The fact that this is multi-winner STV doesn't really impact the vote-splitting issue except that with multiple winners your very deep preferences matter less. With only two winners here, it's in many senses closer to a single-winner election than to a complex many-winner STV election.
@drdrehistorian.bsky.social Is there a quick-and-dirty outline of the impact of optional preferences in Queensland? I feel it's well-traversed territory.
btw NSW is the main OPV state now. We implemented it about a decade before QLD, and QLD dropped OPV prior to the 2017 election. NSWEC also has vastly more preference data than any other single-member election because they scan all the ballots.
Afraid I’m not sure but @benraue.com, @kevinbonham.bsky.social, or @chrissalisbury.bsky.social might have suggestions on pieces (or have their own to link!) about the effects of preferences exhausting under OPV (and OPV isn’t just Qld but they are notable for multiple CPV/OPV shifts)
so the relative importance of preferences vis a vis first preference (primary) votes reduces as you increase the magnitude. For an M21 NSW Legislative Council election, almost all seats are decided on primary votes. But for an M1 election the quota is 50%, so preferences are more likely to matter.
M2 in that sense is quite a lot more like a single-member election than a properly proportional election (say M5+). With a quota of 33%, if you have two similarly-sized groups, they'll each win a seat and it's game over. But if it's not like that, preferences can matter a lot.
In terms of vote-splitting, it mostly matters if people don't number preferences (at least those of the viable candidates). Of course in a non-partisan election it can be harder to tell who is viable or what the 'sides' are. On longer ballots, voters will often not number all the boxes.
there is also the fact that no candidate's voters mark their preferences unanimously. There will always be some leakage. Having fewer candidates could fix that, but maybe some of those voters would just vote for the other side if their preferred candidate didn't run.
In theory you can have issues with a candidate who would do better on the final count getting knocked out earlier, and thus a voter could be strategic by preferencing higher the person who is likely to get more preferences.
An example of this was Fannie Bay in the NT 2024, when Labor would have won a clear Labor vs CLP count, but they came third and the Greens came second. Labor preference flows to the Greens were weaker, so the CLP won. A voter who most cared about not electing a Lib should've put Labor above Greens.
But in practice it's very hard to judge who is likely to benefit from such an imbalance, particularly in an election like this.
The best advice to deal with this problem is 'number every box', or at least if there are 2 standout progressives make sure all the progressives give them both a number.
Yes indeed. We do have local elections coming up. An election ago I estimated that in my local authority, with magnitude 14 and Meek's method spitting a very easy breakdown of how your vote gets split ("keep values"), it's likely that if my preferences had run through 13 winners and been in play...
for the last round of counting, the remaining part of my vote contributing to the outcome would have been, I can't remember if it was a millionth or a billionth of my full vote. So deep preferences really are irrelevant. Yet of course everyone wants to rank someone last and that's emotionally fair.
What election are we talking about here?
This is the InternetNZ board election, which has been a source of controversy as the "Free Speech Union" has tried to stack the board so that they can promote their far-right agenda. There has been a countermovement of progressive BlueSkyNZers becoming InternetNZ members.
aha. I suspected it was an NZ local govt election. Yes I have some thoughts.
Aus upper houses are more analogous to the situation you’re looking at: multi-winner with prefs optional after a certain point (eg Senate only mandates 1–6) The best advice is *aways* preference as far as you feel able, and ideally all the way in case last seat is least fav vs 2nd least fav