Posts by Tim McKenzie
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Legal Beagle: Infrequently asked questions, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Section 128(1)(c) of the Electoral Act requires the Electoral Commission to reject a list if it does not contain the name of at least 1 candidate.
That's a shame. Otherwise someone could start a no-candidates Ninja Party. Pirates vs Ninjas!
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Legal Beagle: Infrequently asked questions, in reply to annamarama,
I generally retort that if people don’t want to vote for list MPs, they can just *not use* their party vote.
Better would be a "no confidence" option (on both sides of the ballot).
So (and I bet this is a very infrequently asked question), if a party wants to contest the party vote, does its list have to be non-empty?
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Legal Beagle: Infrequently asked questions, in reply to Phil Lyth,
Conservative in 2011 similarly have ex-MP Baldock with one term of experience as a candidate.
And Gordon Copeland in Hutt South.
ACT in 2011 do not have a current MP as a candidate.
John Boscawen is standing in Tāmaki.
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Question 1 seems to assume that votes are intended to determine the proportionality of Parliament, or the selection of the government, rather than to determine who represents the voters in Parliament. If voters care more about who represents their electorate than about the proportionality of Parliament, they might not consider that PV, SM, or FPP results in different people's votes being valued differently.
Perhaps it would be better to say
Everyone's vote should be worth the same in determining the proportionality of Parliament ...
and
... even if that means some votes count more than others in determining the proportionality of Parliament.
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Legal Beagle: I heartily endorse this…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Being #1 on the list or National candidate for Helensville both guarantee election.
In the latter case, voters have a far better chance of over-turning the party's decision. If, say, 60% of Helensville voters despise National's choice for Helensville, they have a very good chance of getting someone else. If 80% of party voters despise National's #1 list candidate, they have next to no chance of keeping them out of Parliament.
I agree that parties still have influence, regardless of the electoral system, and voters can always make parties pay for their choices, but party list systems like MMP and SM give parties a lot more power, especially when they're willing to manipulate lists after the election. So do we want more power in the hands of the (relatively) few who have control of party lists?
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Legal Beagle: I heartily endorse this…, in reply to tussock,
FPP makes it really hard to throw the bastards out.
If you mean throwing parties out of government, maybe, I haven't thought about it in depth. If you mean throwing individual MPs out of Parliament, then MMP makes it much harder.
Take, for example, David Carter --- 9th on National's list in 2008, and not subject to any indicative popularity results from an electorate. Even if about 90% of voters had their first preference as "keep David Carter out of Parliament", the other 10% could keep him in there. Knowing this, no-one even bothers trying to use their party vote to keep David Carter out (or anyone else high on their party's list).
So the question now becomes: Do you want MPs to be elected by (and therefore accountable to) voters, or do you want (at least some) MPs to be selected by (and therefore accountable to) parties? For the former, you want PV, STV, or FPP (or, preferably, a Condorcet method --- not one of the options in the referendum). For the latter, you want MMP or SM.
If you want proportionality and accountability to voters, you want STV (or perhaps a variant of a Condorcet method, but I'm not aware of a good proportional variant that has been properly researched yet).
With regard to MPs being selected by parties, see also Russel Norman's entry into Parliament, and Louisa Wall's recent re-entry. In both cases, the parties arguably pressured the intervening list candidates to relinquish their positions, in order to get their newly preferred candidates in. By doing so, they over-rode their declared list, which the voters had relied on in the previous election.
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You should head over there. It’s pretty flash.
I'd prefer something I could use without having to let Adobe's (or anyone else's) proprietary, secret-source software do goodness-knows-what to my computer.
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Graeme, you seem to be suggesting that (wittingly or not) the Māori and Mana parties are pursuing something like this strategy (with two parties, rather than with one party and lots of independents). And if so, they're doing it in a way that doesn't look like they're gaming the system, so it doesn't give other parties an excuse to also pursue the same strategy.
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Tim - yes. Tactical voting is possible under all democratic voting systems.
Yes, but tactical voting wasn't my only point (although I could have done more to make that clear). I was also trying to point out that STV and PV fail the monotonicity criterion: there are situations where you can improve your favourite candidate's chances by giving them a lower ranking. And this particular flaw is avoidable: a Condorcet method that lacks this flaw could be used.
(Condorcet methods don't automatically achieve proportionality, but this may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view. Also, a Condorcet method could perhaps be adapted to be proportional; I don't know. In any case, I don't see any reason to prefer PV to a Condorcet method; Condorcet elections are also much simpler to count than PV.)
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If a Nationwide election were conducted using STV, and everyone who supported National, voted 1 for John Key, and 2 for Bill English and 3 for Gerry Brownlee, all the way down through the National Party List, and Everyone who supported Labour had voted 1 for Helen Clark, and 2 for Michael Cullen, etc. the results would be the same as a list-based Proportional Representation election
And voters could achieve the same proportions without even coordinating to agree on the order of the candidates within each party.
If just over a fifth of all voters rank all the left-handed candidates (in any order) above all the right-handed, ambidextrous, and armless candidates, then I think STV guarantees that roughly a fifth of the winners will be left-handed (assuming there are enough left-handed candidates and at least four seats to be filled in the election). So, to answer the original question,
And I don't see how it can fairly be called 'proportional'- wouldn't that depend on, y'know, there being political parties involved?
you can think of STV as a way of letting voters roll their own parties, if they don't like any of the party groupings on offer.