Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special Votes
96 Responses
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izogi, in reply to
Yup. I split my vote in Ohariu this year, but it wasn’t with intended strategy of helping TOP. It was a genuine belief that Jessica Hammond Doube was simply a much better candidate than a disgruntled Labour candidate whose main strategy had been to cruise through on a culture of change as people voted to get rid of Peter Dunne, and an empty National candidate who’d been selected for his ability to care about not much other than existing National supporters and making sure they understood not to vote for him but to party vote National. Those sentiments of mine hadn't stopped the disgruntled Labour candidate from trying to convince both TOP and Green candidates to stay out of the race, and for me it reinforced them.
It irritates me when I see candidates and supporters expect other candidates to stand down through some belief that they’re entitled to the votes that people would rather cast for someone else. The real problem is that electorates don’t provide any preferential mechanism to let voters reassign their votes when there are similar candidates.
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Jason Kemp, in reply to
We lament people not voting, yet we effectively flush 5 MP’s worth of votes!
But then we add that back into the calculation. I'm not clear whether this is before or after the special votes have been counted though?
"the parties not reaching the threshold have been disregarded the percentage share for each of the remaining parties has increased."
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linger, in reply to
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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I wonder if there is an appetite for changing the MMP distribution to make Electorate seats one total, and then the balance of the seats are allocated along Party Vote percentages - that would seem to better reflect the will of the people ?
Or am I missing something?
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John Farrell, in reply to
Something like that was offered in the first MMP referendum - Supplementary Member.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
But then we add that back into the calculation.
No, we add it back to the big parties. The actual opinions of those voters has been discarded.
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linger, in reply to
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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linger, 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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Bart Janssen, in reply to
I don’t understand how that works. Dont the smaller party's get any?
What linger said.
yes the smaller parties theoretically get some of the benefit but say for this election 46% of those votes go to National 36% go to Labour and the others get the scraps.
More specifically the seats are handed out according to the vote proportion - it is possible for only the two biggest parties to get any of those seats.
The greatest benefit of excluding those votes accrues to the biggest parties - which of course is why the rule will never change.
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izogi, in reply to
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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So back in 2012 there was a referendum on MMP. Dropping the target % from 5% down to 4% was one of the recommendations. Getting rid of the overhang etc. was also in there.
From memory none of the recommendations were adopted. Is that the case and if the proposed rule changes diminish the two big parties share then none of the MMP rules will change just like the reallocation.
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izogi, in reply to
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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Another take on it is that the equivalent of 102 seats have already been allocated by votes already counted, and there are effectively another 18 seats still up for grabs - to be decided by specials (at 21k votes per seat). Seems more promising for the left when viewed from this perspective?!
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Katharine Moody, in reply to
Another take on it is that the equivalent of 102 seats have already been allocated by votes already counted, and there are effectively another 18 seats still up for grabs – to be decided by specials (at 21k votes per seat). Seems more promising for the left when viewed from this perspective?!
I'll take great delight if this final count throws up something that none of our media predicted.
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"This meant they closed the gap with National a little, but that wasn’t enough for them to take a seat off another seat off them." - can you please persuade your writers to read over their material before they hit Send?
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
can you please persuade your writers to read over their material before they hit Send?
First world problems ...
Most writers are not the best proofreaders of their own copy at the best of times - I doubt that Public Address can afford on-call proofreaders,and its contributors are usually doing this for free amidst myriad other tasks - but it does have a crowd resource to help with this ... Us! (quality control is a team effort).Typos or errors can be helpfully and discreetly brought to the writer's attention by hitting the email button at the end of the blog post (and before the responses start) - then tweaks can be made to ensure a flawless piece for posterity.
The major papers and media have people it seems who are paid to publish mistake after mistake daily.
For responses - Preview is your friend...
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Well done, Graeme.
My thoroughly unscientific sampling of media coverage over the last fortnight has found an abundance of "Are we there yet?" opinion pieces, and a dearth of "Here's where there might be" informed calculations. I'd like to have heard less from the bored kids in the back seat of the car, and more from an adult in the front with a map.
I know the unspellable SL formula doesn't lend itself to TV sound bites, but a decent analysis of the most vulnerable seats (and relevant percentages needed) would have been a lot more informative than Nat-Green fairy tales. Talking to you, 6 pm news shows ...
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Moral of story: observation-based persistence forecasting can work out pretty well. Certainly more reliable than fantasy scenarios.
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So, uh, NZ First lost 675 votes after specials were counted. Difference of opinion in what counts as a clear intention to vote for a party? I guess a lot got excluded in the official count for everyone and they just didn't get many specials to top it back up.
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linger, in reply to
Um. NZF went from 162,988 total votes before specials to 186,706 after specials. If they'd really failed to get any more votes over the 15% of specials, they'd have lost a seat or two. I think you accidentally compared the NZF preliminary total with the Greens’ final total.
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More uninformed expertise:
They didn’t pick up the number of special votes they hoped for. They can’t govern alone with the Greens. More importantly, they can’t govern alone with New Zealand First, which Labour would have been holding out hope for.
Er, Claire, they might realistically have picked up one more seat (= two more in total). The disappointment came on election night, I doubt that anyone in Labour was expecting to make up for that by getting approx 100% of the specials.
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linger, in reply to
As for "Labour [...] holding out hope for [...] govern[ing] alone with New Zealand First" —WTF Claire, were you paying no attention whatsoever during the election campaign?
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Now Robinson's nonsense is the Herald's home page.
And we wonder why public ignorance is so widespread.
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I don't think it's ignorance. It's spin doctoring. It's trying to put another column on record for the idea that National still has a moral authority to be the government.
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izogi, in reply to
media coverage over the last fortnight has found an abundance of “Are we there yet?” opinion pieces, and a dearth of “Here’s where there might be” informed calculations. I’d like to have heard less from the bored kids in the back seat of the car, and more from an adult in the front with a map.
It's almost like the modern media model (MMM) of employing people who are only qualified to write about tactical politics (compared with something like aspects of "real life" which political policies and decisions affect) is failing us, merely because there's nothing to report. ... But still we're getting made up speculative opinion after made up speculative opinion.
We need to end MMM immediately, or at least force them all to take their annual leave when there's clearly nothing happening.
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