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It had nothing to do with ranked choice voting shenanigans. Payman had a big primary vote lead in the race for the 6th seat.
The primary votes were 34.5% ALP, 31.7% LIB, 14.3% GRN, with no other group getting above 3.5%. How do you think the 6 seats should have been allocated?
The allocation for the ALP isn't the issue, the inclusion of a wild card in their roster is the problem. Better internal party vetting and discipline. The allocations and split meant Payman ended up as a politician even though her political viability as an individual candidate is stymied by personal preferences untempered by either party discipline or becoming visible to the ground. The point I make is more about modal muslims being thrust into unearned political station and exercising their personal preferences against organizational requirements.
This is the specific problem I was highlighting: entryism by activist entities can disrupt a local polity and a failure to control this is a specific blind spot on leftist parties currying favor with disparate elements. Paymans islamist loyalties leading her to support greens is objectionable simply on party discipline grounds and if a militant environmentalist crossed lines to support banning nuclear or an animal rights activist crossed to ban animal culling it'll be the same problem: uncooperative externals making their personal preferences take priority over the organization they are ostensibly supposed too work for.
Sure, I don't dispute that she should not have been pre-selected. Simply that it had anything to do with "ranked choice shenanigans".
Hyperbole on my part! Strictly speaking I don't quite understand why 35% gets 50% of the prize, but the nebulous magicks of politics is the worst combination of legacy, compromise and procedure. Fun fun fun.
The reason is that a quota to get elected is 14.3%. This is the smallest number that ensures that only 6 people can win, much like how in a single member election 50%+1 is the smallest number than ensures only one person can win.
So straight off the primaries you have 5 senators elected on full quotas. 2 Labor, 2 Liberal 1 Green. There's one seat left.
Once you take 2 quotas away from Labor and the Liberals they are left with 5.9% and 3.1% respectively. There's a bunch of small parties as well, the biggest being One Nation on 3.5%. So Payman has a clear lead here. But none of these parties are close to 14.3% so they start getting knocked out, starting with the smallest ones, and their votes get reallocated to their next preference.
If the preferences flowed strongly to the Liberals or to One Nation, they might have been able to overtake the lead that Payman had. But they didn't, and she ended up beating the One Nation candidate by 23,490 votes.
Now of course while this is the way that the senate counts votes, you can theoretically use all sorts of other methods. But just looking at the primary votes, and knowing that you have to elect 6 people, it's hard to see a combination that makes more intuitive sense. 2 ALP 2 LIB 2 GRN? 2 ALP 3 LIB 1 GRN? 2 ALP 2 LIB 1 GRN 1 ON? All alternatives are pretty hard to justify.
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