Glaister

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Submission of Dr Stephen M. Glaister to the MMP Review

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Thresholds, Electorate Seat Rules, Overhangs

ABOUT THE SUBMITTER

1. My name is Dr Stephen Glaister. I've taught Voting/Electoral Systems Theory at the

University of Washington, Seattle (a whole course) and at Kansas State University (a unit

inside a Philosophy of Law course), and I've had a book manuscript in circulation for several

years,Mixed Illusions: Mixed Electoral Systems Without Illusions (viewable at

http://issuu.com/swanstep/docs/mixed1 ), which argues that the best one vote mixed

electoral systems are superior to the best two vote mixed electoral systems. I'm contactable

at [email protected] .

PARTY VOTE THRESHOLD

2. Party vote thresholds simultaneously prescribe both the minimal level of support a

successful parliamentary party should have in the community and the minimal size for a

successful parliamentary delegation itself. In New Zealand that basic prescription has been

for at least 5% support, hence for at least 6 MPs.

3. I accept the basic Royal Commission 1986 conclusion that it's both legitimate and desirable

to use a party vote threshold for list seats to trade off some amount of pure

representativeness to get a more tractable and functional parliament. Proliferating ultra-

narrowly-based (e.g., personality, single-issue, extremist, joke) micro-parties, whose MPs

nonetheless get votes on everything, and inevitably get far more than proportional media

attention, still seems like a bad idea. A parliament consisting principally of delegations that

are true teams of MPs also seems a legitimate system preference.

4. But, as many others have observed, 5% and 6 MPs may be overkill. The Royal Commission

1986 recommended 4% and 5 MPs, and in my view 3% (~ 75K party votes) and 4 MPs

might also provide as much party breadth of support, seriousness etc, and as much non-

trivial team-hood for parliamentary delegations as can be justified, i.e., beyond which the

price in lost pure representativeness is too high.

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5. Still lower thresholds such as Geddis's and Edgelers's 2.5% and 3 MPs suggestions are

unstable in the sense that even a single defection/departure from minimal qualifiers in that

case leaves only one and two MP remainders. Put slightly differently, 3 MP parliamentary

parties aren't robustly non-trivial: they are trivialized by minimal attrition whereas 4, 5, etc.

MP parties aren't.

6. Does it make sense to impose robust non-triviality as a desideratum on the threshold's level

given that trivial (one and two MP) parliamentary delegations can form in any case thanks to

(one or two) electorate seat waivers? I think so, although the point's a ticklish one. The

threshold sets a standard or norm for parliamentary parties. Exceptions to that standard, if

allowed, have to be treated separately to not simply represent an abandonment of the

standard or norm. That's awkward, but awkwardly exception-tolerant standards are both

commonplace, and normally preferable to strict/not-pragmatically-qualified standards or to'anything goes'. See 13-15 below.

7. I don't have a firm opinion or recommendation on the 3 or 4 or 5% (4, 5, or 6 MPs) question,

and which tradeoff to prefer in that range may be to some extent a matter of taste. The

Electoral Commission might well want to explore this specific matter in more detail. If I

were forced to choose/recommend right now, however, as a cautious, centrist fellow, I'd say

that NZ should adopt the Royal Commission 1986's original 4% threshold.

8. David Farrar has suggested (as a pro-4% now consideration) that while it would be relativelyeasy to lower the threshold further later if required, it would be very hard to raise standards

to 4% having first gone lower. But the current popularity of doing away with the one

electorate seat waiver suggests the contrary moral: that it's relatively easy to muster popular

support in NZ for 'making it more difficult to get into parliament'/raising standards,

notwithstanding entrenched interests.

9. Many people want to argue from NZ's relatively benign experience with differently-sized

micro-parties (notwithstanding the 5% threshold) over the last 15 years to the conclusion

that (i) we have nothing to fear in NZ (stability-wise or any other -wise) from such parties,

hence (ii) that thresholds in NZ can, on empirical grounds, now be dropped or at least shrunk

far below what might otherwise seem abstractly justifiable. But the micro-parties that have

flourished under the 5% threshold in NZ (principally because of the one electorate seat

waiver) have tended to be simpatico with at least one major party. The sorts of micro-parties

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that no (or minimal) thresholds would grant representation would be much more self-

standing, and we'd predict, much more fractious and problematic as partners than the sorts of

tame micro-parties that have flourished under a waiver-encrusted 5% threshold have been.

