[LINK] Electronic Voting

[Stewart Fist]

Howard writes
> Preferential voting is flawed, at least for federal elections.  The feds
> managed to make it so by removing optional preferential and enforcing
> full preferential voting - the anti-Hanson effect.

I'm not sure why optional preferential is any worse than full.

If people want to opt out of voting, they can just not fill in the ballot
form.

If they want to opt out of not voting for some candidates, but voting for
others, they don't need to number the whole paper.  Then, at a certain point
in the preference distribution process, if they exhaust their preferences,
their votes won't be counted.

I find that totally acceptable.

In fact, I think the whole system would be improved by having at the top of
the list of candidates, a pseudo-candidate:

1.    I choose not to vote [ ]

Which would demonstrate once and for all that there is no such thing in
Australia as compulsory voting, and at the same time catch the donkey votes
which can sometimes tip the balance unfairly to one or the other candidate.


-- 
Stewart Fist, writer, journalist, film-maker
70 Middle Harbour Road, LINDFIELD, 2070, NSW, Australia
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