Festival of Democracy

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JimmyH

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#1147418 4-Oct-2014 22:40

I'm just happy that peace and quiet has returned for a couple of years. The robocalls, cold-calling by parties promoting candidates, junk mail saturation bombing, and forests of billboards sprouting on every patch of bare land are hopefully over and done with for another three years.

Batman

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#1147420 4-Oct-2014 22:43

Three years is too short I reckon. Maybe four or even five years?

Dingbatt

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#1147529 5-Oct-2014 10:06

I wonder whether a more pure form of democracy, where the percentage of the party vote you get determines your say in Parliament. No coat-tailing, no overhang, just add percentages to get a majority. So for instance, the United Future or ACT only get 0.7% of the say, Conservatives 3.8%, and more importantly National get just short of 48% of the say. No wasted vote and everyone's vote is of equal value ( independent of what electorate you are enrolled in). There would need to be a cutoff to stop someone registering, voting for themselves and wasting time in Parliament with 0.00003% of the vote. Perhaps along the lines of what is needed to register as a political party in the first place. I know no system is perfect but at least there wouldn't be any gaming of the system like there is at the moment.
Downsides; NORML (or what ever they call themselves these days) or a joke party might hold the balance of power.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

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#1147530 5-Oct-2014 10:09

The easier fix for the issue you described would be to lower the threshold, but also risking a joke party with lots of money getting thru ...

Dingbatt

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#1147545 5-Oct-2014 11:04

joker97: The easier fix for the issue you described would be to lower the threshold, but also risking a joke party with lots of money getting thru ...

Yes I had considered it in terms of threshold, but that still leads to wasted votes. The almost 4% that voted Conservative may have had reasons to not vote National, but half of those vote were distributed to National anyhow. The threshold would need to be at the level equivalent to 1 MP.
The way I would see it working is if you get more electorate MPs than your party vote would entitle you to, you still only get the party vote percentage in voting rights in Parliament. So no overhang, but people can still be represented by their local mp. The 'pureness' of the democracy would not be affected by coattailing, overhang or strategic voting, all of which leave a bitter taste in portions of the electorate.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

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#1147579 5-Oct-2014 13:44

i guess there needs to be a counter balance between "wasted votes" and "jokers trying it out" getting into parliament.

it's like saying if you want to swim 100m you can be at the olympics, well, you need to swim within the time limit to qualify, no exceptions.

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PhantomNVD

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#1147716 5-Oct-2014 17:41

joker97: i guess there needs to be a counter balance between "wasted votes" and "jokers trying it out" getting into parliament.

it's like saying if you want to swim 100m you can be at the olympics, well, you need to swim within the time limit to qualify, no exceptions.

Good point, but the fact that hundreds of thousands voted for conservative (4.2% AFAIK?) and were 'wasted' votes means something should change.

I actually like the prior post of %=1MP. As the entry level. If you get 1/164th (?) of the boy you SHOULD get 1/164th o the representation?

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#1147724 5-Oct-2014 17:56

Well not really.

If the boy next door went to med school and get 10% you won't want to see him where he is allowed to treat 10% of conditions. Otherwise we'd have everyone starting their own party to get into parliament!

oxnsox

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#1147762 5-Oct-2014 18:26

Dingbatt: I wonder whether a more pure form of democracy, where the percentage of the party vote you get determines your say in Parliament. No coat-tailing, no overhang, just add percentages to get a majority. So for instance, the United Future or ACT only get 0.7% of the say, Conservatives 3.8%, and more importantly National get just short of 48% of the say. No wasted vote and everyone's vote is of equal value ( independent of what electorate you are enrolled in). There would need to be a cutoff to stop someone registering, voting for themselves and wasting time in Parliament with 0.00003% of the vote. Perhaps along the lines of what is needed to register as a political party in the first place. I know no system is perfect but at least there wouldn't be any gaming of the system like there is at the moment.
Downsides; NORML (or what ever they call themselves these days) or a joke party might hold the balance of power.

Only if you make it proprtional for everone on the roll....
Meaning if 40% of enrolled voters don't vote then 40% of seats in the house have no bums on them.... and there would be empty space representing invalid votes too.

Its the only way to truely cater for everyone. And as ludicrous as having representation based on % of votes without thresholds

gzt

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#1148186 6-Oct-2014 13:00

Mr Key on the loss of a seat at the last minute: "I guess it makes you work that little bit harder, which is no bad thing. It's just odd actually more than anything, because it's a very, very complex mathematical formula, but the advice that we had was that it was pretty unlikely we would lose one [seat] because we got the 119th seat and not the 120th, but effectively what happened was the special's [votes] were so massively skewed against us. It just seems odd - we got about 48 per cent of the vote across the country."

Personally I don't find it odd. I think it is more likely advance voting favored National disproportionately.

Plus - special voting outside the country has usually favored the left parties especially Green.

Also I expect those overseas are less swayed by the daily political ups and downs inside the country. Therefore special voters have been less affected by the swing to National (and the high number who did not vote on the party list) therefore making the left/right differential greater than usual.

Facepalm! You can expect to see Crosby/Textor and Mr Key develop high level strategy to address that omission next time around ; ).

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