Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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My post has now been updated, noting the Vote For Change has amended its decision tree advertisement, no longer implying that if you vote to keep mmp that you can’t also vote for your favoured alternative, and also providing information about their claims about the number of MPs needed under each system.
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Legal Beagle: Infrequently asked questions, in reply to Angus Robertson,
If the Maori electorates split their vote to elect a Maori Party electorate MP, then the Maori roll will always have proportionally more influence than the rest of NZ*.
Maori Party voters split their vote considerably less than Green Party and ACT voters.
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Legal Beagle: Election Fact Check #8:…, in reply to Sacha,
Same goes for political media. Stop reporting poll results as if FPP still applies, you plonkers.
Kind of. They talk about National being ahead of Labour, but they still show the overall seats of each party.
One of the things I’d quite like about a change to FPP would be watching political journalists trying to explain how their polls translate into seats under FPP. They can understand MMP: votes translate into seats using the Electoral Commission’s on-line calculator, you need pol sci and stats degrees to even have a chance of understanding a nationwide poll under FPP.
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Russell Brown,
Edit: John Edwards has pointed out this could backfire if the police don’t find a case to prosecute. That would leave the way open for the HoS to publish.
Yeah, but not for months. And even then, a decision by police that there was no criminality involved wouldn't mean publication wouldn't be a civil wrong.
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Legal Beagle: Infrequently asked questions, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
You could get rid of any such shenanigans by having a single-vote system where the party vote is allocated to the party of one’s chosen candidate. I’m not sure of the arguments against, except that people seem to like their politics to be ego-driven.
This is a possibility, although is more likely to be used with a supplementary member system. The usual argument against this goes something like: "why should a voter have to have no say in the local MP who represents them if they want to vote for a minor party overall?"
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #7:…, in reply to JLM,
Can I just double check that this means that if someone uses something other than a tick to indicate a preference that their vote is still valid?
A vote is valid and will count if, in the opinion of the returning officer, the voter's intention is clearly indicated.
Tick. Cross. A single number "1". The name of every candidate but one crossed off. All of these should be fine. But don't be a dick about it, working people count these things.
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So what was the last piece of electoral law enacted following substantial parliamentary opposition? Well that would be the Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Act, which received the Royal assent on 15 December 2010. And when did the House pass the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) and Electoral Referendum Bills? 15 December 2010. That’s a rather short-lived period of hard-won agreement on electoral law consensus.
You can probably guess how tempted I was to insert the phrase: “It’s the same day, David!”
And in all it's glory, Hillary Calvert's third reading speech on the Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill:
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #7:…, in reply to gavin long,
However, in your last fact-check you were also guilty of (to an extent) misrepresenting the difference between the Royal Commission recommendations of MMP and what MMP looked like when it was implemented. I thought you made the minor differences seem huge and either dismissed or didn't discuss the huge number of similarities between the MMP we have today and what is in the Royal Commission report.
The MMP we have today is MMP. That's by far its most important feature, and however you make all the other details look (unless you go to extremes like only having 15 list seats, or having a 12% threshold) it's going to look pretty similar to what the Royal Commission recommended. We did vary a lot of the important details (threshold, ratio of list and electorate seats, number of South Island seats), but didn't do so drastically (5% instead of 4%, 55 list instead of 60, 16 SI seats instead of 15) so even though Parliament actually tinkered with quite a lot, and rejected a lot of specifics, it still turned out to be MMP.
Also, in your last fack check you said it was "very very unlikely" that under PV or STV people would have to rank all the candidates for their votes to be valid. Where do you get that from?
A number of factors make me that confident about this:
1. It has been the practice in New Zealand for a substantial length of time that our electoral laws do whatever they can to ensure that people's votes count. If the voter's intention is clear their vote counts as far as possible. e.g. if you leave blank or void the party vote your electorate vote still counts; if you accidentally cast a special declaration vote for the wrong electorate, and are enrolled in another, then your party vote still counts etc.
2. While Australia requires exhaustive voting, it does so in a country with compulsory voting, which we don't have, and won't adopt.
3. We already have STV in New Zealand, for district health boards, and some councils. These do not require exhaustive voting.
4. The Electoral Commission ad for STV (below) includes the following: "to vote, you choose your most preferred candidate, and, if you want, your second, third, and fourth choice, from any party as well as independents, as many as you like."I am prepared to take a bet, at exceedingly poor odds, that if the next Parliament drafts an Electoral (Single Transferable Vote) Act, or an Electoral (Preferential Voting) Act for a run-off referendum, that it will not require exhaustive voting.
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If only all my fact-checks could involve things I could read and not things I have to transcribe!
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Legal Beagle: Infrequently asked questions, in reply to Angus Robertson,
The Maori Party encourage voters to back their electorate candidates and place less importance on the party vote. I think it is a brilliant strategy that works well and will ensure that Maori Party remain king-makers until such time as the rest of the electorate catches up.
I had a part-written piece I was going to finish and post when the Maori Party and Hone Harawira/Mana Party were in talks about an accommodation where Mana would not stand in the Maori seats in exchange for a deal in Te Tai Tokerau where they wouldn’t oppose Hone: Maori party electorate, Mana Party party vote.
I was all prepared to talk about how appalling this was. And then it didn’t happen. So I didn’t end up getting all outraged and beagle-y.
The Maori Party have always campaigned for the party vote. And have been annoyed about pundits telling people that a party vote for the Maori Party was wasted. The electorate vote is more important to them, yes, but that’s far short of a deliberate strategy of causing disproportionality.
As for the suggestion that voters haven’t noticed, well, the Maori Party doesn’t do too well in the party vote, does it? What more can voters do :-)