The New Zealand House of Representatives, if there was no threshold:
New Zealand National Party - 55 seats
New Zealand Labour Party - 41 seats
The Greens - 8 seats
New Zealand First Party - 5 seats
Māori Party - 5 seats
Act New Zealand - 4 seats
Jim Anderton's Progressive - 1 seat
United Future New Zealand - 1 seat
The Kiwi Party - 1 seat
The Bill and Ben Party - 1 seat
My last post – a simple copy and paste of single standing order 267 – is now my second-most popular. You guys are weird.
I thought I’d have another go – this time with standing order 277.
Okay, not quite. But it's a standing order deserving of some comment all the same.
I accept that the Government – which commands a majority in the House – will win practically every vote in Parliament. But it always bugged me that they pretty much get to decide what every vote is. Everything except members’ bills, local bills and private bills – which get collectively shunted to the time left after the weekly general debate on not-quite-every-second Wednesday – is at the mercy of the Government. With their majority they control the order paper, and decide what bill comes up for discussion and when. Government pretty much has to go 100% to the winner, but it’s never seemed right that Parliament does. A close second in a hard-fought election campaign just seems like it should have more reward than a slightly lower differential on the votes the Government has the courage to place before Parliament.
You’ll lose every vote, but it really seems like you should get to decide what some of them are. In the last Parliament, National – within a couple of points of Labour at the election – got to advance one substantive policy – Wayne Mapp's “90 day” bill: a relatively simple measure entirely possible to advance from the opposition benches. It failed (they lost, remember), and while National had a few other members' bills none really stood out and screamed “National advancing core policy for which we advocated at the last election”.
And National only got to advance that through a bill because Wayne Mapp was lucky enough to have it drawn from the members' ballot – it could just as easily have been Judith Collins' Citizenship (For Descendants of Those in the Service of New Zealand) Amendment Bill. Other National members have had luck too, but while their luck has allowed them to advance pet projects (Nick Smith's Building (Late Consent is a Free Consent) Amendment Bill), they haven't had much luck getting core National Party policy debated.
And it's something they should be allowed to do. Not to overwhelm the order paper; probably nothing close to proportional control of it, but to choose to bring to the public consciousness something of importance to them, every so often.
This – I don't really like to call it injustice – isn't easy to solve. A complete overhaul of the system for ordering parliamentary business could hamstring government; setting some time aside each week or fortnight for ‘opposition business’ would necessitate losing time from members’ business or government business, and would likely be opposed by whomever is in government (and many in the opposition).
Which is how we get to standing order 277. SO 277 creates the process by which members' bills are introduced. Idiot/Savant over at No Right Turn has been doing God’s work some journalist’s work analysing the progress of members' legislation and reporting on the hopeful bills that find their way into the members' ballot.
Regular readers of his series may realise that SO 277 sets out the process by which the ballot for introduction of member's bills occurs. Everyone (except ministers) can put a bill in the ballot, and enough are drawn so that there are always four awaiting a first reading debate (this differs slightly from the text of the standing order – they've been operating under a sessional order that over-rides it – ask me in the comments thread if you care what this means), members are limited to one bill in the ballot each, and two people can't have the same bill (there's another standing order prohibiting Parliament having two bills on the same matter, or indeed voting twice within a calendar year on the same question). If two people try to have the same bill, there's a pre ballot which decides which proposed bill goes into the main ballot (I/S carries an example of where this has happened).
My simple proposal is to delete the last bit. If we allowed as many MPs as wanted, to have same bill the opposition could seize the opportunity to push some real policy, to choose an issue where they think the Government is vulnerable. 47 members of the leading opposition party all putting some bill attacking some perceived weakness of the government seems a good idea – whoever is in power. There would be a slight downside – there'd still be a prohibition on having two identical bills, so if more than one bill is due to be plucked from the obscurity of the ballot, they'd be forgoing the chance of getting a second. Perhaps worth the risk. And if they don't think it is, they don't have to do it.
The solution is imperfect – an element of luck remains, and the limited time there is to advance members’ business will mean slow progress; but it avoids the pitfalls of any of the potential big reforms. No-one is worse off – the government won't lose time for its legislative agenda, and those who want to advance members' bill may just be competing in the ballot against copies of the same bill rather than many different ones – so it stands at least some prospect of being picked up, and our democracy might just be a little less capricious.
Why devote a post to it? Well, I find it interesting, anyway. And if we can come up with a way to better recognise the views of everyone whose votes meant an opposition fell just short of government, it can only enhance democracy; finally, I thought it would be nice to respond to I/S's call to action) to see if an on-line columnist such as myself can make a difference by floating what is possibly an entirely novel idea.
Plus, it could have some nice spin-offs. It needn't necessarily be used by opposition parties: members from across the parliamentary Internet caucus could each propose the same bill to fix some troublesome aspect of copyright law; a cross-party bunch of republicans could use it to try to force some version of Keith Locke’s Head of State (Referenda) Bill onto the parliamentary agenda; or a group of like-minded MPs could try to force debate on reform of one of those perennial issues no-one in a major party likes to discuss, let alone debate.
