Posts by linger
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to ,
More accurately, the non-excluded parties. Even ACT is in the calculations, though at 0.5% it won't get any extra seat out of it.
But suppose instead they'd got 1.22%. They'd still (initially) get no list seats; but they'd be just below the cutoff, and rescaling by 100/96 would be just enough to push them over the minimum required to get one list seat.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Though admittedly even the votes that do go towards determining parliamentary seats express little detail about actual voter opinion! (E.g. right now it'd be nice to know how many wanted NZF as part of government, and with which partner(s)...)
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to Jason Kemp,
we add that back into the calculation
Again, a misleading phrase. The information in those votes is irretrievably lost, it does nothing to change the proportions of members in Parliament. The proportions for the non-excluded parties merely get re-scaled to a total of 100% (and the SLAF essentially determines where the rounding error is allocated). The calculation is performed on all votes, including valid specials.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Neil,
The Greens have so far been fairly adept at maintaining their own independent voice (and James’ communique clearly shows they do recognise the potential problems). I don’t know if it’s “the electorate” punishing the minor parties though, so much as that the major parties still haven’t fully accepted that they need to cooperate with rather than compete with them, throughout the term and during the election cycle. Nurturing a minor partner is much more than lifeboat deals (offered, you’ll note, when they advantage the partnership rather than the minor party alone): it’s about allowing them the freedom to have an independent critical voice and to maintain a clear stance in the media, and giving explicit credit when adopting their policy initiatives. The majors have an unfortunate tendency to see minor parties as nuisances to be used when needed and tossed aside when that’s no longer the case. So in a way the Greens have been fortunate to have been largely excluded from government so far; and Winston has survived by not letting himself get walked over, and thereby maintaining his own singular voice.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Neil,
That's taking a shortsighted view. The Greens have a political identity that can survive individual members' careers. Winston personally has a strong political identity, but NZF, not so much. You've previously mentioned the upcoming succession problem: Shane isn't Winston.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Or in other words, any National deal's a killer, electorate gift or no.
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Correlation between age and TOP support is not high enough to support a bias of the size required to get TOP over 5%. Main finding is that half of TOP support came from disaffected Green voters (disproportionally removing the younger, more educated, professional end of that support), which may mean the usual specials bias for Greens could be lower than expected this time ... unless the TOP analysis is missing the specials, in which case their finding itself could be an artefact of a bias in the specials.
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True that; I could countenance voting for 1970s Labour.
(And you can draw a fairly direct line from 1980s National to NZF, in fact that’s probably what most NZF voters think they’re actually supporting.) -
Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to Jason Kemp,
4% of wasted votes […] go back into the pool for seat recalculation
That seems a potentially misleading way of putting it: aren’t they simply ignored (so it’s the proportions of the “unwasted” votes that determine makeup of Parliament, just scaled by 100/96)?
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Yeah, kind of, via the somewhat misnamed Alliance. And it has continued to evolve since. As of last term there was as much ex-Macgillicuddys as ex-Values in the Green genome.
Actually, not sure steady genetic inheritance is the best image for it: the progress of the core personnel and ideas over decades has been more like a rolling maul.