IT IS time for some clear thinking on the merits of various voting systems in local, State and Federal domains.

Some of your correspondents appear to have suggested that proportional representation can be used in elections for a single vacancy.

Others appear to blame the system of simple preferential voting for members of the Lower House in Canberra for the increase in the influence of the Greens in the Senate.

The variation of preferential voting known as proportional representation is designed to give more weight to candidates from minority groups.

Where this in use, it is more difficult for a major political party to gain an absolute majority in that House.

Where there is a single vacancy, as in the case of the Mayor of the Southern Downs Regional Council, only one candidate, whose views cannot be further divided, is left standing at the end of counting.

In the Senate, however, there will be six successful candidates who may represent a wide range of views.

In the Lower House, the system of simple preferential voting generally filters out candidates outside the major parties.

As for first-past-the-post voting, please examine the position in the United Kingdom, where in three-cornered contests it is normal for a candidate to be elected with less than an absolute majority.

Let's assume that in one electorate in the UK there is one candidate strongly in favour of remaining in the EU and two against.

If the anti-EU ran a strong enough campaign to gain 34% of the vote and the other two 33.5% and 32.5% respectively, then the winning candidate would be supported by only about a third of the 60 or so percent who bothered to vote.

The wishes of the electorate would be better served if the preferences of the third candidate were passed to the second, who would then be elected.

To come closer to home, in the last SDRC mayoral elections the number of candidates from the Warwick area outnumbered those from Stanthorpe, thus diluting the vote and making it more difficult for any single Warwick candidate to succeed in the election.

The simple preferential system will change that.

Voters should, of course, make their choices on the basis of merit rather than residence and we must hope that they always do.

Our current Mayor may well have been the wisest choice, but it would have been despite the primitive voting system.

A final thought: is it beyond the wit of those in authority to devise a system which allows defeated mayoral candidates to be considered for election to Council?