Everyone seems to be missing my main point regarding optional preferential voting and compulsory preferential voting:

OPV is a true representation of voter’s wishes. CPV simply isn’t, for most voters.

That really should be the end of the matter. CPV should simply be outlawed forthwith!

Within the CPV system the very notion of compulsory preferences is oxymoronical in a democracy. Indeed it runs counter to the very principle of voting.

How we can have a voting system which can take your vote and make it count where you don’t want it to has got to be one of the most amazing and downrightly disgusting flaws in our system of governance.

Of all the foibles in the whole system, this has surely got be the most blatantly WRONG.

So, CPV should really be totally untenable.

That really does only leave OPV.

continued

FPTP is no good because as Grim says, it can only really work with a two-party system. We need preferences to give a clear winner of more than 50%, or at least a considerably higher vote on a two-party-preferred basis than FPTP would give if there were three or more candidates.

It is still possible that the winner may get less than 50% with the OPV system. But I can’t see that this would be of a major concern. It is not absolutely necessary for the winner to have more than 50%.

And OPV has been shown to work perfectly well. Qld and NSW have had it for many elections.

Now if we’d had OPV at the last Federal election, I bet we wouldn’t have ended up with a hung parliament. You’ve got to wonder just what portion of the vote each major party attained through preferences that the system forced the voter to allocate. in other words; STOLEN votes!

And when you add this to the fact that a very large portion of voters were voting on the basis of whichever they thought was the slightly less undesirable party, you’ve got an almighty MESS. We’ve definitely got a government that the vast majority of voters didn’t really want to install!

I wonder how different it would have been with OPV?

Perhaps one of the big advantages of OPV is that voters would feel happier about the party that won government. Because they could see that it would be a whole lot more legitimate. This could have huge ramifications for the peace of governance, the lack of constant vehement criticism and a much better level of acceptance of the projects that the government implements. Maybe?

“It is not absolutely necessary for the winner to have more than 50%.”
Sorry Ludwig, not true. It is a legal requirement in Australia that a candidate must have 50% + at least one vote after preferences to be called winner.
The preferential voting system and party politics are 2 totally separate issues.
What is sticking in everyone's craw at the moment is prior knowledge.
When anyone votes for the Nats or Libs in a federal election, they have prior knowledge of the coalition.
No one (including Gillard and Abbott) knew before the election that the Greens and independents would be called upon to add their numbers to form Government.
Remember, Abbott was trying just as hard to court the independents as Gillard was.
This may be an unusual event in Australian politics, but is fairly common in other parliamentary democracies around the world.
Maybe we'll have to get used to it

If you think preferential voting brings problems you need to consider the problems that come with first past the post voting.

Both the USA and the UK are blighted with FPP voting. If you doubt that read Sacks' book, "The Price of Civilization".

Larger electorates with say five members and proportional representation might be worth considering but I for one do not want my preferences not to matter.

I seldom follow a ticket. Several times I have completed all the 70-80 voting spots on a NSW Upper House ballot paper to put Fred Nile last.

<< It is a legal requirement in Australia that a candidate must have 50% + at least one vote after preferences to be called winner >>

I’ll take your word on that Grim.

Presumably this requirement also exists in places with a FPTP system, as in the UK, in which 50% is not achieved by any candidate quite often. What do they do about it?

I also find it hard to believe that after all the elections in NSW and Qld with OPV that we’ve never had a situation after the allocation of preferences where the winner hasn’t achieved 50+%.

At any rate, as a matter of principle, it shouldn’t be necessary for the winner to have more than 50% of the vote. All they should need is the biggest vote.

G'day Ludwig,
I think you must have missed the crucial words in my statement: “After Preferences”.
If you go back to my earlier post describing how our system works, you'll see that by continually eliminating the least successful candidate and redistributing the preferences of those who voted for him, it is almost inevitable that you will eventually achieve a greater than 50% candidate.
And no, I don't believe any such requirement exists, or could exist in FPTP elections.
The majority is only made possible by considering 2nd and even 3rd preferences.