You Can’t ‘Waste’ Your Vote!
Australia’s preferential voting system explained... IN FULL COLOUR
Australia is saturated in media from the USA and the UK. Through entertainment, current affairs, and social media, we hear things like:
“There’s no point voting for [Independent Candidate] because they’ll never get in — it’s a wasted vote!”
“Sure, [Good Minor Party] has good policies, but all they do is take votes away from [Bad Major Party]. We must vote for [Bad Major Party] to keep [Worse Major Party] out!”
Many Australians absorb these messages and assume they apply to our elections too — and our two major parties benefit from the misconception.
But whereas both the USA and the UK use ‘first-past-the-post’ voting systems for their national elections, Australia’s system is more elegant than that. In elections for the House of Representatives, we use preferential voting — also known as instant-runoff voting, ranked choice voting, or ‘the alternative vote’ in the UK.
So here’s Dennis the Election Koala to give Ken the Voting Dingo an important lesson in civics!
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