However, I fully agree that even the idea of ranking candidates is far more complicated than the two ticks system. I would like STV but I just don’t think we are ready for it. STV in local elections is a good way to introduce it to people, I think.

I love having STV in the local elections in Wellington, but one thing I’ve noticed is that it takes a hell of a lot more time. Largely that’s because even though I know I only need to rank the candidates who have a hope of getting anywhere, I still feel compelled to make sure I research and correctly rank all the other candidates in relation to each other. This also isn’t easy in a local-election world where it can be difficult to get to local candidate meets to see people speaking, and lack of coverage means it’s often hard to discover anything about a candidate apart from the short paragraph they’ve written about themselves. (I’ve found the GWRC especially hard for this, but fairly ranking DHB candidates was virtually impossible when we were asked to vote for them.) Without ranking everyone, though, it just feels like I’ve not done it properly. Compare this with FPP where generally you only have to care about the candidate you like most, and you just vote for them without needing to care about deeply understanding anyone else at all.

And every so often those extra rankings matter more than you might have assumed. In 2022 I had a candidate in my ward who, imho, is a crazy nutter. After previous elections where he’d done awfully I didn’t expect he’d rate this time either, but this time he somehow was selected first of the three candidates in the ward.

I’ve also lived in Australia previously with dual citizenship and voted in a local election there. It was awful because there were roughly 30 candidates, none of whom I knew the slightest thing about. This was for the municipal rectangle of houses in which I spent 7 sleeping hours of every 24 living in it. I wasn’t likely to stay there for longer than a year before shifting to a different municipal rectangle of houses, and I still had to figure out who to vote for.

Australia deals with the voting complexity problem of STV in two ways. (1) It makes voting mandatory, and (2) it lets each candidate provide a list of preferred rankings of other candidates. Each voter, if they choose, can simply choose the candidate they like most and then tick a box to auto-assign the rest of their rankings to the list provided by that candidate.

I think both have problems.

Firstly the rankings by candidates result in a lot of bartering between candidates to get high on each others’ lists. It’s good to be near the top of a list of a candidate likely to be eliminated before you, because then you get allocated all their vote as soon as they’re eliminated. It’s also good to be near the top of a list of a candidate likely to be elected early and overwhelmingly, because then you get allocated all the unnecessary portion of their vote as soon as they’ve been elected.

Secondly, I think it makes a mockery of asking people to rank candidates when they’re really just out-sourcing that responsibility.

In the end, for my municipal rectangle, compulsory voting meant I had to vote despite feeling like I had zero stake in the outcome. After genuinely trying to learn about the candidates, I cast a donkey vote because I simply didn’t care and it seemed wrong for me to influence the outcome over people who really did care.