Americans are starting to get the idea about preferential voting! (They’re calling it ranked-choice voting.)  If they took to it, they'd have a more representative electoral process.  Choose the future! has added a comment to a Washington Post news article about ranked-choice voting.

Here's the comment:

In Australia we call this preferential voting, and we’ve been using it for as long as I’ve been voting.  

The advantage of our preferential voting system is that is gives voters more freedom to vote for candidates of smaller parties, so the unwarranted hold that major parties have on our political system is weakened.  This is because, without a preferential voting system, voters feel that their vote will be wasted if they don’t vote against the major party that they dislike most (even if they don’t much like either of the major parties), while they would really rather vote for a minor party.  With a preferential voting system voters can vote for a minor party and choose their preference between the major parties.  If the minor party fails to get elected their vote is transferred to the major party that they prefer.  This creates a more responsive and representative election system that doesn’t, in itself, entrench the major parties.  

There are plenty of other countries that should be looking at this streamlining improvement to the democratic process of voting, too.

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