If you had an unlimited amount of power to rewrite the Const

[cthulhu]

I was offended that I had to wait 10

It looks like ALP has kicked the shit out of the liberals.

[Draco_Argentum]

I also was offended by a 10 minute wait and having to leave a group in WoW.

Still, Howard got owned so its worth it.

[Koumei]

Damn straight.

So... anyone vote for Fascist First?

Half of my preferences seemed to be a case of "Do I hate X more than Y?" with the rest being actual cases of supporting the policies of A and B, and a few "I have no idea about this person." cases thrown in the middle.

But seriously, a huge factor was putting FF last, then the Christians, then One Nation (yeah, the racist party isn't as bad as the "We think our sky fairy gets a say! Also, Zieg Heil!" parties), before looking for other people I didn't like. I finally decided I may as well declare "I don't like Howard."

[Draco_Argentum]

I just went for what will get rid of Howard. Labour first Liberal second last, everyone else in order of hatred. Liberals second last because Family First are the Christian fundie party, don't need those shits coming here.

Senate I didn't mark the ballot, Labour has a healthy lead so I didn't need to sully my hands voting for them to keep the Liberals out.

[PhoneLobster]

I have a desperate manly man crush for the beautiful and charismatic Bob Brown with his sexy progressive socialist dirty talk, so its Greens all the way for me baby (5 senate seats bitches! So long democrats, eat your hearts out National Party, we are THE third party now)

Its good to see family first vote not growing but is sad to see them not shrinking either (but wow, 0.0% swing for them that is SPOOKY).

Also spooky is the prospect from the ABC senate prediction right this second, leaving the balance of power potentially in still the hands of family first and some other zany random dude no one knows or cares about.

[Crissa]

There is something to be said about our current system in which if the top-tier arsehat is unpopular enough, they get flushed. We've done this many times in the last decade - Tom Delay, Gingrich, Santorum, Liebermann.

Although Howard seems to have done himself in to the point that he may be the first PM in 106 years to lose his own seat...

-Crissa

[technomancer]

I think there should be a "none of the above" vote. It would be nice for my non-vote to actually be counted, rather than attributed to apathy. I honestly didn't like anybody for the last to US presidential elections, which is why I didn't vote.

[ckafrica]

how exactly does the Auzzie preferential ballot work btw?

[Draco_Argentum]

You put your choices in order. They count everyone's 1s. The dude with the least ones is eliminated and his votes split up and given to whoever has a 2 on the ballot. Repeat until someone has >50% of the votes.

Theres a bunch of variations, federal lower house you have to number each candidate. Queensland state (we only have one house, the senate was removed in a referendum decades ago) you can just stick a number against one candidate if you want.

[cthulhu]

Intrestingly the AEC will still count your vote as far as possible even if you only partly number it.

In other news, costello resigned?! the liberal party is going to be rudderless for a while.

[RandomCasualty]

1195738127[/unixtime]]I'm in favour of compulsory voting, even if it does lead to some people voting without really knowing what's going on. That just makes it a more or less random vote, which could still be worse.

Honestly, compulsory voting sucks. Why encourage uninformed people to flip a coin or go along the lines of propaganda. See there are lots of people who will vote for a candidate for stupid reasons, because they like his personality or he has a nice face or whatever. That's what happens when uninformed people go to vote. If you have compulsory voting, you force people to go make random uninformed votes, so you introduce more chaos into the election process, and overall you make the ratio of good votes to bad votes worse.

If people are too lazy to go out and vote, they're certainly not going to research candidates and make informed decisions. And we don't want those people voting, in fact, I'd rather tell them they can't vote rather than force them into the polls so they can flip a coin.

[CalibronXXX]

Right, if you're going to force people to vote you're going to have to force them to know what the hell is going on if you want any good to come out of it.

[Catharz]

1195994443[/unixtime]]You put your choices in order. They count everyone's 1s. The dude with the least ones is eliminated and his votes split up and given to whoever has a 2 on the ballot. Repeat until someone has >50% of the votes.

That's an interesting system. I'm a little bit confused as to what it means to be "whoever has a 2 on the ballot', but I think I get the general idea. Here's how it would probably go down in the US:

~40% of voters put the Democrat first, ~40% put the Republican first, and ~20% put the Independent (the 'compromise') first. The Independent is eliminated from the first round of voting.

~10% put the Democrat second, ~10% put the republican second, and ~80% put the Independent second. Ideally, the Independent would win at this point because she is the obvious compromise. The Independent, however, has been eliminated, so we examine the totals for the Democrat and the Republican, ~50% vs. ~50%. Somebody wins by a percentage point.
It never gets as far as a third round.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Not quite, at least as I understand it. You only drop down the votes of people who voted for someone who is no longer in contention. Here's a hypothetical example:

40% vote Dem, Indep, Rep
40% vote Rep, Indep, Dem
15% vote Indep, Dem, Rep
5% vote Indep, Rep, Dem

So Independent is eliminated in the first round with only 20% of the vote, and everyone who voted for the Independent has their vote dropped down to their #2 choice. Now it's 55% Dem and 45% Republican, so the Democrats win.

