College Takes

In this edition of College Takes, Jameson Henderson Redden, a Business Management/International Relations and Political Science student from Flinders University, Australia, introduces “full preferential voting” (FPV) reflects on his own expreience as a voter, and argues FPV could help increase Americans’ confidence in their democracy.

Would Australia’s System of Full “Preferential Voting” Improve American Democracy? An Australian Perspective.

Jameson Henderson Redden

February 4, 2026

A Crisis of Confidence in U.S. Democracy

The majority of Americans agree that “democracy is the best form of government,” yet recent polling has found that 51% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is “performing poorly, or very poorly,” with four out of five voters “worried about the state of America’s democracy.” Americans report that they find U.S. politics exhausting and divisive. The public’s trust in the federal government to ‘do what is right’ has steadily declined since 2001, from 54%, to around 22% in 2024. Critically, only about a quarter of America adults believe that decisions being made by the government in general reflect what the majority of people want done.

As an Australian who interned on Capitol Hill last year, and who has worked for a federal politician in Australia, I believe Australia’s electoral system of preferential voting presents one way to help rebuild Americans trust in their government and the democratic process, while enabling citizens to have more choice and be better represented. In this article, I will present the case for full preferential voting (FPV) to be implemented in the U.S. Congress, where voters rank all candidates from most to least preferred.

The First Past the Post Voting System in Congress

Almost all U.S. states currently employ “first past the post” (often known as “plurality”) voting in congressional elections. In first past the post (FPP) voting a candidate in a single-member district (House) or state (Senate) will win an election if they receive the most votes. If candidate X receives 55% of the vote while candidate Y receives 45%, candidate X will be elected.

FPP works well if only two candidates run in a district but can produce strange outcomes when there are three or more candidates running for election. Ohio’s 9th district in 2024 offers a prime example of such an outcome. Three candidates contested the district: incumbent Marcy Kaptur (Democrat), Derek Merrin (Republican), and Tom Pruss (Libertarian Party). After all the ballots had been counted, Kaptur received 48.3% of votes, Merrin 47.6%, and Pruss 4.1%. Under FPP voting, Kaptur was elected, as she received more votes than Merrin or Pruss.

"Australia’s electoral system of preferential voting presents one way to help rebuild Americans trust in their government and the democratic process"

In the aftermath of the election, however, some Republicans argued that Pruss was a “spoiler” who cost Republicans the district. If Pruss had dropped out of the race and allowed a one-on-one battle between Kaptur and Merrin, the logic goes, Pruss voters would have instead voted for Merrin over Kaptur, and the Republican would have the seat.

Because of the FPP’s vulnerability to the spoiler effect, third party and independent candidates in multi-candidate races often face significant pressure to drop out. A recent example was that of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate for U.S. President in 2024, who dropped out of the race after concerted pressure, and then endorsed now President Donald J. Trump. Major political parties target third party and independent candidates who refuse to drop out, such as Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, alleging they split the vote and spoil the outcome. Alternatively, some independents, such as 2024 congressional candidate Thomas Bowman claim that major parties sometimes choose to donate to minor party candidates and independents in an effort to ‘spoil’ the vote by splitting voters between a major party candidate and minor or independent candidate with similar values.

From the voters’ perspective, FPP encourages insincere voting and dissuades votes for third party and independent candidates. A voter might worry that a sincere vote for their most preferred candidate will spoil the outcome (and contribute to the victory of their least favorite candidate) or be “wasted,” since their most preferred candidate has no chance of winning. This results in some people either choosing not to vote at all, disheartened by the fact that their most preferred candidate has almost no chance of winning, or to vote insincerely for a major party candidate instead. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these factors combined to ensure that close to two-thirds of House elections in the 2024 U.S. election involved just one Democrat taking on one Republican, with no independents or minor parties present on the ballot.

Another way that the U.S. FPP system limits choice is through its reliance on cartography to divide voters into districts. FPP is highly susceptible to the uneven spatial distribution of political preferences that exist in the U.S. (often referred to as “The Big Sort”), in which urban voters tend to prefer Democrats and rural voters, Republicans. Even without any gerrymandering, the vast majority of FPP districts would be safe for one party or the other. Consequently, congressional elections fought between candidates from the two major parties are rarely competitive and usually won by large margins. In the 2024 U.S. Congressional Elections, the average margin of victory, (the difference between votes cast for the winning candidate and the runner up), in contested House of Representatives districts was 27.3%. An additional 23 House seats were entirely uncontested, meaning that on the day, voters could choose from only one candidate on their ballot or write in a candidate (where allowed), effectively eliminating choice altogether.

"FPP in the U.S. offers voters little choice. ... However, there are alternatives."