10. In general, it's unwise to project positive features of life under thresholding into a non-

thresholded future (let alone to make those positive features part of one's case against a

threshold) unless you have something like a proof that the positives are causally independent

of the threshold. But there is no such proof. Indeed the dependence is obvious and strong.

THE ONE ELECTORATE SEAT WAIVER

11. In NZ's version of MMP the 5% party vote share threshold for a party to become entitled to

list seats is waived if the party wins an electorate seat. This condition is currently widely

scorned as illogical and otherwise unmotivated, and is criticized for causing massively

unfair and arbitrary outcomes riddled with unequal suffrage. All of that, however, is false.

12. The one electorate waiver is not some illogical or unmotivated tack-on to the threshold,

rather it:

Falls directly out of the 'size of parliamentary delegations' side of the threshold's

rationale (13-15)

Creates incentives for micro-parties to do proportionality-enhancing deals with

(interested, politically compatible) larger parties rather than pure overhang, anti-

proportional deals (16-21)

13. The threshold expresses a phobia of micro-parties in parliament. But since MMP is a mixed

electoral system, parties can get members into parliament anyway if they win electorates.

But if a party is going to have a parliamentary delegation anyway (notwithstanding the

threshold) then our phobia of micro-parties recommends allowing it to have as many MPs as

possible compatibly with proportionality. Additional proportionality itself is valuable, of

course, but so is non-trivial team-hood for parliamentary delegations.

14. Put slightly differently, NZ's threshold creates a presumption that parliamentary parties are

fully functional teams of MPs. The one electorate seat waiver then says that if that

presumption is defeated by a party's electorate success then that party should at least be as

large, and as close to a fully functional team of MPs as possible. Better a 2 or 3 or 4 MP

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parliamentary party (that's consistent with proportionality) than a sole MP parliamentary

party, and so on.

15. Note that policies qualifying a main condition (or stipulation or desideratum) with a fallback

(or approximation from below or partial satisfaction) condition are commonplace, e.g.:

Students should read (all of) War and Peace over the summer. Failing that, they should

at least read as much of it as possible.

Smoking in airplane bathrooms in particular is absolutely forbidden (and a fineable

offence). But if you nonetheless do smoke in the bathroom, stub out your cigarette in

the ashtray provided.

16. A small party, S, polling, say, 1.5-3% several weeks before election day, has a significant

power base. That power base is a bargaining chip ('Who wants these votes? And what's it

worth to them?), and a moral argument ('We must get the best deals we can for our

supporters, and generally do whatever we can to make sure that our supporters voices are

heard and their votes aren't wholly wasted...').

17. Given the one electorate seat waiver, S's best strategy is to secure an electorate win either

unilaterally or with the help of a simpatico large party, L (to whom this arrangement is

mostly costless). This type of deal enhances parliament's proportionality.

18. Without the one seat rule, S's possible strategies include:

a. Sell the Support Base. 'Sell' S's support base (both party and and electorate votes) to L

for policy concessions. [Painful, risky for S.]

b. Trade to Get Over the Threshold. Trade S's relatively unconditional support for L in

parliament (and also a few electorate votes) for enough party vote defectors from L to

get S over the threshold. This strategy might evolve organically (and very riskily for L)

or it could be organized by L's leaders ('We need S, and S needs our help. We therefore

urge all of our supporters in Electorates 1 and 2 - fully 2% of the overall electorate, and

1/20th of our support base - to party vote for S.) [Painful, risky for L]

c. Play the Overhang Vigorously. That is, if S's support base is nominally worth 3 MPs,

then Trade S's relatively unconditional support in parliament, its party votes, and its

electorate votes for electorate votes from L's supporter's in two or three of L's safest

seats. [Painful, risky for the electoral system]

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19. Because of the availability of strategies such as 18a-18c, it is self-defeating for figures such

as Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Andrew Geddis and David Farrar (in their respective

submissions to the Electoral Commission) to urge the removal of the one electorate seat rule

as a means of discouraging/preventing deal-making and 'gaming' of the electoral system.