And the member who really wanted to advance the Airport Authorities (Sale to the Crown) Amendment Bill still could.
267 Entrenched provisions
(1) A proposal for entrenchment must itself be carried in a committee of the whole House by the majority that it would require for the amendment or repeal of the provision to be entrenched.
(2) A proposal for entrenchment is any provision in a bill or amendment to a bill that would require that that provision or amendment or any other provision can be amended or repealed only by a majority of more than 50 percent plus one of all the members of the House.
Discuss :-)
1. Heavy objects and light objects fall at the same rate
This is oft-repeated. It's a particularly ironic one – I've seen it used a number of times as an example of where common sense fails to properly explain the world.
Thing is – of course – that it's not true. Heavy objects do fall faster.
The speed at which something falls comes from a combination of a number of factors – including shape and wind resistance – and, yes, weight.
Try dropping a few plastic coke bottles from a tall building (or better yet, a tall stairwell to get rid of cross-winds). One filled with something heavy like mercury will hit the ground before one filled with water, which hits before an empty one.
It’s common sense (and true) that a hammer will hit the ground faster than a feather, and when shape is controlled for, weight still plays a factor – the force of wind resistance acts in a particular way against the shape of a falling object and when two similarly sized objects (like two coke bottles filled with different substances) fall the denser one counteracts the wind resistance better - and falls faster!
Galileo was right, but he must have been talking about the moon.
2. Labour won the last election because of a fantastic get-out-the-vote drive in South Auckland
Politics gives us a number of myths – that a re-vote on MMP was always promised is among our most enduring, but I've debunked that (as have many others) before. This one is more interesting. The mantra that Labour won the last election because of a massive get-out-the-vote campaign in south Auckland has been endlessly repeated.
Beyond the too obvious rejoinder that Labour won the last election by getting more votes and stitching up parliamentary support, it's not really true in any sense.
Labour got a lot of votes in south Auckland, and without them would have been toast.
And turnouts rose in south Auckland last election (south Auckland being defined for my analysis as the electorates of Mangere, Manukau East, and Manurewa – electorates chosen entirely for their alphabetic proximity in voting statistics), but the 2005 election was close – so turnout was up everywhere.
Across New Zealand, it was up 3.94 points. Across the general electorates only, it was up 3.51 points. In Mangere, turnout was up 2 points, in Manukau East, it was 2.24 and in Manurewa it was 2.64. Oh.
And it wasn't a large increase in enrolled voters, either. The population of New Zealand having increased, numbers of enrolled voters were just up. Admittedly, south Auckland electorates were up by more than the average, but Auckland is growing faster than the average (Auckland picked up an extra electorate in the recent post-census re-districting). And the south Auckland electorates weren't growing at a vastly different rate from, say, Auckland Central.
The three south Auckland electorates I've analysed had the lowest turnout across all general electorates in both 2002 and 2005, with very low growth in turnout as well – the south Auckland turnout meme seems entirely baseless.
3. No two democracies have ever warred with each other
This is a favourite, and came up in conversation the other day, so is coming up here too. If Athens vs Syracuse (415 BC – 413 BC) doesn't do it for you, then the Boer War (1899 – 1901) should, and if not that then the 2006 conflict between Israel and Lebanon seems to trump all. In any event, this little factoid (hey – I used it right!) has been pretty well debunked by this guy.
Now if only people would stop repeating it.
If only people would stop repeating them
(one old, one new, one borrowed ... if someone can up up a blue one, I'll be a happy man)
Feel encouraged to add your own...
As the US election moves up a gear – with the selection of running mates (Obama – Good Choice!) and the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions at which the presumptive nominees will become the actual nominees are about to kick off – I thought it time to look at how the actual vote will go, and the prospects of it changing any time soon.
After the panoply of different systems that marked the nominating season – which seems so long ago – it’s nice to have a single system. Kind of.
And the system is remarkable simple. If either Barrack Obama, or John McCain gets over half the votes, he will win.
Of course, only 538 people get to vote.
It will sound complicated, but try to explain to someone exactly how we elect our head of government – under first past the post or MMP – it’s not as easy as you think. You start with, well, they’re appointed, not elected, and by the time you’ve gotten to they’re chosen by some unknown process by the parliamentary members of the largest party that – alone or in concert with other parties – has support from the majority of members of the House of Representatives who were themselves elected by the people, after being selected by some process by the wider membership of the parties to contest those elections, just about anyone would be hopelessly lost…
But back to those 538 electors. It’s those people who will be chosen in November, and it’s a majority of their number that a successful candidate needs. Of course, they’re not being elected because they’re people steeped in wisdom who’ll be able to apply great judgment to determine who should be president – they’re all promising to vote for someone in advance.
Different states get a different number of electoral college votes – from as little as three in each of the seven smallest states (and thanks to the twenty-third amendment to the US Constitution, the District of Columbia) to 55 for California. The number of votes is calculated by adding the number of representatives the state is entitled to in the House of Representatives (which is proportionate to the US population) and the number of senators it is entitled to (always two). Washington DC – not a state and thus not entitled to a representative or any senators – is the only non-state that gets electors (thus not all US Citizens – for example those in Puerto Rico, or American Samoa – get to vote in federal elections – and DC gets as many as it would if it were a state, but not more than the smallest state gets (i.e. three, but its population isn’t big enough that it would get more anyway).
