What to do about overhang?

As I have said on multiple occasions, I regard any attempts to deliberately engineer overhang seats as semi-undemocratic. MMP is designed to let the bloc with the most votes to form Government. Overhang strategies undermine the concept of equality of suffrage where all votes have equal power, and lead to outcomes that are unproportional.

There is only one party that is seeking an overhang strategy – Te Pāti Māori. They are unique in that they are actively discouraging people from giving them their party vote. All other parties are working hard to gain party votes.

There are activists who are promoting an overhang strategy on the right. This is not new. I have had people propose a variant of this since 1996.

The question is what to do is overhang results in a government that received fewer votes than the opposition?

I have considered whether the two major party leaders should refuse to form a Government if it is only possible due to overhang. The problem is that you can’t ignore the facts you actually have those overhang MPs (if there are any). You would have to have some of your MPs voting to keep a Government you oppose in power, and that simply isn’t feasible.

A gallery journalist has suggested a second election should be called. That would be ridiculous though. It would cost a huge amount of money and could produce the same outcome.

A sensible thing for any Prime Minister who only holds the job due to overhang would be to treat their mandate as somewhat limited, and where possible try to only pass laws when they can get some support from at least one non-Govt party. So that could mean PM Hipkins getting support from National, ACT or NZ First; or PM Luxon getting support from Labour or Opportunity. This would only apply if overhang is responsible for the Government being possible.

The focus for me is how to prevent overhang in future, so that a Government is only possible if it wins more votes than the opposition parties in Parliament. There are four main ways to do that.

1. Increase the size of Parliament. If you had say 150 MPs, 80 list and 70 electorate, then overhang is far far less likely to occur. But the public won’t want a larger Parliament (ironically overhang will deliver that anyway)
2. Change the ratio of electorate to list seats. If you had say 70 list seats and 50 electorates, overhang would be far far less likely to occur. However some already huge seats like West Coast – Taman would become even larger. Also unpopular.
3. If a party gains more electorate seats than its party vote share, then other parties get additional list seats so the proportions are proportional to the party vote. This would remove the incentive for overhang, but could result in a larger Parliament when you get accidental overhang. If TPM wins four seats and it is entitled to two, Parliament would have to almost double in size.
4. The German solution where if a party wins more electorate seats than its party vote share, then their most marginally won seats goes to the second place getter. This would make the electorate’s choice secondary to the party vote which would be less than ideal, but is still the best solution. It would 100% ensure all parties go all out for the party vote, so TPM would not try to repeat their overhang strategy, and people could no longer advocate that not giving your party vote to National actually helps National.

My hope is that there are no overhang seats, or if there are they don’t determine who can form Government. And that Parliament after the election gets a bipartisan consensus to amend the Electoral Act in line with option 4.