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It is hilarious that preferential voting which was a Reddit fan favourite of 2010s and was surely going to herald true democracy…. ended up creating more backroom politics
What’s the problem with it though. In effect some uninformed voters voluntarily hand their preferred parties the power of their residual votes to use as they see fit, along with the main one. If the voter himself says : ‘I’ve seen all I wanted to see, go to the backroom’, it’s not really backroom politics.
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It also succeeds at doing the thing it is meant to do - preventing vote-splitting from making third parties counterproductive.
E.g. the seat of Pumicestone in the 2017 Queensland election gave the most votes to the left wing Labor candidate (the amusingly named Michael Hoogwaerts), with 35%. The right wing vote was split between the Liberal National candidate with 30% and the even more right wing One Nation candidate with 23%.
FPTP would have given the seat to Labor, despite most voters voting for a right wing candidate. Instead, the Liberal National won it on preferences.
Under FPTP almost all conservative voters would have voted for National. UKIP didn’t win a parliamentary seat for that reason.
Yeah but that's a bad thing. It's good when people aren't locked into supporting establishment parties that they hate.
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For what it's worth I do think preferential voting is superior to first-past-the-post, but you're right that it does not end or remove backroom deals. I don't believe there's any form of democracy, or even of government entirely, that's immune to scheming and dealing behind the scenes.
In this specific case, alternative vote (i.e. not requiring every box be filled) would be an alternative to Australia's mandatory full preferential voting that would significantly weaken the power of preference deals.
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