Moreover, given that parties no less than individual people tend to avoid pain and risk to

themselves (and to give pain and risk to an impersonal system little mind), byfarthe most

likely outcome of removing the one electorate seat waiver is the proliferation of explicit

overhang plays l 18c. Geddis says, 'smaller party reliance on the Electorate Seat exception

opens the way for inter-party deals over the outcome of the vote'. But that's absurd:

removing the exception invites much more pernicious inter-party deals.

20. Similarly, Graeme Edgeler decries the one electorate seat rule for giving 'voters in particular

areas substantially more power than those in other electorates' (on which more below: 26-35). But that's short-sighted when ending the one seat rule will continue those alleged power

inequalities (i.e., between those who are and those whose are not lucky enough to live

somewhere where clever parties set up a both-votes-count play) by other means, most likely

in ways that are corrosively anti-proportional.

21. In sum, a party with a significant, sub-threshold power base has both self-interested and

moral reasons to explore strategic play. A one electorate seat waiver then channels that

strategic play, creating incentives for that play to be proportionality enhancing, and also

undistorting of party vote shares. Removing the one seat rule creates incentives for that

strategic play to be anti-proportional (18c) and greatly distorts party vote shares even when

the outcomes themselves are nominally proportional (18a, 18b).

22. The one electorate seat rule therefore connects to proportionality indirectly and on two

distinct levels:

Which sorts of strategic play it channels/incentivizes

How the system-wide preference for parliamentary parties that are full-service teams of

MPs is effected

The relatively sparse group of defenders of the one seat threshold (including the National

Party in its submission to the EC) often seems to suggest that proportionality directly

justifies the one electorate seat waiver. That's overkill that only makes the recurrent 'It's

Unfair' objection to the one seat rule harder to answer convincingly (24-26).

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23. I now want to address directly the first of two standard criticisms of the one electorate seat

rule (in the context of a relatively high threshold).

That it Generates Unfair Outcomes. Rodney Hide's victory in Epsom in 2008 saw

ACT's 3.65% party vote share entitle it to 5 list seats Hide + 4 other MPs whereas

NZ First's 4.07% got 0 MPs. Compare with Germany in 1990 under a 5%

threshold+three electorate seat waiver regime: Greens (3.8%, 0 MPs), Alliance (1.2%, 8

MPs), PDS (2.4%, 17 MPs).

24. Any system of rules that draws legally-binding bright lines and boundaries is going to offend

against certain aspects of childhood conceptions of fairness.

a. The Threshold Can Be Unfair. Party S gets 5.00% of the party vote and is entitled to 6

MPs whereas party T gets 4.999% of the party vote and is entitled to 0 MPs.

b. Plurality Elections Wins (and anything indexed to them) can be Unfair. Party U gets 3%

of the party vote but narrowly wins a low turnout, but tight, multi-candidate, highly-

divided electorate contest (e.g., U's candidate gets 6000 votes, and 25% of the electorate

vote, margin of victory = 10 votes). Party V gets 3% of the party vote and narrowly

loses a very high turn out, two-way local race (e.g., V's candidate gets 25,000 local

votes for a 49.99% electorate vote share, margin of defeat = 10 votes)

Wah wah. We got almost exactly as many party votes as S. Wah wah. I got four times as

many votes as V's candidate did and nearly twice the share of the electorate vote. Wah wah

wah.

25. A threshold+waiver regime is logically just a disjunction of two boundary rules. Standard,

tempting, childish mewling about what are always, partially arbitrary boundaries [24a, 24b]

is then sent into overdrive by the target-rich environment of a more complicated, disjunctive

boundary. Is that all there is to the claim of unfairness against the one electorate seat rule in

the context of a 5% threshold? I think so, although a couple of more specific forces may help

explain some of the felt gallingness of outcomes like those in 23.

The heuristics and biases literature in Psychology warns us that people regularly lose

their minds over disjunctions (e.g., they often find disjunctions less credible than their

disjuncts). It's possible that the disjunctive boundary literally distorts people's value

judgments, i.e., about how arbitrary, unfair, unworthy, etc. some outcomes are.

