A few fictional presentations of PR (or non-FPTP)
Catherine Helen Spence
until her older years she did little for the PR cause except mention PR in a novel she wrote, Hogarth's Will. (later she campaigned without pause for STV in Australia, achieving an early breakthrough in Tasmania)
Her campaign included in 1888 writing a utopian novel A Week in the Future about life in the far distant year of 1988
in which she describes an almost utopian future of full employment, financial and social equality, co-operative living ... [obviously she should have set her utopian novel in the year 2088 or some other still-future date ]
Here's excerpt at the end of Chapter VI
where it seems Spence speaks of herself through the thoughts of her main character:
"even when I intend to keep to a certain department--such as politics and criminal law--the social question continually invades it. I never was very much of a politician--even my strong feeling in favor of what is called Hare's system of voting, which my nephews and nieces used to call Aunt Emily's fad, was less because it would give more equal representation to political parties than because it would strike at the root of the anti-social and immoral tendencies of the majority vote.
I have always believed that people might be a great deal happier than they are, if they only managed their lives better, and if they did not make laws and follow customs that sacrificed the sick and the poor to the strong and the rich. Here, in the new society, the intelligent pursuit of happiness was the avowed object of all, and my curiosity as to the result of such an unusual pursuit was ever alert, and my kinsfolk--half amused, but wholly interested -- were eager to satisfy me."
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Rake
in the Australian TV series, Rake, a mocking look is taken of the IRV system, as he fights and cajoles vote transfers from other splinter candidates.
Total Control
The IRV system is presented in the Australian TV series, Total Control, an account of being an Aboriginal female candidate in settler society in Outback. Despite the unremitting uphill battle you might expect, her candidacy is favoured by some white farmers upset at the status quo, upset at the sitting politician selling off local water rights to army base or some such.
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