STV vs FPP for Wellington

Poneke has voted for STV in the Wellington referendum, despite earlier calling it a failure.

I blogged my views in March:

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. …

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.

My position has not changed. Sadly I am going to vote for FPP.

However my preference would be to have smaller single Councillor wards, as if that happened then I think STV would work fine for both Mayor and Council.