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If the only defense one ever hears of the one electorate seat rule (or of the three seat rule

in Germany) appeals directly to the boost it provides to proportionality (e.g., Geddis's

'the only possible justification for the Electorate Seat exception...is that it helps to

rectify some of the disproportionate outcomes that would result from simply having a

5% Party Vote threshold.') then it can be hard to understand why parties whose

exclusions from list seats caused the greatest disproportionalities (and the largest

number of wasted votes) weren't extended the same grace. That is, the wrong defense of

the electorate seat waiver probably does help undermine the intelligibility of and

support for the threshold.

26. The second standard criticism of the one electorate seat rule is:

That It Involves Unequal Suffrage. '[T]he voters in particular electorates [have] a

disproportionate say regarding the overall composition of Parliament via their Electorate

Vote.' (Geddis); '[The Rule] violates the principle that all votes should be of equal

value, by giving voters in particular areas substantially more power than those in other

electorates...[W]hat was wrong [about ACT's result in 2008] was that it was the voters

of Epsom who had the power to decide whether the 85,496 people who gave ACT their

party vote were going to be represented.' (Edgeler)

27. In my view there'ssomethingimportantly right about this criticism. Two vote MMP's

problem with unequal suffrage is real enough: overhang plays l (18c) are a sore pointprecisely because they threaten to roughly double some people's voting power. But the one

electorate seat rule causes no comparable unequal suffrage problem. Or so I'll now argue.

28. Begin by noting the straightforward sense in which one electorate seat rule plays do not

involve anyone having 'disproportionate say regarding the overall composition of Parliament

via their Electorate Vote'. ~25-30K National and ACT voters in Epsom end up electing ~1.2

list MPs with their party votes just the same as all other similarly-sized groups of voters, and

the electorate winner they choose is subtracted or compensated away from ACT's list

entitlements (i.e., from the budget of MPs to which ACT's party vote share entitles it, which

is at least 2 MPs if the one electorate seat rule applies non-trivially). National and ACT

voters in Epsom do not end up with roughly double the voting power of everyone else, their

electorate votes do not by themselves affect the balance of power in parliament, and there's

nothing anti-proportional about the outcome.

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29. So the question is whether we can make sense of an ability to trigger a waiver itself as an

alarming kind of power asymmetry? Can we, after the fact, credit actual Epsom voters alone

with Edgeler's ominous-sounding power 'to decide whether the 85,496 people who gave

ACT their party vote were going to be represented'? Note that powers that principally get

identified after-the-fact and that depend on a whole raft of positive and negative

contingencies (e.g., only a sub-threshold % of ACT voters show up elsewhere; ACT wins no

other electorates) to exist at all tend to be suspicious: easy to attribute without being

especially probative, let alone alarming. For example, one can try to credit a handful of

voters in Florida with the power to choose the US President in 2000 afterall other states' and

counties' results are settled. But that's more alarmist talk rather than an alarming discovery

of illicit powers possessed by Floridians.

30. Edgeler's way of describing things in (cases like) Epsom 2008 commits him to saying that ifACT had received many fewer (or even zero) party votes in the 2008 election then Epsom

voters' would have had much less power. But it seems wrong (or at least strained and

definitely not compulsory) to describe voters and their powers in ways that include (and so

logically fluctuate with) all subsequent events. Better (or at least equally legitimate) to

describe Epsom voters' situation and powers more neutrally and relatively invariantly: given

the one electorate seat rule and some parties coordinating to give voters a play to take

advantage of that rule, Epsom voters just had the power to ensure ACT's entitlement to list

seats. How many list seats (even the one list seat needed first to 'cover' Rodney Hide's

electorate win) ACT would become entitled to, however, was up to ACT supporters

nationwide.

