I notice that Australia Senate elects two members in each of the Aus. Territories - Northern Territory (NT) and the Aus. Capital Territory (ACT) - through STV.
2022 Northern Territory election of Senators
Each party (or most of them anyway) ran two candidates although there was no chance it would elect both - not with votes as spread as they are. (It would take about 66 percent of the votes for a party to take both seats.)
Results in short
total vote 103,617
quota 34,540
17 candidates
15 counts used to establish the two winners.
1st count Last count
C. McCarthy 33,854 34,540 (peak of votes 34,827 in Count 13)
A Price 32,630 36,195 (passed quota in Count 15)
Anzelark 12,459 18,458
McMahon 9490 13,888
all other candidates were less popular in 1st Count, all were eliminated in Counts 2 to 15
exhausted votes 311.
Price's surplus votes were not transferred away so the vote totals at end imply he was more popular than McCarthy but McCarthy won with more first preference votes and with quota attained earlier.
the two winners were of different parties, so balance that way.
Each party ran just two candidates so not wide choice for voters.
The two most popular in the 1st Count were elected in the end. Vote transfers did not change the STV winners from whom would have won under SNTV. This was not caused by the DM being just 2 - it happens in most STV elections even with DM of 5 to 7.
In the end, 70,700 votes (70 percent) were used to elect the winners.
in STV where DM is 5 to 7, perhaps 80 percent are used to elect winners.
that only 311 votes were exhausted is sign that most voters ranked many preferences, perhaps as much as 14 in some cases, perhaps a carry-over from the days when voters had to rank all the candidates.
(although recently it has become optional how many candidates a voter has to rank).
the back-up preferences on the 66,000 ballots originally placed on Price and McCarthy were not consulted at all, no matter how many they were.
Those two took the lion share of the votes even in the 1st Count, their slate mates got less than 500 votes and were early eliminated. (When they were eliminated, not all of their votes were transferred to their slate mates. There was not 100 percent party allegiance in marking back-up preferences, as is the voters' liberty under STV - although it is possible that some of these votes wound their way back to the slate mate in later eliminations.)
Like in the Canadian Territories (NWT, Nunavut and Yukon) there is only so much proportionality you can make with small number of members. and the system used in the Northern Territory produces as much PR as two members can do (I just don't see the reason to go out of your way to create small DM by using districts to divide a city or use staggered terms to limit number of seats open at one time, as is done in some applications of STV.)
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