I had been under the impression that significant political reform generally required somebody getting shot; but in New Zealand, not only can the electoral system change with a vote, it actually does. In 1993, NZ adopted Mixed-Member Proportional representation (MMP) -- the system used by the Germans -- and at this year's general election Kiwis will be asked if they would like to change it again. The referendum will have two questions, firstly, should New Zealand keep MMP? and secondly, if NZ were to change, which of a list of four other systems should it use?
I decided to look at each of the alternatives on offer:
First Past the Post (FPP)
Initially, I wasn't planning to spend any time on this one as it's an incredibly silly system, but given that the Poms actually managed to vote for it earlier this year, and polls show it's the second most popular option in NZ, it would seem to be worth a few words.
In this proposal the country would be divided into a number of single member electorates (120 of them), and the winner of each is the candidate who gets the most votes. Simple. But if there's more than two candidates, there is a real risk of returning the wrong result, because no one needs fifty percent of the vote. A candidate despised by sixty percent of the electorate can win. While two party politics dominates many (most?) democracies, three way contests are not that uncommon, either at the national level -- consider the UK (Tories vs Liberal Democrats vs Labour), or Canada (Conservatives vs Liberals vs New Democrats) -- or at the electorate level, and we'll see a new example of that in New Zealand this year (Maori vs Labour vs Mana). And then there is always the Greens.
One of the more famous demonstrations of the flaw in this method of voting comes from the 1992 US presidential election where Ross Perot split the conservative vote. Bill Clinton won with 43% of the vote, when George Bush Senior was almost certainly the more widely preferred candidate.
Actually, the most insidious aspect of FPP is not the contests it gets wrong, but the contests it prevents from happening at all. There is little point in voting for a candidate that few others vote for - the vote is "wasted". Instead, the voter is encouraged to second guess the intentions of other voters, throwing support behind a candidate he expects to be competitive with whomever it is he really doesn't want. Hence the controversy surrounding any of Ralph Nader's electoral tilts. But lousy though FPP is at dealing with individual competitions, it actually has a much bigger problem, which it shares with the next system to be discussed.
Preferential Voting (PV)
Question: How do you spot an Australian? Answer: They're the one trying to explain preferential voting to the person next to them.
As an Australian, I regard preferential voting as my birthright, and it's certainly a practical corrective to the problem described above. Given a list of candidates, the voter marks their preferred candidate with a "1", the next with a "2" and so on, saving the highest number for the most despised candidate on the list. Or, if you prefer, decide whom you dislike the most and work backwards. Counting is performed by determining which candidate has the least number of "1"s, eliminating that candidate and distributing those votes to all the "2"s. This process continues until one candidate has more than 50% of the vote. The voter can actually support the person they want, without it directly serving the person they least want.
However, PV shares the biggest weakness of FPP: single member electorates. Consider the following thought experiment: Party A gets a uniform, nation-wide vote of 50.1% (either first preference or two-party preferred, it doesn't matter). This would lead to that party winning 100% of the seats! While the example is extreme, the phenomenon of individual parties dominating a parliament on slender majorities -- or even considerable minorities -- is not. Consider the 2005 UK election in which Labour won 355 seats in the House of Commons with a mere 35.2% of the vote. The Tories and Liberal Democrats, with a combined 54.4% of the vote managed just 260 seats between them. Minor parties can thrive in such a system if they have strong regional support, but not if they have broad support. So, for example, the Democratic Unionists (Northern Ireland) were able to convert their 0.9% of the vote into 9 seats, while the Greens were unable to gain any seats despite 1% of the vote. So in New Zealand, PV will suit the Maori Party just fine, but at considerable cost to the Greens.
A similar disparity exists between the Nationals and the Greens in Australia, although there the excess of single-member electorates is partly mitigated by having a bicameral legislature, with the Upper House selected using a system of proportional representation, Single Transferable Vote, which I shall discuss next time.
Partial Conclusion
The perfect electoral system accurately reflects the intentions of the voters, but if that could be perfectly defined then the hunt for a system would be over. All the systems so far devised have their quirks, and can fail at corner cases. But the fact that there is no one right answer does not mean that there are no wrong answers, and both FPP and PV are, in this context, wrong answers. Preferential Voting is a good way to resolve individual contests, but by itself cannot overcome the flaw of single member electorates (although it does push things in the right direction, which is why the outcome of the UK referendum was gobsmacking). The remarkable thing about FPP is not that it fails sometimes, but that sometimes it doesn't fail.
Next time: Single Transferable Vote and Supplementary Member
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