31. Moreover, in the actual Epsom 2008 case, it's plausible that many of ACT's 85,496 party

votes would have gone elsewhere if the one electorate seat shot in Epsom hadn't been on

(rationally speaking, they should allhave defected in that case). It's therefore misleading to

hold all those party votes fixed in thought and imagine the electorate votes in Epsom as an

independent factor 'with all the power' over them. It's much more natural in my view to say(if one mustsay something after-the-fact) that the actual outcome reflects successful

cooperative, proto-coalitional play to the mutual advantage of all concerned. Coalitional

play and horse-trading isn't just for parliamentary parties after the election, rather it's an on-

going part of the operations and incentive structures and consensual ethos of two vote MMP

(and of electoral systems with proportional elements more generally).

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32. Let's re-derive the conclusions of the last three paragraphs from another direction from the

other side of the disjunctive boundary by constructing a 18b-style, 'get the small party over

the threshold' strategic play in Epsom. For the sake of a good, knife-twisting, I'll suppose

that the threshold has been lowered to the 2.5% that both Geddis and Edgeler recommend (if

you like, suppose too that the one electorate seat rule is gone just as G&E recommend):

a. Trade to Get Over the Threshold. In 2014 ACT polls ~2% two weeks out from election

day. ACT begs for help (offering what quid pro quos it can) and National decides to

provide it, i.e., to give up .5-.7% of its own party vote to ensure that ACT's 2% isn't lost

to the center-right. To minimize its risk from a play of this sort, National restricts its

'defecting party vote' push to the National party supporters in a single electorate. And

who better for that effort than Epsom's sophisticates who are well-used to this sort of

thing? (And the ~25K National party supporters in Epsom gives about the right marginfor error, i.e., just so long as a majority of National supporters in Epsom play along.)

33. If one is of a mind to credit voters with unequal powers, especially after-the-fact, then 32a

must look like a case in which voters in one electorate 'have a disproportionate say regarding

the overall composition of Parliament,' 'have substantially more power than those in other

electorates', 'decide whether the 50K other people who gave ACT their party vote were

going to be represented', and so on.

34. But if so, tough. 32a is paradigmatic, successful, between-elections cooperative, proto-coalitional play. While 32a is a little more explicit and organized than usual, or than it needs

to be, for dramatic effect, the basic situation it describes is business as usual in an electoral

system with proportional elements (especially one that encourages fully functional

parliamentary parties). That's 31's conclusion re-derived.

35. 32a's stipulation that everything in fact works out beautifully for ACT and National indeed

tempts us to attribute special powers to the defecting-to-ACT voters. But ACT's support

could easily have either taken off or collapsed in the final days of the campaign. If either of

those things had happened then Epsom's strategic defectees would have moderately

(National gifts .7% to ACT but gets little back for that since it wasn't needed) or royally

(National's gift ends up being just more wasted vote share) screwed their own party. Some

great powers! Rather than attribute powers that aren't robust across variations in obviously

relevant contingencies, better (or at least equally legitimate) to describe the capacities of

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defecting Epsom voters more neutrally, invariantly. Given the low threshold, National

supporters in Epsom jointly had the power to give ACT about 1/3 of a threshold's worth of

party vote share (the same power every other similarly sized group of voters had). That's

29's and 30's conclusion re-derived.

36. Summarizing 26-35: regardless of which qualifying condition they target, strategic plays by

a large party's supporters to help simpatico smaller parties qualify for list seats are business

as usual for MMP, and the sense in which such plays give some voters more power or 'say'

than others remains evanescent, more a fanciful manner of speaking (that one can adopt as a

kind of novel perspective in a range of different cases) than a compelling, alarming problem

that demands a solution (or many solutions since there are a number places you can spy a

'problem' of this kind if you try or squint hard enough).

37. Note again (28) how different plays-to-get-parties-to-qualify-for-list-seats are from overhang

plays l 18c, where a (usually, but not necessarily small) party tries to gain representation

entirely through electorate wins while shedding (and ideally trading) as much of its party

vote as possible. There the disproportionate says and voting power, leading directly to anti-

proportional outcomes in parliament are plain for all to see.

38. Bizarrely, however, neither Geddis nor Edgeler sees any real problem with overhangs ['I

must admit to being largely agnostic on this particular issue... I recommend no change be

made to the law on this issue.' (Geddis). 'I am not particularly concerned about overhang.'(Edgeler)]. I've referred to such plays in passing as 'pernicious' (19), 'corrosive', and 'risky

for the electoral system' (18c), but evidently this base-line opinion is not widely shared. In

the next section, I'll try to succinctly explain both the seriousness of the overhang problem

and its only solution.

