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I recently discovered that Australia uses the preferential voting system. It looks like a great system, so great that I do not see any immediate drawbacks.

What are they?

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    Are you aware of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem? Its not a direct answer to your question, but its an important part of the discussion. politics.stackexchange.com/questions/2/… politics.stackexchange.com/questions/34638/… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem
    – Paul Johnson
    May 13 '19 at 7:43
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    (For clarity, I'd also raise that I completely disagree with the top voted answer in that dup question. In practice the spoiler effect is statistical fluke, and the alternatives to ranked choice voting are arguably all worse, so it's very much like the choice between democracy as a government vs some other alternative.)
    – Denis de Bernardy
    May 13 '19 at 9:04
  • @DenisdeBernardy: thanks, the dup is indeed what I was asking for, better phrased. Should someone like me ddi not know what a "spoiler" is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
    – WoJ
    May 13 '19 at 9:25
  • Drawback is that the current ruling parties/elite of a country will be penalized, so they won't want to implement it.
    – Bregalad
    May 13 '19 at 13:44
  • Note that Australia has two different preferential voting systems. The question this is marked as a duplicate of only addresses the single-winner variant IRV. Australia also uses the multi-winner variant STV in their Senate.
    – endolith
    Mar 20 at 3:30

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