That only deals with what is normally referred to as 'first past the
post' problems. The actual problems are deeper.
I think that the best facet of the Australian system is the Aust.
Electoral Commission, the independent body which runs elections.
They'll even run a union election for you if you wish and have run
elections in small, neighboring countries like East Timor where
difficulties were anticipated. They are absolutely incorruptible. We
don't have a situation where each state can decide how it will elect
the federal government as the US does with presidential elections -
that gets rid of problems of partisan states like the Florida incident.
The commission has decided that technology is best employed in the
system (distribution of preferences) rather than in the actual voting
- no machines! Votes are cast with pencil on paper and counted
manually by election staff, overseen by voluntary scrutineers. The
first count is completed the night of the election in most cases,
except for the upper house where a proportional representation model
is used. Thus while our system is complex when it comes to deciding
who won in tight seats, the decision comes through quite quickly in
most cases.
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 18/03/2007, at 2:12 PM, Mike wrote:
> For a discussion of the mathematics of elections see:
> <http://sciencenews.org/articles/20021102/bob8.asp>
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