Thanks for your insightful comments Petr.

I agree with your suggestion about Compulsory “Turning up to vote”. What they do in the booth is up to them — whether they vote for a party, or abstain.

I recognise and agree with your point around the need to have regular elections. My feeling however is that 2 years is too short a cycle…especially when you factor the campaigning required…so each term is really only 1.5 years before you’re trying to win the next one.

Having a slightly longer term horizon allows you to stay the course a bit more. We also have mechanisms to write to our MPs/congressmen between elections and organise petitions if we feel strongly enough about a particular issue between elections.

Not sure I follow your line of thinking around the challenges of preferential voting (or single transferable votes) in single member electorates?

The candidate with the plurality of votes off primary votes need not be the winner — rather it is the candidate who garners over 50% of the vote once all votes are transferred that ought to be the winner as that single individual most closely aligns to “most” people.

You’re right — it compromises slightly on true proportional representation in single member seats.

An example of a country that does this well is Australia where it has preferential voting for single member seats in the House of Representatives, but a preferential vote for multi-member spot for it’s Senate.