Should WCC keep STV?
Poneke blogs that Wellington City Council should ditch STV – an issue they are going to consult on. I agree.
Now I actually support STV in many types of elections. In fact I introduced constitutional changes to InternetNZ so that candidates are elected by what is effectively STV, not FPP. National uses a form of STV for its internal elections for candidates and the board. I like and support STV in situations where it works well.
STV works well when the voter has a relatively small number of candidates to choose from, and they know most or all of the candidates. When you know the candidates you can quite easily make an intelligent choice about ranking X No 1, Y No 2 etc.
However STV is an unmitigated disaster for DHBs and a partial disaster for Councils.
Even the most politically active geek has no idea who 80% of the candidates for the DHB are. Trying to rank 30 of them in order based on who wrote the best 200 word bio is just insane, and it is no surprise turnouts are so low.
If one insisted on keeping STV for DHBs, then you would need very very small wards with one vacancy per ward. That way you may end up just raking say four or five people for one local spot – something which might be possible if they are fairly well known locals. Of course whether you want to have geographical segmentation like that for DHBs is another issue.
With regard to Councils, it is not quite as bad. I actually like STV for voting for the Mayor. There is only one position to fill and it is possible to fairly sensibly rank say half a dozen candidates for Mayor. I like being able to express a second and third preference should my first preference fail to be elected.
But then when you come to wards, it becomes near useless again because again not even the political geeks can sensibly rank say 15 people competing for three Council positions. And so we have a 10% fall in turnout over two elections. If you want to keep STV then you need small one person wards.
I could advocate STV for the Mayor, and FPP for Council but that may be too confusing. So if WCC is to have one electoral system only, then FPP is best.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
DPF:
Spot on. Democracy requires (or at least presumes) informed voting. I read the carefully massaged self-profiles for the DHBs, ranked the top 3 and randomly numbered the rest. Seriously, who’s going to waste the better part of an afternoon deliberating over whether [ ] should be ranked 13 or 18? Those advocating a STV system (generally Green supporters in my experience) need to account for the inflated ballot problem.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
STV for votes with under 10 (or whatever) candidates. ie. keep STV for mayor and ward councillors, but FFS make DHB elections FPP.
March 7th, 2008 at 12:01 am
I think I’d go STV with single member wards. I’d modify it a little, I think a little in line with the Australian system (which might be preferential voting, never quite kept up with the various systems).
1. You can vote for only one person if you wish. Your vote won’t be reallocated.
2. You can rank if you wish, down as far as you want.
3. You can tick a box somewhere on the form that says “beyond the candidates I have ranked, follow the preference of my first ranked candidate”.
This means you can vote just like FPP if you want, or you can vote like FPP but allow your preferred candidate to redirect your vote if they don’t get in.
It means you don’t have to be some well-known person to get elected – nothing worse than a bunch of washed up sports-people and other assorted minor celebrities getting in only because enough people recognise their name. It means you can vote for a less well-known person without wasting your vote.
March 7th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Who gives a stuff.
Meanwhile, in meaning world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgt6YQiZTkc&eurl=http://thelastofthefew.blogspot.com/
March 7th, 2008 at 12:38 am
Are you people taking the piss or just having some sort of attack of middle class intelligentsia snobbery.
What could be simpler than ranking 1-5 or 1-10 or 1 to whatever the things you like. School kids are asked to do this sort of thing all the time by their mates “who do you like, I like Superman, Batman, Catwoman, Mr Incredible…”
If you are at such pains as to upset the ulcers over ranking of 13-18 then you are taking life just a bit too bloody seriously, and if you don’t care, welcome to the rest of the country, we don’t care. DHB are a joke. Seriously why the hell are we voting for them, we don’t know them, we never hear from them unless they are sipping Hawkes Bay wine while wining about being sacked.
As for councils, STV is brilliant and should be in the general election (nobody tell Garth George, he might just have that fatal heart attack that this country seems to be inflicting on him).
If you have no idea who 12-18 are, don’t rank them. After reading their bios, it didn’t take too much ink to figure out whom I was going to vote for. I can’t believe that Wgtn is so stupid as to choose between STV and FPP. Where is the MPP, or did ADHD get in the way?
On the Peninsula ward here, it would have taken all of 10 seconds more to figure out whom I liked first, next, next, next and of course last – that annoying old sod who doesn’t want a stadium in Dunedin.
March 7th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Going for single member wards defats the whole purpose of the thing which is to not exclude Say Labour voters just because 60% of their ward like C&R. Having a multi-member ( 3+ ) ward enables a reasonable amount of proportionality.
