🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, thank you for so many replies and informative analyses of the elections.
I must say I was most delighted. I thought you might be interested in the
Australian system as it tackles some of the questions brought out.
Firstly - voting is COMPULSORY -you are fined if you don't vote. Last
elections 60,000 people were fined. Total electorate is 6-7 million.
There are two houses.
The Lower House consists of about 150 seats all of equal population numbers
(gutxi gora behera). The government is formed by the parties that can make a
coalition to produce an absolute majority in the House. The leader of that
coalition becomes the Prime Minister.
The Upper House (The Senate) -has an equal number of seats for each state (6)
in total. Only half of the seats go up for re-election at each election.
Elections are held each 3 years so a Senator has the job for 6 years. The
Senate is a house of review. It doesn't initiate legislation but it can change
it. It has a lot of representation of the minor parties that can't win seats
in the Lower House. Usually the governing parties do not have a majority in
the Senate, which means that socially important legislation gets stopped and
modified there.

Our voting is also different. It's called compulsory preferential. You MUST
put a number beside every candidates name. 1 for highest priority, 2 for
second priority, etc. When the votes are counted the person with the fewest 1
votes has his/her votes distributed to the 2 priority of the voter. After each
allocation of these preferences the candidate with the lowest number of votes
has ALL their votes distributed. In the end you have just two candidates of
which one has an absolute majority, that is more than 50% of the vote. This
system mitigates against small parties as their votes get distributed to the
large parties.
They do much better in the Senate as they only have to get 1/12 of the votes
in the whole of the state to be elected.
Because voting is compulsory we have a system of absentee and postal voting,
so for seats with very close results we don't know the result for 2 weeks.
However the overall trend and the general make-up of the government is known
by the end of election night.
agur
Jon
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