Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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2008 Maori electorates produced 33,807 party votes for the Maori Party. To increase this to 85,000+ (ensuring they have 5 PR MPs) requires making each electorate 2.5x larger than they currently are.
Because we assume the Maori Party wouldn't get 22,000+ party votes in the general electorates?
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I'm not disputing that tactical voting can cause an overhang, nor that it helped cause one here. I'm suggesting the larger cause of overhang is an unequal distribution of voters between electorates.
And mostly, I'm backing up my riposte to your assertion that the Maori electorates are not inherently more likely to cause an overhang. Whether you agree that this overhang was strongly correlated to voter numbers across the Maori electorates or not, I think my argument at the very least shows that overhang is more likely in electorates with lower than average voter numbers (which the Maori electorates are).
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How did they win 5 electoral seats?
I believe they were the beneficiaries of tactical voting.
That's one way to look at it.
You're looking at the results as showing that the Maori Party were the beneficiaries of tactical voting in the Maori seats.
Another way to look at it is that the Labour Party were the beneficiaries of tactical voting in the Maori seats: Maori Party supporters looked at the polls, realised that the Maori Party were unlikely to win any list seats, so party voted for the Labour Party, giving them some extra seats.
I don't think either of these is the correct way or the incorrect way to look at the results, but is does show how our biases can colour our interpretation of data.
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I got the impression (whether you intended it or not) that you were saying that Māori electorates were disadvantaged, because they only elected 1.051 MPs each, compared to 1.849 MPs per general electorate. Therefore (so I thought) you were suggesting that voters in the "disadvantaged" electorates were also disadvantaged. As discussed above, this is not the case; voters in "disadvantaged" electorates have more influence than the average voter on the distribution of electorate seats...
The voters have more influence, but the electorate has less. Electorates are all roughly equally sized, representing approximately 60,000 people each. The 60,000 people represented in your average Maori electorate have far less influence over an election result than the 60,000 people represented in your average general electorate - even taking into account overhang.
Why is this? First, because far fewer of them vote, but most importantly because far fewer of them can vote. And when you're working out influence over the election result it's raw numbers in the party vote that matter most.
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Actually I think we do have a 5% threshold.
Yes. But because the Maori Party won an electorate it doesn't matter for them. Had they earned from 0 - 9,159 votes they'd have caused an overhang of 5 seats. Had they earned 85,411+ votes they'd have caused no overhang.
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There's no difference, overhang is tactical advantage. Both increase the chance of a voter getting their representatives into government.
Sure, but what I was looking at was whether the Maori seats are inherently more like to cause an overhang. They are.
That this *is* a tactical advantage does not mean it is caused by tactical behaviour. My analysis leads me to the conclusion that it is not behaviour from Maori Party voters, or Maori roll voters that primarily causes this, but the relative youth of the Maori descent population, coupled with lower enrolment and turnout.
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But, as Mikaere shows above, "eventually" does not happen until the Maori electorates are have more voters than general roll electorates.
Mikaere's numbers are wrong (my apologies for not noticing his comment earlier). He assumes that you earn a seat with c. 20k votes. This is false. Without a threshold, at the last election, a party could have earned a seat with 9,160 votes. Three seats would have been earned with 46,611 votes, and five seats with 85,411 votes. That's just how the Sainte-Laguë method works out, which I note isn't applied in his analysis.
Re-reading what I said, I may have inadvertantly caused him to make an 'error'. When I said "voted in the same proportions as those already there" I meant voted for each party in proportion to the votes already cast. I was not assuming, as he has done, that Maori-seat enrolled voters would still stay away from the polls in the same proportions. His analysis has been done on the basis of equalising the number of enrolled voters; mine was based on equalising the number of actual voters (i.e. the same level of turnout in general electorates and Maori electorates).
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I had always assumed that electorates were based on voter numbers, not total population, but that makes a great deal of sense.
It's an old National Party "rort". Back in the day, rural National-Party-voting people had larger families, by setting boundaries by reference to overall population, there were more safe National seats.
It's certainly defensible on other grounds, and overall, I support it, but the reason it is that way now is that it has been that way for a while.
Because having larger electorates makes it impossible for voters to vote tactically for their own advantage? Seats like Epsom or Tauranga or Coromandel, are all examples of larger electorates.
I'm not talking about tactical voting, I'm talking about overhang. Larger seats are less likely to cause overhang. Maori-party caused overhang is substantially a result of low voter turnout in the electorates the Maori party represents, not tactical voting in those electorates.
Lots of voters vote tactically: only 16.4% of Act Party voters voted for an ACT candidate. This was clearly a tactical vote, primarily exercised to try to ensure that local representation was more likely to be by a National Party MP. In contrast 60% of Maori Party voters voted for a Maori Party candidate.
I suggest sufficient Maori voters used their votes tactically to increase their representation.
As I pointed out above, the lower voting numbers in Maori electorates can easily result in an overhang even in the total absence of split voting.
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Oh, and according to these numbers, the general electorates elected 1.849 * 63 = 116.487 MPs, and the Māori electorates elected 1.051 * 7 = 7.357 MPs, for a total of 123.844 MPs in Parliament. I don't think this is right.
It's not. I'd been looking at the last two elections (our only overhangs), and noticed this morning that I'd been working off the 2005 electorate numbers for both sets of data: 62 general seats, 7 Maori seats.
As you note, in 2008, there were 63 general electorates. The numbers will change a little, but not very much. I was intending to go back and re-do them when I had a chance at home tonight.
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How do they decide if a child is a non-voter on the Māori roll or a non-voter on the general roll?
The Maori electoral population is determined by taking the number of residents of Maori Descent, and multiplying it by the proportion of of people of Maori descent who are enrolled to vote and are enrolled on the Maori roll.
Bascially if 60% of people of Maori descent enrol on the Maori roll, 60% of the children of Maori descent are counted as being represented through the Maori roll.
I'm not sure how meaningful these numbers are. List MPs aren't elected by electorates. They're determined by the party votes cast by all eligible voters who choose to use their party votes. And the 50 list seats aren't even given in proportion to party votes; they're allocated so that the whole 120-seat Parliament is in proportion to the party votes.
I'm aware the list seats are allocated over the whole 120 seats. The voters in an average Maori electorate have enough party votes between them to elect 1.051 MPs. The voters in the average general electorate (because there are many more of them per electorate) have enough party votes between them to elect 1.849 MPs. When allocating list seats, you first look at how many electorates have been won, for voters in Maori electorates, this means, collectively, they have very little say in the divvying up of list seats. They help ensure overall proportionality, and individually have as much sway as anyone, but collectively, their votes mostly band together to ensure there isn't more of an overhang, rather than deciding actual list seats.