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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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