On 14-Mar-14 10:41, David Cake wrote:

To be predictably Australian for a moment, for multiple candidate
elections I find a preferential ballot (also called a single
transferrable vote - i.e. the system we use to elect politicians in
Australia) to be a better system for multiple candidate elections than
systems will multiple voting rounds etc, And it is one of the
suggestions made by Beth's strategy panel that we consider that form of
voting. I know it is probably far too radical a suggestion for the
non-antipodeans at this late stage, but I just thought I'd throw the
suggestion out there.

i am willing to see anything tried.  But I don not understand this well enough to know why it is more democratic.  Can you explain?

Voting systems are a complicated subject on which I don't claim to be an expert, but most of the tricky stuff applies to multiple position elections. For electing a single candidate to a single position, we'd be talking about an Instant Runoff System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

On the ballot, you simply rank candidates in order of preference. To count the vote, you count the ballots per candidate, and if there is no majority winner you eliminate the candidate with the lowest ballot and redistribute their votes based on the next preference, repeat until one candidate has >50%

It is is more democratic because it largely (though not entirely) removes any incentive for voters to vote strategically (strategic voting is voting for the candidate based on your assessment of their relative chances of winning, rather than the candidate you actually want to win). In short, it allows candidates to stand without feeling that their candidature is weakening the campaign of another that they might have sympathies with. This contrasts with 

also i assume the method relies on free voters, or does it work in the context of party/constituency/SG discipline as well.

Oh, it can certainly apply in both situations. While a preferential ballot is the system we use for elections here, which are of course a free and secret vote, I've also seen it used for international political party ballots in which groups such as unions controlled a significant number of votes. Of course, if the ballot is secret, you may not be able to verify how a ballot was cast, but that is regardless of voting system. 

An excellent system for conducting various kinds of ranked choice ballots online can be found at http://www.opavote.org/, and that site also has some useful explanation about its value. 

Regards

David