As for ranking 15 candidates in a 3 person ward? This shouldn’t be needed. Just pick you party ( Labour say ) and rank their candidates ( they could have more than 3 ) followed by anyone else you like. According http://www.npsnet.com/cdd/PR-West.htm :
“Experience in countries, such as Ireland, where STV has been used for many elections shows that approximately 80% of voters see their first-choice candidate elected, while 95% see at least one of their first two choices elected, and 97% one of their first three. Therefore if a voter marks as few as 3 preferences on her STV ballot, the overwhelming likelihood is that his or her preferences will not be exhausted and the vote will be counted. It should be remembered that there will be multiple candidates running for each party. The voter might therefore wish to vote for only 3 candidates from the same party, and the great likelihood is that one of them will be elected. Most voters will have at least this many preferences.”
March 7th, 2008 at 1:24 am
OMG, NZ Herald has a complimentary story.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10496531
NZs newspaper of record engages 12yo’s yet again.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:33 am
I agree with Paul (and to a great degree with PaulL).
Yes, preference voting as PaulL describes it is used in Australia. In close races it can produce some rogue results. A candidate whose campaign I ran got 49.5% of the first preference vote out of a field over 7 candidates. The next most popular candidate received around 25% of the vote. But by the time the preferences of the lower-polling candidates were distributed the second-placed candidate won.
This leads to all sorts of dubious “preference deals”. For instance a candidate who failed to be selected by my candidate’s party ran as an independent but said she’d “give her preferences” to him (candidates hand out ‘how to vote cards’ which are guides as per option 3 outlined by PaulL aboove).
However on election day she was handing out “how to vote” cards preferencing the opposing party. Clearly she’d been offered an inducement as she was drummed out of the party she’d originally sought the nomination for, and thus lost her place on a local council. Or perhaps her failure at selection just burned her more than was thought.
That’s why I support a “clean” STV model where candidates are restricted to saying “vote for me”, not “vote for me and then him, then her, then her…”
But most importantly, as Paul says, if you can’t be bothered ranking to the bottom, don’t. And if you can’t be bothered finding out about the people for whom you’re voting, what are you doing holding the pencil?
As a person who champions technology, DPF, I’m surprised you don’t look to technology to solve some of the problems with voting. Diebold-like problems aside (which aren’t failures so much as sabotage), technology offers the potential to solve a great many issues. An online voting system would at least allow people to read a bio (and maybe even watch a video if they wished) of each candidate, ‘shortlisting’ them and then coming back and ranking them, for instance.
That’s what I meant a few days ago when I advocated that NZ create a solution that wasn’t necessarily a carbon copy of anyone else’s voting system – not inventing an entirely new system of vote counting as some people seem to think!
March 7th, 2008 at 5:42 am
STV in parliamentary elections I tend to support as people do follow national politics enough to be able to rank a few parties and candidates in a sensible order.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:54 am
When there are a lot of candidates you don’t know, surely FPP is every bit as much a lottery?
At least with STV you can rank the candidates you *do* care about (whether positively or negatively). If the rest are in a random order who cares? If there are no strong feelings then it probably doesn’t matter which of them get in anyway.
March 7th, 2008 at 6:30 am
“Trifecta”-style STV voting maybe?
> LAWS179: “Improving our local democracy”
March 7th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Rex Widerstrom said
“Yes, preference voting as PaulL describes it is used in Australia. In close races it can produce some rogue results. A candidate whose campaign I ran got 49.5% of the first preference vote out of a field over 7 candidates. The next most popular candidate received around 25% of the vote. But by the time the preferences of the lower-polling candidates were distributed the second-placed candidate won.”
What Rex has described is exactly what is likely to happen with our MMP-elected Government.
March 7th, 2008 at 10:13 am
“Yes, preference voting as PaulL describes it is used in Australia. In close races it can produce some rogue results. A candidate whose campaign I ran got 49.5% of the first preference vote out of a field over 7 candidates. The next most popular candidate received around 25% of the vote. But by the time the preferences of the lower-polling candidates were distributed the second-placed candidate won.”
Which is why I would like to see some sort of weighting system in place to balance that out.
March 7th, 2008 at 10:46 am
The Lower Hutt City Council also uses STV and I think it is a waste of time, given the profile (or lack of it) for most candidates. There are also too many positions to vote for – unless you are a political junkie – most of the people are completely unknown to you, even the all but the top two political “parties” are unknowns.
My idea would be to simplify it, in a ward were you, say, have to elect 3 councillors, everyone gets to vote for (up to) 5 people, then use FPP to find the 3 that get the most ticks. That way there is no ranking, just straight out counting. The instructions would be a lot simpler also “Tick up to 5 people that you want to vote for”, rather than the fairly convoluted set of instructions that came with the voting paper we got sent.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Some good suggestions coming from people.
So… where’s the referendum on MMP we were promised when we were sold that particular pig in a poke???
March 8th, 2008 at 10:39 am
David – this post hits the nail on the head, and I’m a fan of STV.