Though with preferential voting, we already have a runoff basically...that's the entire idea. It's instant runoff voting (as it is often known). With a runoff, everybody would have to vote again, and almost no one would change their vote I'd think, at least not differently than their original preference between the two surviving candidates. It would be a battle of turnout essentially.
First choice votes as a tiebreaker would make some sense...if both had equal support among the whole electorate, it would make sense to make the tiebreaker be the candidate who has the greatest depth of support.
For this election though, since the Constitution says the Senate will decide, I think we should do that. It's an issue to consider for the future though.
The thing is, it doesn't necessairly show that. If we have 2 major candidates and 1 suffer an insurgency who takes away a lot of votes that could affect that candidate's number of first preference votes. For example, your vote count would probably be a lot lower if the UL had decided to field a candidate. The point is, if we are electing a candidate through preferential voting we should be true to the spirit of that, IMHO. Obviously the senate will decide in this election should it have to, but I am inclined against that sort of system in the longer run.
