Constantly Furious: donkey voters

With much excitement in the air about the brave new world of PR that we may - or may not - or might - or might not - be about to enter, it's worth looking at how this exciting, vibrant method of voting works in other countries.

How about Australia, for example? They use preferential voting, in various forms, for all federal and state and territory elections. How does it work out for them?

Well, guess what? Given the laziness, fecklessness and general imbecility of the cretinous voting public, it doesn't work very well at all.

So often is the vote buggered up, that the Australians even have a term for it: the 'Donkey Vote':

"..a donkey vote refers to the practice of numbering the candidates' boxes sequentially from top to bottom of the ballot-paper, rather than taking the time to number the candidates in the voter's own thought-out order of preference. .. Some estimate that "donkey votes" can comprise up to 2% of the total"

Oh, dear God. And of course, politicians are - if nothing else - cunning. So of course, many parties..

".. deliberately select candidates with a high alphabetical ranking."

For fuck's sake. That's democracy in action, right there. Is this only an Australian phenomenon? Nope:

"In Ireland .. the donkey vote has its greatest effect not between parties but within them. With an alphabetical list of candidates, and several candidates from each major party for the 3 to 5 seats per district, the proportion of Dáil Éireann deputies with surnames A to M is typically much higher than 50% ...

..the Irish High Court upheld the constitutional validity of alphabetical listing against an equality-rights challenge, noting that despite its faults, A to Z does have the advantage of making it easy to find candidates on the ballot-paper."

You really couldn't make this shit up, could you? But hang on a minute: we're British, dammit. The Mother of Parliaments and all that. This nonsense couldn't happen here, in dear old Blighty, could it?

"British pro-STV campaigner Enid Lakeman noted the same effect in UK local elections, where significant numbers of voters invited to X (say) three candidates for three council seats would simply X the three highest on the ballot-paper, even if they belonged to different parties."

Oh.

So, who'd have thought? As soon as you introduce a voting system more complicated than 'put an X next to the one you like best', the lazy, stupid voters conspire to completely fuck things up.

What fun we're all going to have when this is introduced here, eh?

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