FPP in the U.S. offers voters little choice. It encourages candidates to drop out of the race to allow others to succeed, essentially forcing voters to “choose” between just one Republican and one Democratic candidate in uncompetitive seats. From an Australian’s perspective, this hardly seems fair. However, there are alternatives to FPP that may help re-build Americans’ confidence in the democratic process by providing Americans with more choices at the ballot box.

Introducing “Full Preferential Voting”

Preferential voting, also known as “ranked-choice voting” (RCV), “single-winner ranked-choice voting,” the “Alternative Vote” or “Instant Run-off,” allows voters to rank the candidates on their ballot from most preferred to least preferred. Full preferential voting (FPV), the topic of this article, requires voters to rank all candidates on the ballot from most to least preferred in order. For example, if four candidates were running in a district, a voter would be required to rank all four in order of preference to cast a valid ballot: Their most preferred candidate first, a second choice, a third choice, and a least preferred candidate. FPV is used in most single-winner state and all single-winner national elections in Australia.

Unlike FPP, which elects the candidate that received the most votes in a district, irrespective of whether they achieved a majority, FPV requires a candidate get more than 50% (a majority) of the vote. This therefore raises the question of what happens if no candidate receives more than 50% of voters’ first preferences. Vote counting continues, with more information from ballots (second and subsequent preferences) introduced, until one candidate emerges as the winner with 50% + 1 of the vote.

Figure 1: The 2022 Federal Election Ballot for Bennelong (Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

A Case Study: The Bennelong Electoral Division in 2022

To get a better sense of how FPV in Australia works, let’s look at a real ballot paper from the 2022 House of Representatives Election (Figure 1). This ballot, from the electoral division of Bennelong in New South Wales, lists the eight candidates who ran in the district for the 2022 Australian federal election.

As you will notice, Australian ballots are designed very differently to American ballots: Australians vote with a pencil on a paper ballot, using numbers (not filled in ovals), and vote for only one office per ballot paper.

At the top and bottom of the ballot paper, there are reminders to number every box from 1 to 8. This is because under FPV voters must rank all candidates from their most to least preferred candidate for their ballot to count.

After the close of polls, counting of the votes starts just the same way as it does under FPP in the US: Voters’ first preferences are tallied. Shown below is the actual count of all votes (first preferences) cast in Bennelong in 2022 (Figure 2).

2022 Bennelong First Round Vote Count

"FPV takes into account more information from voters to find the candidate with the broadest support"

As shown in Figure 2, 41% of voters in Bennelong ranked Simon Kennedy, the Liberal Party candidate, first on their ballot papers. Under FPP, Simon Kennedy would have been elected. But FPV takes into account more information from voters to find the candidate with the broadest support, which was not Kennedy.

Because no single candidate received more than 50% of the vote, counting continues to a second round under FPV. In this round, the candidate with the fewest votes, in this case, Kyinzom Dhongdue from Democratic Alliance, is eliminated. The votes she received are reinspected for their second preferences and “redistributed” to those candidates. This means that the preference of a voter who ranked Dhongdue first and then Tony Adams (Greens) second, for example, is now redistributed to Adams in the second round of counting. If a voter preferenced Dhongdue first and a different candidate second, such as Jerome Laxale (Labor), then their vote would be redistributed to Laxale.

This process is repeated, eliminating candidates with the fewest votes and redistributing according to preferences until one candidate in the district has over 50% of the vote. After Dhongdue, the Liberal Democrat candidate was eliminated after another round of counting and redistributing, then the One Nation, Fusion, United Australia, and, finally, the Greens Party candidate. After seven rounds of counting, and with only two candidates remaining, one candidate reached the majority threshold: Laxale (Figure 3). Laxale was elected as the representative because he was the preferred candidate for the majority of voters. Most voters who had cast first preferences for eliminated candidates subsequently preferenced Laxale over Kennedy. In the final round of counting, Laxale had 51% of the vote compared to Kennedy’s 49%.

Figure 3: 2022 Australian Federal Election in Bennelong

The Sydney Morning Herald published an interactive visualization of the vote count.

The Effect of Full Preferential Voting in Australia

As is evident from the example above, FPV is a more complex voting system than FPP, both for voters and for election administrators. Yet FPV does not change the outcomes of most elections: come from behind wins are rare and the plurality winner most often wins after preferences are distributed. The two major parties in Australia still win most of the seats, with independents and minor parties running but rarely winning office.

This may raise the questions: “Why bother with preferential voting? What can it offer that is different or better than FPP?”

"Elections are not only about which candidates and political parties win. They are as much about the voters — and how voters feel."

