A few days ago, we saw Canada’s Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre lose an election and his own seat. Can we make that twice in a week?
Current numbers (6.1% counted) have a 5.1% swing to the ALP, resulting in a 6.8% lead for Labor’s Ali France over Liberal leader Peter Dutton.
Thank you to our forebears for this at least, giving us preferential voting so that no matter what we think might happen, we can still vote by our heart!!
Preferential AND mandatory voting, so that all those, “meh it doesn’t make any difference” voters are forced to get out there and at least put their opinion on a ballot paper.
And hats off to the AEC who do a very good job of nudging people to get their details sorted, and for putting in place systems that makes it pretty easy to do so, and for generally making sure that elections are pretty well organised.
AND we have snags and cake stalls for good causes at polling places and it’s also done on a Saturday, so might as well get out there and do the thing.
100%. I’m also really glad mandatory voting remains popular
To think that the reason we have preferential voting is because it benefitted the conservative parties of the day…
Reminds me of all of the back and forth between optional and full preferential voting at the state level. Usually the change would only happen because the government at the time thought they would benefit from it, only for it to backfire an election cycle or two later.