OVERHANGS

39. As Edgeler notes, some (even very large) overhangs have nothing to do with strategic play

and can occur without any split-voting or (equivalently) under one vote MMP:

Inadvertent (Massive) Overhang. Suppose an election in NZ with (i) no split voting (or

one vote MMP), (ii) 5 parties each get ~20% of the party vote, (iii) each party's

supporters are uniformly distributed so that each electorate reproduces the nationwide

20/20/20/20/20 division on both votes, but (iv) one of the five parties, L, ends up

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winning each of the 70 electorates by a handful of votes in each case (i.e., so L in fact

has 20.0001% of the vote at every level). L's party vote share entitles it to 24 list MPs,

so L ends up with a 46 seat overhang (and a 70/166 share of a 166 member House).

40. There are two key differences between the inadvertent overhangs to which even no split

votes/one vote MMP is susceptible and the pernicious overhangs that are distinctive of two

vote MMP.First, as our example (39) suggests, inadvertent overhangs, especially large

ones, are quite hard to arrange. On the one hand, small parties tend to find it very hard to

win significant numbers of single member district races, hence hard to overshoot the

delegations their overall vote shares entitle them to with their electorate success. On the

other hand, large parties do tend to do disproportionately well in single member district

elections. But very rarely do they carry all their 'marginal seats', which is normally what it

would take for them to 'run out of list seats'. In sum, so long as there are plenty of pure listseats to go around (50% of the total was the original Royal Commission 1986's good

recommendation; NZ's current 41.66% is about as low as one can go without sharply

increasing inadvertent overhang rates) then inadvertent overhangs are likely to be rare. (To

get a sense of what an inadvertent residue looks like, consider that if there were no split

votes/one vote MMP, e.g., all but one of the Maori party's three overhang seats in 2005 and

2008 would be eliminated/'covered' by list entitlements, i.e., if all the people who voted for a

Maori party candidate in their electorates had also given their party votes to Maori.)

41. Thesecondand more important difference between inadvertent overhangs and the

distinctive, pernicious kind concerns the incentives in the two sorts of cases. In inadvertent

overhangs, as best captured under no split votes/one vote MMP, a party's incentive is always

to get as many votes as possible: it tries to win electorates precisely by trying to increase its

share of the overall vote, and vice versa. In the overhang plays that are characteristic of two

vote MMP, however, the incentives are quite different. Since it's not determinedwithin a

two vote MMP system that the same parties will or should compete for both votes, the

'compensatory' mechanism in two vote MMP creates a strong incentive for parties tospecialize on either the electorate seat or party vote share side of the ledger, and then to

coordinate to reduce each others' compensatory loss and to 'get the most bang for one's

voting buck'. And the incentive for parties to coordinate and generate overhangs feeds back

positively: the larger the overhang, the better off your party and its relatively simpatico

coordinatee will both be. And this seems to mean that even otherwise objectively, not-

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especially overhang-prone two vote MMP systems will sooner or later (and sooner rather

than later in my view) descend into widespread, large overhang, anti-proportional chaos.

Hence we weren't kidding when we projected vigorous pursuit of large overhangs back in

18c.

42. I explore what this means and what to do about it in my bookMixed Illusions (viewable at

http://issuu.com/swanstep/docs/mixed1 ). Building on discussion in Chapter 3, in Chapter 5

and 6 I establish the robustness of my core case against two vote MMP by showing that

existing so-called 'solutions' to our problems with two vote MMP systems fail miserably.

Those alleged solutions either try to mitigate the effects of strategizing behaviors (esp.

House inflation/Ausgleich seat proposals and 'internalize the overhang' proposals), or try to

block those behaviors in the first place (esp. proposals to legislate both for and against

various party behaviors, and proposals due to Max Anderson of the Committee for VotingEquity in British Columbia to penalize parties that don't receive large numbers of both party

and electorate votes). But the effects of strategizing behaviors can't be mitigated at anything

like an acceptable cost, and there is no way to block such behaviors short of collapsing the

electoral system overall down to one vote. Or so I argue.

