Counting Our Votes SIR: Charles Copeman (March 2010) rejects preferential voting as illogical, but his real complaint is about how the votes are counted. In Australia, preferences are distributed by starting with those of the voters who put first the candidate with the lowest number of primary votes. As he says, this means that voters for middle-preference candidates can have much less influence on the outcome than do voters for low-preference candidates.   Charles Copeman mentions de Borda as the inventor of preferential voting, but not his coeval, Nicolas de Condorcet. Condorcet rejected Borda’s method of counting votes as deeply flawed.…