I've been thinking this for almost all my life: the voting systems used in almost every country are plain ridiculous. The only country I know that uses a system that sounds reasonable is Australia.
Yeah, that video explains our Senate voting process almost exactly - each state gets a number of Senators, and you vote preferentially either at the party level (about 15 - 30 choices and you can preference up to six), in which case the party decides which candidate gets the first votes, or you can preference every candidate in the whole state (can be over one hundred - the voting paper is comically large[1,2]!)
For the House of Representatives, each electorate is much smaller and parties only have one candidate each, so you only have five or six choices, and you preference all of them.
Should be noted that it's not perfect. It encourages a rather slow pace in politics. There is also a lot more than simply a proportional system to it (for one there is a 5% minimum for getting into parliament), there are laws and rules around voting such that the government doesn't deadlock because of a single party or complicated political spats
As far as I'm aware Australia just uses the same voting system as the UK, Ireland and New Zealand–i.e. almost the entirety of the non-American Anglo-sphere. Is there something else unique about how Australia does it?
The Open List system used in most of Europe (with France, parts of Germany, and Spanish congress being notable exceptions) seems like a very good, successful one also.
In the Republic of Ireland we use single transferable vote with proportional representation (which I think is a really good voting system, although a bit complex to understand the operation of).
UK is still first past the post for MPs. Australia seems to be different again but not first past the post.
STV is complex when there are multiple winners. It still produces a broadly representative result, but it is hard to understand how the mechanism worked near the margins that determine which candidates prevail near the lower threshold.
When there are is only one winner and STV is exactly the same as instant runoff, it is not so difficult to understand.
This surprised me but you're right. NI have(/had?) STV, but not Westminster. Very odd.
> Australia seems to be different again
This was my question really. Australia uses IRV, afaik, which is somewhat equivalent to STV except that it's slightly simpler, though I don't see any major disadvantage to the extra complexities in STV.
