Western Australia Legislative Assembly - Python Assignment

Internal Code: MAS3464

Python Assignment:

The conduct of elections in Western Australia is governed by the Electoral Act of 1907. However, unless you are REALLY keen, you are better off looking instead at the Wikipedia entry for Instant Runoff Voting. In Australia, the system is known as Preferential Voting. Optional Preferential Voting is a variant of Preferential Voting that will also be relevant to this Project. The main thing you need to know is that under Preferential Voting, for a vote to be "formal" an elector has to number all of the squares corresponding to candidates on the ballot paper. Squares are to be numbered from 1, corresponding to the most favoured candidate, followed by 2, for the next most favoured candidate, then 3 for the next most preferred after that, and so on, until all the squares are numbered. No number can be missed out. Thus, if there are 5 candidates, all of the numbers from 1 to 5 must be used (once only!). No other marks are allowed, e.g. ticks, crosses or other letters/symbols. Questions: 1. In the first step, the first preferences from all the votes are counted. If a candidate secures at least 50% of the eligible votes, that candidate is declared elected and no further counting is done. 2. If no candidate has secured at least 50% of the eligible votes, the candidate with the smallest tally is eliminated from further counting, and that candidate's second preferences are added to the counts of the remaining candidates. 3. If a candidate now has at least 50% of the vote, that candidate is declared elected. Otherwise, Step 2 is repeated: The candidate with the smallest number of votes is eliminated and the next-preference votes redistributed among the remaining candidates. That is, for each vote associated with the eliminated candidate the current top preference (for the eliminated candidate) is removed and the next preference is instead associated with the next most favoured candidate. However, if the next most favoured candidate has also been eliminated, the preference is popped and the preference after that should be used, and so on. If all the preferences for a papers have been used, the vote is regarded as "spent", and discarded.