Australia: tactical voting almost unknown with AV
MPs looking forward to their upcoming recess have received another missive from the No campaign’s Jane Kennedy, who digs out a reference to the arcane Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem which she claims “disproves” the idea that AV would end tactical voting. This is true in a purely abstract mathematical sense, but the knowledge that voters would need to predict accurately in advance is of such complexity that there it has virtually no real world application.
But don’t take our word for it. Antony Green, the respected election analyst for the ABC News Channel, says
“tactical voting is almost completely unknown in Australia, especially under the federal system of compulsory preferential voting…the model described is so theoretical it is laughable”.
Tactical voting blights elections under FPTP in the UK. It is “almost completely unknown” in Australia under AV. That sums it really.
