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Whoa really? Where I live there have been occasional rumblings about switching to preference voting, and I've mostly been agnostic about it. But this part seems like a negative, to me. If it's clear who someone meant to vote for, the vote should count.
I'm curious what the reasoning is here? Is this specific to Australia? Something to do with mandatory voting?
That's just how it works in Australia. To my knowledge, when preferential voting is proposed overseas, as in the UK Alternative Vote referendum in 2011, the proposal has been for optional-preferential voting, rather than our mandatory full-preferential system. Likewise I believe New York uses optional-preferential rather than full.
As to why that's the way it works here, I don't know specifically.
We adopted preferential voting with the Commnowealth Electoral Act of 1918, after WWI - the intent was that, since politics of the day were a relatively unified Labor Party which would likely win a plurality vote every time against a gaggle of competing alternative parties, preferential voting was necessary to ensure fair representation. In 1918 the Nationalists were in power, and there had just been a by-election which Labor won with only a third of the vote, against two conservative candidates who split each other's vote. Preferential voting was intended to prevent travesties like that. Naturally Labor opposed it at the time, but today both major parties are solidly behind it.
(Interestingly, the general dynamic of Australian politics still mostly holds today, in that Labor is consistently the biggest individual party, and it's opposed by a rough coalition of not-Labor parties, which today are called the Coalition. The general structure of Australian politics has been the interests of labour, represented by the Labor party, against the interests of capital, represented by the National/Country/United Australia/Liberal/Whatever party. That said, this might be changing as over the last few decades, Labor have been increasingly losing touch with their earlier working-class and union base, and both major parties are seeing their primary votes collapse, as voters leave the big parties for more ideological alternatives.)
Anyway, I don't know why we chose full-preferential voting in 1918. For better or for worse, we did, and no one seems to want to risk touching the electoral system today. So it's likely to stay.
(We did not have mandatory voting in 1918 - that was introduced in 1924, after the 1922 election only had 60% turnout, which at the time was considered extraordinarily low, and indeed too low to give the government a real mandate. I realise that sounds quaint now with countries like the United States usually showing sub-60 turnout - I guess it just goes to show what a different time it was.)
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