How are these people selected? Well, technically, it’s up to each state to decide how it appoints its electors. Through the early history of the United States, this wasn’t done through a statewide popular vote – state legislatures would meet and decide which people should be appointed to the electoral college. But now, each state puts it to a vote, and in the vast majority – all but Maine and Nebraska – it’s winner take all on a simple plurality – the person with the most votes in a state, gets their whole slate of electors. When Barack Obama gets more votes than anyone else in California 55 people picked by the Democratic Party will all get to vote for him.
It doesn’t matter whether he gets a majority of Californian support, or if he gets two votes and everyone else just votes for themselves and gets one, it’s a first past the post system where the winner takes all (as winners tend to do under first past the post). In Maine (two congressional districts and thus four electoral votes) and Nebraska (with three districts and five votes), the plurality winner in each congressional district gets one elector, and the winner of the state overall gets an extra two. I would say that these states were thus more proportional, but it’s never made a difference – the leading candidate state-wide has always won the race in each congressional district too.
So a collection of individual first past the post races effectively decides the US Presidential election. As we can see – and as Al Gore can attest – the nation-wide popular vote is irrelevant. It doesn't matter that electors pledged to support Al Gore in 2000 were backed by more voters than the electors pledged to George Bush were – he had more electors. And the fact George Bush won an actual majority in 2004 wouldn't have helped him if Ohio had flipped (which would have given Kerry an electoral college majority).
You may have noted that I've been talking about an electoral college majority. While the state-by-state races only need a plurality – getting the most votes is enough – in the electoral college it's a majority that is needed. If no-one gets a majority (because, miraculously, some third party won a state or two and the votes split three ways, or there just happens to be a 269-269 tie) then the House of Representatives gets to elect the President (each state, no matter how many representatives it has, getting one vote), and the Senate chuses the Vice President (which, if you think about it, is how we choose our Prime Minister).
And you will also have noted that the system gives greater weight to the votes of smaller states (California has nearly 70 times the population of Wyoming, but gets a little over 18 times its number of electoral votes). It’s not as disproportionate as the Senate – each state gets two senators, irrespective of its population – but it’s this over-emphasis on small states that means that this system – designed for a new country in the late 18th Century – is unlikely to change.
The US system for conducting presidential elections is set in the Constitution, and it’s a pretty difficult beast to change – since its inception it has only been amended 27 times (and ten of those were in one go near the beginning). To change the Constitution, two-thirds of the Senate, and two-thirds of the House of Representatives first have to agree, and then three-quarters of the states have to come in behind too (different states have different mechanisms for approving amendments – some would hold a state referendum, in others (most?) the state legislature would make the call). So it seems pretty unlikely the required supermajority to abolish the electoral college is going to come about.
That's not the only way for change to occur, however. I pointed out that it's up to individual states to decide how they determine their electors. In 2004, the voters of Nevada voted down a referendum that would have meant the state would divvy up its electors based on the proportions of the vote each candidate got. A proportionate system – whether based on state-wide vote, or following the Maine-Nebraska district-by-district method – is fraught. It might result in a more proportionate selection of electors, but we have to remember that – unlike a legislature (or a Parliament), the presidency cannot be proportional – it's a job that gets done by one person. Following the 2005 election, we didn't get a situation where Helen Clark got 41% of the Prime Ministership and Don Brash 39%.
For a number of reasons, proportionate state-wide allocation of electoral college votes just isn’t a good idea. The individual states that opted to do it would be acting against their own interests (a state worth 25 electoral votes in a tight race would become a state worth one vote – does the Republican get 13, and the Democrat 12, or the other way ‘round?), and wouldn't be worth campaigning in (or making promises to...). And because third party candidates would far more easily be able to earn some electors, the chance that no candidate would get the required majority could see election after election kicked to the House and Senate. It is that prospect – that some future election is decided by the Congress, rather than the people through their electoral college that is the only likely catalyst for a constitutional change – with the only serious alternative being a nationwide winner-take-all (not necessarily first past the post) popular vote.
A congressionally-determined presidential election has happened, but it seems pretty unlikely to happen now. But here is the really fun bit. States set their own rules and processes for divvying up their electoral college votes, and something called the national popular vote interstate compact has been proposed. Under the compact – essentially an agreement between state governments – federal laws and the constitution would not change, and states would keep their electors as at present who would vote as at present, but each state party to the agreement would promise to give all its electors to the winner of the national popular vote, even if he or she lost that state. The agreement would come into force once states whose electoral college strength exceeded half the 538 electors (i.e. enough to secure an electoral college victory and the presidency). Four states – Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois and Hawaii – a little under 20% of the 270 electoral votes needed – have already passed the required legislation, and it is pending in others.
I'm not a great critic of the electoral college – sure it's an anachronism, but I think it is a legitimate way for a country (particularly a federation) to choose its head of Government – the national compact is just a really clever idea...