Posts by izogi
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to linger,
I see what you mean.
Browsing the Electoral Act I see that section 89D(2)(a) states that the Electoral Commission is required to check with every registered person, that their details are correct, within the 12 months leading into an election. To me that suggests that even if the EasyVote card wasn't being sent then it'd probably be sending something.
Section 89G then goes on to state that if the inquiry cannot be delivered, the Electoral Commission must make any inquiry to the whereabouts of that person which they think fit, and otherwise shift them to the dormant roll. Based on that I feel a bit miffed that they didn't seem to contact the Retirement Village when I informed them that that's where the couple were now living, but maybe it's just not thought fit to chase people to that extent.
The Dormant Roll section 109 is interesting, though. Once people are shifted to it, they're required to remain on it for 3 years until being taken off. It goes on to say that the dormant roll for the district where they were last known to be, and to be used as a list for determining if people are allowed to vote.
If I'm reading this correctly, does it mean that if people were successfully enrolled at the previous election, and remain at the same address or in the same electorate, they should still be allowed to vote (from the dormant roll) if they show up to a polling booth at the next election? ie. Being removed from the main roll because an EasyVote card was returned-to-sender shouldn't make a difference. (60(c) states that any person who's qualified to be registered in a district, and was successfully enrolled "in that district", is allowed to vote.
Or have I mis-read something?
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I'm trying to remember now, but doesn't or didn't the Electoral Commission often send out other correspondence anyway leading up to an election? If a returned EasyVote card can cause removal, presumably anything returned-to-sender would cause someone to be removed from the roll.
Prior to the flag referendum, we received ballot papers for the previous occupants of our house. After a year of forwarding their mail when they clearly weren't correcting their address with anyone, we'd given up bothering and most stuff was just being returned to sender. For voting docs, though, I thought I should probably tell someone. I emailed the local registrar to notify that they no longer lived here. I also indicated that I specifically knew they'd shifted to the retirement village down the road.
Despite knowing where to find them (same electorate!), the response was:
Thank you for advising that you are returning the previous owners voting papers as "Gone no address".
The Electoral Commission will forward them to our Head Office and the [name_removed]'s will be made "dormant".
Unfortunately, many people move and do not advise us so miss out on their democratic right to vote.
I've no idea if they realised they weren't on the roll before this year's election came around.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to TracyMac,
Hello.
No need for a third vote. That's essentially STV.
Not if I've understood (not sure). Australia's STV is applied to elect a bundle of candidates and lets a vote be distributed between several of them (depending on how much it was needed). I'm just meaning is a simpler thing where NZ keeps the party vote almost as-is, but voters get to express an alternative party to get the vote if, and only if, their first choice doesn't reach the threshold. I guess it's a dumbed-down preferential ranking system. If there's an MMP argument that the threshold needs to be high so that parliament doesn't end up packed with parties that are too small to operate effectively, I think the least that should be done is to let people cast their vote for the party they like most without needing to fear that they'll just help a party they don't want to succeed.
Since the Aussies use that for the Senate vote, and a bastardised version for the lower house vote (NOT a good option), any argument about complexity is void. I haven't heard of any Aussies complaining about not being able to understand this voting thing.
Maybe, but Australia also added group ticket voting. To me seems more like hiding complexity which voters struggled to cope with rather than fixing it. It encourages voters to hand the full power of their vote to the one favourite candidate, and whichever political alliances and deals that candidate has, instead of necessarily thinking about and understanding what they're voting for.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Aside from a lower threshold I'd really like to see an alternative vote situation, so people could party-vote for a small party they really really want, but have the safety of being able to have their vote reassigned if it didn't reach the threshold. That reduces the problem of new parties struggling to get support from people worried about nothing except their votes being wasted.
The main down-side, I guess, is adding complication to the voting process. There seem to be enough people around who struggle to understand the difference between the two votes the already get. Adding a third probably wouldn't help with that.
Also preferential voting in electorates would be optimal. It'd not stop big parties from instructing their supporters how to vote, but it'd make it much harder for them to mess up electorates when they can't count on opposition votes being split. No party should be incentivised to withdraw their candidates whom some voters prefer merely because too many votes might result in a worse overall outcome.
Neither of these was considered or recommended by the 2012 MMP review so I can't see much hope for them.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Auto-enrol high school & university students upon turning 18
Just randomly on enrolment, is there any evidence or investigation out there of whether there's a significant effect of the jury service system on enrolment figures?
It seems odd to me that people who try to skip the potential stress and often life-churning turmoil of a jury summons typically get sneered at, chased and threatened by the MoJ... while people who accept it sometimes still have to accept serious inconvenience and a pay-cut compared with their usual living expenses. But if you avoid putting yourself on the list from which juries are selected, whilst illegal, it's just barely illegal. It's so barely illegal, in fact, that if the Electoral Commission ever began prosecuting someone for refusing to enrol (has this ever happened?), the law states that the previous failure to enrol is immediately forgotten and ignored if the person enrols then and there.
The contrast seems to create a significant incentive for people to not enrol, especially if they don't really care about voting. Maybe it's not obvious to all, but I bet it must occur to people who've already had a bad time in jury service.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Zach Bagnall,
FPP was the most popular replacement but it's worth noting that huge numbers of people who voted on part A explicitly chose not to vote on part B. http://www.electionresults.govt.nz/electionresults_2011/referendum.html
At the time there was controversy over the whole structure of the referendum.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to simon g,
I think the Greens need to care what the media report
Yes and no. I'm not a Green Party insider, but especially after Kennedy Graham and David Clendon resigned, it seems to me like what happened to Metiria Turei went deeper than just media. For a moment that came from right within the core support base of the Green Party, which apparently felt as if it hadn't been adequately consulted.
Anyway if the Greens did risk extermination by going into a coalition with National, I can't imagine it'd be a stable government long term. More likely it'd go the way of the Land and Water Forum, where a bunch of high profile environmentally-focused NGOs ended up leaving because they thought their input was being ignored and their presence was merely being waved around to make the government look good.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to Jason Kemp,
The third main recommendation of the review was that consideration be given to indexing the number of list seats to electorate seats, which would mean the number of MMPs grew over time (unless population dropped).
That recommendation very rarely seems to be discussed as far as I can tell, but without it the proportionality of MMP outcomes gradually disappears as more electorates get created whilst total MPs remain at 120. http://www.elections.org.nz/events/past-events-0/2012-mmp-review/results-mmp-review
Judith Collins binned the whole review after it was presented, claiming "no political consensus". Status quo suits the presiding government.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Do you mean the Supplementary Member system, which was rejected as one of the alternative options in Part B of the 2011 MMP referendum?
National was promoting Supplementary Member, probably because it has a big advantage right now in winning local electorates (lots of vote-splitting happening on the other side), and SM tends to put lots of weight on who can win lots of electorates. It's basically FPP with a token gesture towards fake proportional representation.
Referendum result: http://www.elections.org.nz/events/past-events-0/2011-referendum-voting-system/results-referendum
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to linger,
If National offers a deal then I think it'd be largely so it can claim to its supporters that it tried, and that it was the Greens who were being unreasonable, the Greens' fault that NZ First is inflicted upon everyone, and yadiyadiyada.