[Username17]

Add in even more hillarity when you realize that there's a Green Party, an American Independent Party, a Libertarian Party, a Natural Law Party and so on and so forth. By the time you eliminated all the minor parties, you'd be down to like 7th choices and it could seriously be the Greens or the Libertarians who take everything.

-Username17

[cthulhu]

Basically Australia uses 'instant runoff voting' where you vote for all the candiates in order of preference, and the candiate with the least votes is eliminated, his votes redistributed according to the next preference on the seat and the votes redistributed according to the preference system.

Which goes pretty much as Jacob Outlined. Minor parties rarely win because they tend to get eliminated in early rounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-ru ... br]Instant runoff voting is another percularity of the Australian electoral system and seems bizarrely unpopular elsewhere.

Systems that produce the results Catharz wants are Condorcet systems, which are systems that the candidate that is most preferred when compared individually to all the other candidates is elected. This produces really, really, weird outcomes. Say there are Major parties A & B and minor party C

If the vote cards

500: A < C < B
500: B < C < A
1 A < B < C

C should be elected, because its 501 vs 500 when compared to A and 501 vs 500 when compared to B

This is why pretty much why no government organization uses Condorcet systems.

[Catharz]

Actually, there are instant runoff elections in my home state, although only for the city Minneapolis (which is actually listed in in Wikipedia article). I've heard rumblings that any higher-level runoff elections might be declared 'unconstitutional' for 'depriving an individual of his or her right to vote'.


Looking over that article, I've got to agree with the Libertarians. Approval voting seems optimal for one-winner elections.

[cthulhu]

I'm not sure. If 80% of people think candidate A is the best thing since sliced bread, but 90% say candidate B is a bit of a wanker but we could put up with him, you lose great candidate for the limp wristed one.

Not that IRV doesn't suffer from similar problems, but in Australia you apparently pretty much always get Plurality voting anyway, so you're only looking at 6% of cases in the Australian environment, and then IRV or approval are going to generate the same cases

[Catharz]

1196049677[/unixtime]]I'm not sure. If 80% of people think candidate A is the best thing since sliced bread, but 90% say candidate B is a bit of a wanker but we could put up with him, you lose great candidate for the limp wristed one.

You loose a great candidate for an acceptable one. The result is possibly sub-optimal, but it should always be 'good enough' (otherwise why are you voting for "the wanker" at all?).

In the situation you describe, it would be reasonable for the people who wanted A and were fairly certain that a majority also wanted A to vote for A and avoid B on those exact grounds.

It's not ideal in all cases, but to get the ideal result you're basically stuck with polynomial complexity.

[Draco_Argentum]

1195999479[/unixtime]]See there are lots of people who will vote for a candidate for stupid reasons, because they like his personality or he has a nice face or whatever.

These people are already voting. Extremists are more likely to vote by choice and less likely to think about voting for anyone other than whatever party they're a member of.

Compulsory voting forces the swing voters to actually vote. It also means there are as many swing votes as possible up for grabs. This means anyone who wants to get in has to at least try to get their votes instead of pandering to their normal support base.

[Koumei]

Yep, and that's basically why I'd prefer to force everyone to vote, even the coin-flippers, because at least it takes away from "the only people voting are the (pro/anti) skub extremists, who vote for the (pro/anti) skub party."

Even if we can't get people voting intelligently, at least we can balance out the morons by throwing random morons at them, thus causing them to realise "I can get more of the random morons to not be random and instead vote for me if I do something clever here."

The next step is to educate them.

[RandomCasualty]

1196076556[/unixtime]]Yep, and that's basically why I'd prefer to force everyone to vote, even the coin-flippers, because at least it takes away from "the only people voting are the (pro/anti) skub extremists, who vote for the (pro/anti) skub party.

Even if we can't get people voting intelligently, at least we can balance out the morons by throwing random morons at them, thus causing them to realise "I can get more of the random morons to not be random and instead vote for me if I do something clever here..

All that does is promote more propaganda campaigns that are more about influencing idiots than actually developing real solutions to the issues.

[tzor]

Elections are strange things. You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. You can't make an election fool proof because politicians by their very nature want to be elected / re-elected and will do so through any means they feel acceptable. (One of the basic ideas under the design of the consitution was the notion that man more or less sucks so we have to live with that and work with flawed human nature in the design.)

There is a wierd thing in the US federal goverment that actually works, although it was born by necessity. We have a rotating senate. That is to say that only a portion of the senate is up for election at any one time. I think the best way to reduce the effects of fooling all the people some of the time is to make sure that to really have an impact you need to convince the people not just once but several times in a row.

[Crissa]

Only an idiot votes Republican, anyhow.

The weight of evidence isn't equal.

-Crissa

[Draco_Argentum]

1196087027[/unixtime]]
All that does is promote more propaganda campaigns that are more about influencing idiots than actually developing real solutions to the issues.

Thats already beneficial. Hell, Bush keeps getting re-elected. Voluntary voting can't be super great.