This is a summary of the Future for Local Government report - He piki tūranga, he piki kōtuku.
Recommendations that stood out to me were reducing the voting age for local elections to 16, implementing ranked voting (STV), and increasing the term limits to four years.
Also, not mentioned in RNZ’s summary is the recommendation that the number of local councils is reduced from 80 to about 15.
Ok I addressed the party issue as well. Just like there is only one candidate that can win there are only a limited set of seats in the parliament.
The votes are tallied. The party with the most votes is allocated their seats. The party with the second most votes is allocated their seats and so on until all the seats are filled. There would have to be a way to settle ties but that’s not that difficult.
I don’t feel like I’m getting my idea across, regardless of if I’m correct or not. I’ll try to explain my thought process a little more.
Let’s say there are 10 voters, and the election is only for parties. National has a list of potential MPs.
National:
Labour has put forward their candidates:
And then the Legalise Marijuana party saw a loophole, and so has registered a bunch of extra parties. Theirs looks like this:
LM1:
LM2:
LM3:
LM4:
LM5:
LM6:
LM7:
LM8:
LM9:
LM10:
Now our 10 voters come into the voting booth, and they see the list of options:
5 voters want to vote for National, so they only vote for National. They are all against legalising marijuana and don’t like Labour’s policies so they don’t vote for anyone else.
4 voters want to vote for Labour, so they do. They are also all against legalising marijuana and don’t like National’s policies so they don’t vote for anyone else.
1 voter wants to vote for the Legalise Marijuana party. The party has told them how they can vote for all 10 of their subsidiaries, so they do this.
Now we add up the votes.
5 for National 4 for Labour 10 for Legalise Marijuana subsidiary parties
The Legalise Marijuana party now has 52% of the seats and so can pass their law, but only 1 out of 10 voters actually voted for them.
You say this is fair because they all had the same number of potential votes. I say it’s unfair because 10% of votes got 52% of seats.
How do you figure that?
The party itself only has one vote.
In your example the votes are tallied. There are five votes for national, they get the most votes and they are allocated five seats. labour has four votes and they are allocated four seats. All other parties have one vote and a tie break is needed to determine who gets the last seat.
It’s not like you get to add the votes of the other parties together.
No, the party formally registered 9 new parties and split their members across them.
Now they have a coalition of parties whose members all came from the same original party.
How many people are voting? If there are nine people voting each giving all of their votes for the parties then the parties should win and rule because they have more voters. Nine people voted for these parties while only five people voted for National and four for Labour.
Your voting system says that every voter can vote for as many parties as they like. As I explained in my post, there are 10 voters. 5 voted only for National. 4 voted only for Labour.
1 voter voted for 10 different subsidiary parties of the Legalise Marijuana Party.
When we add up the votes, the Legalise Marijuana Party coalition has 10 votes compared to 5 for National and 4 for Labour.
OK.
OK.
it doesn’t matter. The coalition will not get seats as a coalition. National gets five seats of the ten seat parliament. Labour gets four seats. All the rest of the parties are tied for third place with one vote each. Whatever the tie break process is will determine who gets the last seat.
Honestly I don’t know why this is so confusing for you. Each of those parties only has one vote. They are all tied for last place. They can’t combine their votes or transfer their votes to somebody else.
I don’t know why either.
Wait, what? There are 19 votes from the 10 voters, how come National gets 5 seats from 5 votes? What would have happened if 2 of the National voters also voted for Labour, and one of the Labour voters also voted for National? Then the Labour and National tally total could have been 6 for National and 6 for Labour, how would the 10 seats get allocated then?
Your voting system is to allow people to vote for as many parties as they like and tally up all the ticks. That’s all you explained, however, it seems there is a lot more to it in terms of how those ticks are translated to seats. Is this a real-world voting system where you can point me to a wikipedia page or something that can explain it to someone like me who just doesn’t get it?
because each of those parties only got one vote.
The total votes would get counted for each party as before. If two of the national voters also voted for labour and one labour voter also voted for national there would be a tie and the tie break process would be invoked. Presumably since there are enough seats to accomodate both parties both parties would get equal seats because they got equal percent of the votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#:~:text=Approval voting allows voters to,consider to be reasonable choices.