Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes
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Some people actually want to ban that completely. I’m positing a slightly less drastic alternative.
Same effect in reality though. What political party is going to let someone run off the list to an electoral by-election, if it means they lose a seat in the house?
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Graeme Edgeler, in reply to
What political party is going to let someone run off the list to an electoral by-election, if it means they lose a seat in the house?
One that wants to win it :-)
One that doesn't want Judith Tizard or Paul Quinn to return from the list?
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But won't they just pick some future star who's a likely for the next election, but didn't make the list cut this year, and make them do it?
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Graeme Edgeler, in reply to
But won’t they just pick some future star who’s a likely for the next election, but didn’t make the list cut this year, and make them do it?
No.
At least, that was my theory in the Mana By-election. People were arguing that MPs should be banned from running in by-elections, and I thought that that was unwise.
Hekia Parata ran in Mana in 2008. She had an electorate office and presence in Mana throughout the 2008-2011 term. Having worked up a relationship with the community in Mana it would have been wrong to force National (if it wanted to contest the by-election) to select a new candidate who would contest the by-election only, or to force Parata to resign.
There is no requirement for a list MP elected at a by-election to be replaced as a list MP, but if people have a concern about the process by which the voters of Mt Albert might vote for Phil Twyford and get Judith Tizard, having a rule that this doesn't happen seems to be a good way of doing it. If a party really did want a replacement list MP, it could get one, but only if the list MP resigned to contest the by-election, not if they resigned after winning the by-election.
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In that hypothetical situation, people would have elected Phil as an electorate MP and because he is a member of the Labour Party, got their next list person elected, who happened to be Judith Tizard.
If they didn't like that, they could have voted for another candidate. If the Labour party felt that Judith was such a bad candidate, they could have not selected her to the list. (She was my MP when I lived in Auckland, could see much wrong with her. Didn't actually *vote* for her or anything - I voted for Nandor).
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