Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Australian voting system explained

Not that I can vote or anything, not being a citizen, but here can be found a nice little comic explaining how the voting system works in Australia.

Personally, I consider it regrettable that nearly all Anglo-Saxon countries are still saddled with some form of single winner system and thus with some form of two-party system, but at least the Australian one has preferential voting. In place like the United Kingdom you could theoretically win all the seats in parliament with only 10% of the national vote as long as there are so many other parties that nobody ever gets more than 9% in any district. And in case you think that these distortions are only a theoretical concern, I give you the parliament of Papua New Guinea from 1975 to 2001!

Hat tip to Jim Croft.

No comments:

Post a Comment