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Notes -
Eventually, parties start publishing "slates" which suggest to their voters the full order they should mark candidates in. Then it pretty much boils down to negotiation between parties for positions on each other's slates.
STV proponents assume that individual voters will have individual opinions on the different candidates. I.e. some Conservatives will put the Liberal party second, but others will put the far-right party second, and that proportion will determine the winner. But voting as a bloc is too strong a tactic. Very often an election will end up coming down to which parties can expect great fidelity to their slate.
So you end up with a vast increase in complexity and a great decrease in transparency, just to get the election decided by more backroom negotiation.
In Australia less than half of voters strictly follow their preferred party's official slate (how-to-vote card), though this is still enough to be important.
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I would rather have negotiation between parties than the stonewalling we get here.
Plus, even if slates make STV converge on two parties, shouldn’t it break down more elegantly? By voting similar to the slate, you can tune how much you penalize the main party. That reduces the cost of coordinating a switch.
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