“I’m none of these candidates, and so’s my wife!”
FPTP is fine if you have only two options. If you have more, you really should use a different system. Rank Choice is a good option. Approval voting is also nice because it is so simple (vote for all options you like, no ranking).
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And people are smart and adapt to these systems quickly. You can see it for example in Northern Ireland where people vote differently, strategically, in different elections with different voting systems (UK parliament, NI assembly, and recently EU elections but no more).
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Indeed. This is an Australian Senate ballot paper.
Each column is a party. The entries in each column are the senate candidate members for that party.
The bold horizontal line near the top of the page is the dividing line between “vote for a party” and “vote for a senator”: if you only want to vote party-by-party, keep all your preference numbers above the line. If you want to vote on individual senators, you number exclusively below the line. You don’t have to number them all: you must number at least six parties or 12 candidates.
The current senate is composed of two major parties, neither of them having a majority, one “medium-sized” party (The Greens), and three minor parties plus a few Independents. This is pretty typical - it’s unusual for one party to hold a majority in the senate, and the government must negotiate with some minor parties who hold the balance of power. A few decades ago, there was a minor political party whose entire strategy was based on gaining and holding the balance of power, whose slogan was “We’re here to keep the bastards honest.”
I haven’t studied it in detail, but the Australian Senate feels like a dreadful mess that’s a very honest reflection of the Australian voters. I like it.
Edit: number of parties in the current Senate.
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Stolen.
The caucus/primary split makes any real outcomes so screwy as to make it impossible to actually predict anything.
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