[LINK] Electronic Voting
Kim Holburn
kim at holburn.net
Fri Nov 17 17:08:54 AEDT 2006
On 2006/Nov/17, at 4:20 PM, Stewart Fist wrote:
> 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.
I can't see why that's not acceptable either.
> 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.
You can always not fill it in or do a number of things that make your
vote "informal".
Australia doesn't have a compulsory voting system, it has a
compulsory attendance at a voting station system.
I'm not even sure Australia has compulsory registration. I remember
at the 1975 elections I was dropped off the rolls. I seem to
remember they did a sweep of the registered addresses two weeks
before the elections and removed anyone who wasn't at their
registered address and I had moved and wasn't much interested in
politics at the time. I got pissed off at the whole process and
didn't reregister until years later. Once you're registered though
you can get fines for non-appearance/not voting.
Kim
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Kim Holburn
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