thank you for the hattip!

In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That’s an aberrant result that doesn’t really match anyone’s intuition of how elections should work.

Unless, like me, you grew up in a FPTP system - then this is exactly what you'd expect. (As you already know in FPTP the votes would be split, so with the centrist and the right-wing splitting the vote, the left-wing would win. But if the right-wing drops out, then the votes would mostly go to the centrist instead, likely putting the centrist ahead now.)

I didn’t realise it was in response to a specific article, but I gathered it was a response to general comments from some in the LNP praising FPTP.

Accurate enough - the article that it was responding - well, it was basically what you wrote above.

I was responding primarily to the headline suggesting we should be “proud” of what is literally the worst acceptable voting system.

I took this with a fair bit of humor. I would have said that it's not the worst voting system because FPTP is worse, but then,

(Personally, I consider FPTP completely unacceptable and anti-democratic; it should not even be part of any discussion among serious people.)

So actually, you are right. Agree 100% here.

a proportional system would be better.

And here too.

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