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by jpatokal 4088 days ago
Then again, thanks to the wonders of the group voting ticket, the bar for getting a clearly ridiculous result is pretty high:

"In the New South Wales Legislative Council election of 1999, the Outdoor Recreation Party's Malcolm Jones was elected with a primary vote of 0.19%, or 0.042 of a quota."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_voting_ticket

2 comments

This kind of result is perfectly valid. If candidates A and B are polarising, and candidate C is a compromise candidate, and you have a preferential voting system, then it makes sense that many people would put A or B first, and C second, producing a victory for C despite almost zero of the primary vote.

Of course, realistically, what probably happened in this case was more to do with party preferences and backroom deals, because you can give the voters an awesome voting system but then they'll just turn around and ask someone else to tell them what preferences to give anyway...

By ridiculous, I mean "steve the armadillo" just got elected. Or something of that sort.