Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to Rowan McCaffery,
PS: Had you genuinely never heard people complaining that voters in Epsom (or Tauranga, or Coromandel) were given too much power because of this rule? I’d thought that was the main objection to it!
Yes. Whenever I heard the complaint it was never about the voters. People complained that ACT was only in Parliament because Rodney won Epsom, and people complained that ACT was only in Parliament because National l made a deal with Rodney in Epsom (which isn't true, at least for the first time). But no-one complained that it meant voters in Epsom had more power than other voters.
p.s. since changes to Standing Orders following the introduction of MMP, the Speaker now gets a vote in Parliament.
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to dave crampton,
Not just Tauranga, all voters in every electorate go to tell them – Including the said 95,000.
I did consider putting it like that, but I decided my way was pithier.
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Graeme. I am that “someone”. And you’re welcome.
It was Therese Arseneau. You were more of a hanger-on once I'd pretty much made up my mind to change my mind.
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to tussock,
Rather than 1/120th, use half of what it takes to get 2 seats. Not d’Hondt where you make all the small parties smaller (because the little parties work better in our parliamentary system if they’re a bit bigger), just keep the micro-parties from further splitting to gain representation.
Anyhoo, that’s 14,654 last election, which is roughly what electorate MPs get in on anyway (30-35% of ~50k). 0.625%, 1/160th.
I imagine we'd just used modified Sainte-Laguë. Perhaps having the first divisor as 1.4 or 1.5 instead of 1. It's not too far off what you suggest.
Also, at the last election, well over half of our electorate MPs were elected with absolute majorities.
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
The other bug bear with MMP; is the lists or rather the non democratic way some of them are picked/ranked
All parties are required by law to have democratic candidate selection, and that includes list ranking.
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to Ian MacKay,
It makes me nervous to think that ... whichever party is in power can get to cherry pick those factors which suit them.
Same is true even if there isn't a review, and is also true in respect of all the other systems. If New Zealanders choose "change" and STV in the referendum I suspect we'd be likely to see different systems designed in a National-Act government than a Labour-Green one.
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to Steve Parks,
I must say I was a little uncertain also that was what you meant by the end of your article. I thought you were saying: keep threshold, get rid of coat-tailing. But you might have meant: get rid of threshold, therefore coat-tailing not an issue.
I was saying get rid of the single seat exemption.
I would also say get rid of (or lower) the threshold, but I support removing the one-seat rule irrespective of any change in the threshold.
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to Matthew Whitehead,
If we got rid of it entirely, you could get into parliament with relatively few (ten thousand to twenty thousand) votes. What we should do instead is set the threshold to about 0.87%- or more clearly, the amount of the vote required to win a single seat outright.
If we got rid of it entirely, just over 8000 party votes would have been needed during the first three MMP elections, and just over 9000 in the most recent two.
1/120th is ~0.833%: in 2008 a party would have needed 19,539 party votes with a threshold at that level.
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to peteremcc,
There’s only really two practical solutions:
1) Get rid of the thresholds entirely (5% and seat), and let anyone that gets 1% of the vote have 1% of the seats.
2) Get rid of electorates entirely. The only thing they provide is regional representation for people, which is silly in a system designed to represent people based on their political views. Just have a pure list-based election, let parties allocate their MPs to regions themselves, and devolve more power and responsibility to councils and councillors.
If you can only think of two alternatives, you're not trying very hard :-)
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Legal Beagle: Up to 11, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Another amendment that has been proposed is to prevent MPs from sub-5% parties ‘coat-tailing’ on an electorate MP, which would probably make more sense.
Well, that is what the post was about...
I will note, that even having changed my mind on this matter, when it comes up for debate I still find myself making the arguments in favour of coat-tailing, because the arguments that are arrayed against it are generally ones I disagree with.