43. Chapters 7 and 8 scrutinize and reject as largely illusory two alleged benefits of two vote

MMP systems: that they extend voter choice, and that they induce something like additional

institutional structure (e.g., separated powers, checks and balances, etc.), as it were, on the

cheap.

44. It's worth mentioning that (compensatory) one vote MMP (with or without Ausgleich or

'balance' seats), is used in the two largest German states (Lnder), North Rhine-Westphalia

and Baden-Wrttemberg, and in the Italian Senate, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, and

the South Korean Kukhoe.

45. The Royal Commission 1986 seems to have been guided in its recommendation of two vote

MMP by the thought that only a small minority of New Zealanders would split their votes. If

that thought was part of the Commission's case for dismissing the obvious worries about two

vote MMP then it is a thought that has failed every test so far. In New Zealand's first six

MMP elections the percentage of voters splitting their votes has been 37% (1996), 35%

(1999), 39% (2002), 29% (2005), 30% (2008), and 31% (2011). At the time the Commission

wrote its report, Germany's Bundestag elections had experienced little significant vote-

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splitting. Indeed, even now, rates of vote-splitting for the Bundestag are barely half of what

they are in New Zealand.

46. Significantly, from 1965 to 1987, there were only a total of seventeen overhang seats in the

Bundestag, hence the Commission's sanguine observation:

'If a party wins more constituency seats than its overall proportional entitlement, it

keeps the seats it has won, and the total number of seats in the Bundestag is increased

until the next election; this has happened on a few occasions since 1949, resulting in a 1

or 2 seat increase.' (RCES 1986, 36, sec. 2.92)

But things have changed greatly since Germany's reunification. There were six overhang

seats in the Bundestag in 1990, sixteen in 1994, thirteen in 1998, five in 2002, sixteen in

2005, and twenty-two in 2009. That and much, much worse - illegitimate government just

for starters - is the future for NZ's two vote MMP system. Better to head all that off at the

pass now by moving to a one vote counterpart of our current system.

47. Unfortunately, that probably won't happen in part because NZ's foremost electoral engineers

(e.g., Vowles, J., Sullivan, A., Aimer, P., Miller, R., and Banducci, S. 2000. Electoral

System Opinion and the Evolution of MMP: A Report to the Electoral Commission) deny

that large-scale inter-party coordination to produce overhangs is a real problem simply

because it hasn't happened so far. We don't allow civil, mechanical, etc. engineers to rest on

such backward-looking laurels 'So far the dam has held', 'So far no plane has crashed'

and to answer charges (let alone proofs) that their complex systems have design flaws or

important vulnerabilities that way, but we seem determined to give such latitude to our

electoral engineers. Sadly, then, New Zealanders will probably have to wait for the electoral

equivalent of a dam failure or an airplane falling out of the sky for their electoral engineers

to agree that some entirely foreseeable, design-level phenomenon is real.

48. Note that whenever I've mentioned to a non-expert New Zealander that I advocate a one vote

version of MMP, their initial response has mixed 'How can that be MMP?' with 'So you

want to go back to FPP then?' That is, within my small, highly non-random sample, people

tend to think of two votes as definingMMP, and hence of 'one vote MMP' as close to a

contradiction-in-terms. They've never been exposed to the possibility of one vote MMP

before, and their sense that two votes must be essential suggests that the various seductive

myths (e.g., voter choice, checks and balances on the cheap) surrounding two votes may

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have played crucial motivational roles in forming their, as it happens, broadly positive

attitudes towards NZ's MMP system. This political reality unfortunately creates incentives

for electoral engineers to avoid recommending transitioning to a more reliable and secure

one vote system.

AFTERWORD

49. I'd like to thank the Electoral Commission for the opportunity to make this submission. I did

not submit earlier because I thought that my original research on one vote MMP would lie

somewhat outside the Commission's brief. Reading other people's submissions on thresholds

and electorate seat rules, however, convinced me that I had something to contribute on those

issues, and further that some of my main research interests were relevant (notwithstanding

the improbability of my largest, one vote MMP recommendation being accepted).

Glaister

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