Dresderstan wrote:San Lumen wrote:or perhaps people decided they didn't;t like the third parties. what is your issue with RCV?
Or the parties keep pushing fear and propaganda against third parties to the people creating this ever growing partisan divide in this country. You still haven't proven to me smaller parties have won.
Australia is a useful example, because we have single-member STV in the House, but multiple member STV in the Senate (6 per state per election, or all 12 in some elections).
The Australian House looks almost exactly like any FPTP chamber: 2 big parties, one of them with an outright majority of members. The Gillard government in 2013 was a minority-Labor government who formed a temporary coalition with (mostly country) Independents, but it was very much an exception to the rule.
The Australian Senate on the other hand, somehow manages to be roughly proportional despite representing the voters of the different states very unequally. Electing the six most popular instead of electing the single person most popular, has a far more dramatic effect than just STV in the House. It's been 6 elections since either major party held a majority (2004) and even then it was deadlocked, and made a majority by appointing one of the opposite party as Speaker (the speaker forfeits their vote).
We have something called a Double Dissolution Election (pronounced "double disillusion" by most people), one feature of which is that all the Senators are elected instead of only half of them. Then there's a raffle of some sort to decide which are there for a double term and which for a single term. Because the quota to get elected is halved and the "12 most popular" instead of 6, for each state, get elected, you can get wild results like this (from 2016):
Coalition (Liberal + National + LNP) 29
Labor 23
Greens 9
One Nation 4
Nick Xenophon Team 3
Country Liberal Party
Family First
Jacqui Lambie
Justice Party
Liberal Democrats
(Should add to 76)
STV for single offices (districts) will do almost nothing to get third party representatives into office. Multiple-member constituencies (even without STV) will do that for you.