Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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Of course, one could always treat them the same as independents, and take it out of everyone else's representation so as to fix parliament at 120 seats. But this is more disproportionate than the current arrangements, and so not a positive move.
There are other options.
But let's start with this matter: National got 44.93% of the party vote in 2008. Because of overhang, they got 58 seats. This is 47.54% of Parliament. Without overhang, they'd have got 47.5% of the seats. Greens: 6.72% of the vote, 7.38% of Parliament, but 6.67% of Parliament if no overhang. Wouldn't this better reflect their support among voters?
But sensibly, we would implement the non-waiver of electorate seats by including these parties in the calculation, but not grant them any MPs beyond their electorate wins. I acknowledge the arguments on the other side (I often still make them!), but extra overhang isn't one of them.
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if you give everyone who gets 0.00000001% of the party vote a seat...
Well, that's kinda stupid. Even under the craziest system imaginable, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be having a Parliament where someone with 0.0002 votes gets a seat. Every voter would be personally represented by 4200 MPs.
I believe the right I/S is talking about is the right to have your vote count equally with everyone else. If National gets 20,000 more votes, they get an extra seat. If Bill and Ben get 20,000 more votes they don't.
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Is this a feature of of sainte-lague, that smaller parties can get in at about 0.5% of the vote? Should take more like 0.8 shouldn't it?
I'll (over-)simplify it a bit, but yes.
We have to divvy up 120 seats. If you were to work it out on strict percentages, you might find a major party with enough votes for 32.43 seats, and some minor party with support for 0.43 seats. Sainte-Laguë - designed to ensure the most proportional result possible - says give it to the smaller party (because this creates a more proportional outcome) - which is more proportional between these parties 33 seats major, 0 minor, or 32 major, 1 minor?
There were 2344566 valid party votes at the last election. 9160 votes would have gotten a party 1 seat, 27815 would have gotten two seats, 46611 for three seats.
You get the first seat, at quite a bit lower than you might assume (0.08333% - or 19538 votes), but subsequent seats cost close to 1/120 of the votes. This "problem" that a minor party can get a seat with well under the votes needed to earn a whole seat, is a reason why some countries modify Sainte-Laguë.
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If you equate not putting a representative into Parliament for every party that gets a single vote with interfering with someone's rights, you've got a fairly interesting definition of "right".
He doesn't. That's not what abolition of the threshold involves. FPP doesn't have a threshold, and still seems to manage.
Rather, you would get the votes of every party, apply the Sainte-Laguë method (or the modified Sainte-Laguë method) to them and the 120 highest quotients would have seats.
You'd need around 9000 votes or so to get a seat (factually, given recent turnouts).
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At the last election, the "left of Labour" vote was ~182,000 votes
Are you including New Zealand First in that? Because of lot of their economic policies: reserve bank, protectionism, minimum wage, etc. have been to the left of Labour for some time.
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Sure. But the solution is less unfairness, not more. Retaining the threshold at a non-trivial level while abolishing the "electorate lifeboat" means people who would be represented under the current rules going under-represented. And that makes the problem worse, not better.
That makes *a* problem worse. But if the problem is that the votes of some count more than the votes of others, then getting rid of it is a good thing irrespective of the threshold (on which we agree).
At present, the constituency votes of Epsom voters are worth five times more than the constituency votes of everyone else. Given the option between keeping *this* problem and removing it, I (now) say we get rid of it.
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Bolger screwed over his candidate by not so subtley telling national voters to vote for Richard Prebble in Wellington Central to get ACT into parliament. Wasn't actually needed in the end as ACT crossed the 5% threshold...
Would ACT have crossed the 5% threshold if this hadn't happened? Might not have some ACT voters voted National if they feared their votes would be wasted?
The same thing probably happened with Winston and NZF at the last election. If people who really wanted to vote for NZF had all done so, it could well have gotten over 5%; but because people were worried they wouldn't make it in, they didn't vote for them, causing them not to make it. Winston has been calling for a ban on the publication of polls for a few years because of this.
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I rather think, though, that David Garrett has other things to worry about at the moment
I'm not so sure.
Section 76 of the Magistrates' Courts Act (of Tonga) seems pretty clear on this point. The conviction of a person in Garrett's position is stayed pending the disposition of an appeal. Garrett filed an appeal in time: it has yet to be heard, so he has no Tongan conviction.
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Bought. I've been doing a lot of that recently. Why just today, I bought a book about turtle-stacking on the recommendation of Lisa Simpson.
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Any in the Narnia books?
Don't know, but there's a Lottie the Otter in Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, the recent authorised sequel to The House at Pooh Corner.