Re: CHAT (POLITICS!!!): Putting the duh in Florida

Nik Taylor wrote, quoting myself:

> > it is valid to vote 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4,
>
> That's good. It would be hard to rank 10 candidates, as was on our last
> ballot. Especially when I've never heard of half the parties.
Where it gets *really* daunting is in student elections at univerties
where you get very large numbers of candidates.

In *Senate* votes in Aus, you can either vote by numbering the *individual*
candidates (of which there might be, say, 40, but again you don't have to
number them all) or else you can just place a '1' in the box of a
particular *party* and no numbers anywhere else. The effect of this is as
if you voted for members of that party in the default order specified by
that party, and didn't vote for members of other parties at all. The former
option (voting for each candidate) is called "voting below the line" and
the latter option is called "voting above the line" because of the way
ballot forms are set out.

> > but it is *not* legal to publically encourage voters to do this.
>
> Weird.
There was a mavorick group around last election time that was doing exactly
that, in an attempt to force the law to be changed. The rationale for the
law is that if large numbers of voters don't number all boxes, you could
lose the sense of having a winner agreed on by over 50% of voters.

> > Even a system where voters give +1, 0 or -1 points to as many candidates
> > as they like would be better than the current American system.
>
> That would be a good system. Altho wouldn't "0" be the same as not
> casting a vote?
Yes indeed. I was enumerating all possibilities, including the null option.

Adrian.