I confess that in preparing for this session I scratched my head as to what had happened back in 2003 and couldn't honestly remember. Whether I would find something instructive in the minutes of the committee meeting, I'm not sure. But I think I'd say that the main rival that members would have been interested in would have been the first-past-the-post system, as used in elections to the House of Commons at Westminster. I think members would have recognized that it was likely that there'd be quite a few candidates. We had nine candidates in the first speakership election and six in the second. I mentioned one of the issues might have been that you could then have had a successful candidate with very many fewer than half the available votes. I think that's probably the main reason.
As I said or implied earlier, something like the exhaustive vote might not have been something that members would have had the stomach to engage in, sort of staying on for several hours while votes were counted and so forth.