On 04/05/11 15:33, John Williamson wrote:


What all the minority parties will be pushing like mad is that you need
to put them somewhere in your vote, so please rank all candidates. So
the Sheeple will.

There are two big advantages to that. The first is that people will be
more likely to take time to evaluate the policies of the minor parties.
The other advantage is that it will give the winners more information
about what policies the people actually want. That's going to be a shock
to some politicians.


It's difficult to say what will actually happen, because this exact
system has never (AFAIK, but ICBW) been used anywhere on a larger
scale than the equivalent of County Council elections.

Apart from in other countries' elections.

The closest to the system proposed is Australia, and they make it
compulsory to vote, and any vote which does not rank all candidates is
ignored. The there are Papua New Guinea, and Fiji, which use a similar,
but different system.

Do you know of any others? Wikipedia doesn't.

I don't know of any other countries that use it for their elections.
It's becoming more popular with organisations that have recently taken
time to study variant voting systems and deliberately chosen what they
see as the best. I include both Labour and Tory parties in that. As I've
already said, I've used it for years in the Hugo award ballots and
Worldcon site-selection ballots. I doubt that any balloting systems have
had the as much informed debate as those. There's a reason why the
Worldcon has a "Nitpicking and Flyspecking Committee."


--
Bernard Peek