I am indeed, and like all other voting systems, preferential voting has its pros and cons. It's good because firstly, you can be guaranteed that somebody will not be elected with a small percentage of the public's approval, secondly because it allows compromise, and thirdly it's a third party firendly system (third parties aren't seen as 'spoilers' and there isn't that much shame for voting for them, as well as third parties can win some elections, due to the fact that they could be most people's 2nd choice)
The downside, of course, is that often the winner isn't the candidate who initially had the most support, as well as the fact that it requires you to vote for everyone. However, I like it.
It works as follows: when you vote, you are given a list of candidates to vote for. Each of them have a box in front of their name. In each box, you rank them with numbers, descendingly (ie. 1 for first choice, 2 for second and so on until the boxes are filled) then the votes are counted. If a candidate has 50% + 1 or more of the votes, he/she wins. However, if the candidate has 50% or less, that's when the preferences kick in.
For example, let's make a hypothetical election between Candidate A, B, C and D.
The initial results (number 1 votes) are as follows:
Candidate A 54%
Candidate B 40%
Candidate C 4%
Candidate D 2%
Candidate A would automatically win because it has more than 50% of the vote. However, if this were the scenario:
Candidate A 46%
Candidate B 40%
Candidate C 10%
Candidate D 4%
There would be no initial winner, because nobody has more than 50%. What would happen in this scenario, is the candidate with the least votes would be eliminated (in this case, Candidate D) and all the ballots with his/her vote as number 1, will be reassigned based on the number 2 vote. So let's say that from the ballots for D, 2% chose A as their second choice, 1% chose B and 1% chose C, the second round results would look like this:
Candidate A 48%
Candidate B 41%
Candidate C 11%
Still nobody would have more than 50% of the vote, so the next candidate (Candidate C) will be eliminated, and all the number 2 votes from the C ballots (if their second choice was D, then their 3rd choices are counted) and all the 3rd choices of the old D ballots inside this group are counted, and added on to the totals. Lets say in this scenario, A only gets 1% and the other 10% went to B. The results would look like this:
Candidate A 49%
Candidate B 51%
Candidate B would win the election. Even though, initially, Candidate A had the most votes (and under most other electoral systems would be the winner,) the fact is most voters
preferred Candidate B, to Candidate A, so B'd win.
That's how it works. Sorry if this post was long and confusing, but I thought I'd explain it to anybody who was confused about it.