Fundamentally, elections are not just about candidates and political parties. They are as much about the voters and how the voters feel about their system as they are about candidates winning and losing. And Australians feel much better about their democracy than do Americans. The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey found that 57% of Australians are satisfied with “the way democracy is working” in their country compared with 38% in the U.S. The use of FPV is likely a key reason: In a 2023, 84% of Australians agreed that “Australia’s electoral system represents their vote accurately and fairly.” By contrast, Pew Research Center data reveal that only 61% of Americans believed the 2024 election would be conducted fairly and accurately.

The reasons for the greater satisfaction may include the fact that Australian voters have many more choices than American voters. In the 2025 Australian federal election, every district in Australia had at least four candidates running as either independents or for parties, with the average number of candidates running in a seat being just over seven, significantly increasing voter choice. And these choices feel real. Even though still voters have to preference one major party above the other, they can feel free to preference the candidate they like the most first, without worrying about damaging the chances of the other preferred candidates (or aiding the election of their least favorite candidate). Vote splitting or spoiling is not something that even crosses the Australian voter’s mind.

Henderson Redden in Washington D.C. in 2025.

My Experience as a Voter

In Australia’s most recent federal election in 2025, there were 5 candidates running for House of Representatives in my district: A candidate from the Australian Labor Party (the major center-left party), the Liberal Party of Australia (the major center-right party), the Australian Greens (a left-wing environmental party), and two candidates from right-wing parties, (One Nation and Trumpet of Patriots). I had a variety of very different options to choose from.

As a voter, I had to rank all 5 candidates, from most preferred to least. After ranking my most preferred candidate, I choose my next most preferred candidate to rank second. When ranking a candidate second, I was essentially saying, “If my first choice does not win, this other candidate would best represent my political beliefs.” I then went on to rank my third, fourth and fifth candidates, ensuring that all candidates had been ranked from 1 to 5. I didn’t have to worry about the spoiler effect or contributing to the election of a candidate I do not agree with. I could vote sincerely.

For me, personally, the primary benefit of FPV lies in its ability to represent the people without discouraging participation from voters or competition between candidates. When ranking candidates in preferential voting, I get to express my political beliefs truthfully. There are no mind games. I have the power to vote for who I truly believe is the best candidate to represent my beliefs. Although I still have to preference one major party above the other, I have the freedom to choose my most preferred candidate without fearing it will hurt the chances of another party or candidate I like.

"I have the freedom to choose my most preferred candidate, without fearing it will hurt the chances of another party or candidate I like."

As a consequence of FPV, when I hear the results broadcast for my district and for the country later that night, I am rarely disappointed in the result. This is not because I do not care who won, but because I have confidence that whoever won is who the majority of the voters in my electorate wanted.

Full Preferential Voting for Congress?

Implementing FPV for Congress would be a heavy lift. Reform faces several key challenges.

First and foremost, the decentralized nature of election administration in the U.S. means that overhauling current voting equipment across so that all localities could use FPV for congressional elections would be a mammoth and expensive task.
Second, the introduction of FPV would need to be supported by an extensive education strategy to ensure the transition was as easy as possible for voters, election workers, and politicians. The costs of educating the American people about the new system would be substantial.
Third, PFV would require a significant culture change. The requirement to rank all candidates from most to least preferred is central to FPV’s efficacy (otherwise it behaves more like FPP and becomes susceptible to the spoiler effect, less likely to produce majority winners, etc). However, any form of mandatory political participation is likely to be met with resistance, especially the idea of ranking candidates you dislike.
Fourth, FPV would face legal challenges, particularly under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause, and especially if significant numbers of ballots were invalidated due to incomplete rankings.
Finally, FPV for congressional elections nationwide would require Congress to legislate for it. That would require support from both political parties, including large majorities of Republicans or Democrats.

FPV is the system that truly delivers the promises made by RCV advocates

As single winner RCV (with optional preferencing), which is now used in Maine and Alaska, scores of cities across the country, and is being implemented in the District of Columbia, gains acceptance in the U.S., voters, election administrators, and politicians become more familiar with the idea of ranking candidates. With time, FPV—the system that truly delivers the promises made by RCV advocates—may become more widely known. To date, however, the implementation of RPV has not ever been seriously considered by Congress.

For FPV to gain more attention, American voters need to act. Call up your local, state and federal representatives. Send them this article, ask them about preferential voting, post about it on social media, do your own research on the topic, or join a lobby group that shares similar ideals.

Democracy should give power to the people and FPV could be one of the keys to giving power back to the American people. By ensuring that the people have more choices at the ballot box and giving the American public the freedom to choose exactly who they want to vote for, FPV would help rebuild Americans’ trust in the democratic process and, ultimately, improve American democracy.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse