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.
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.
This page basically says that this is only used for finding the most popular candidate (e.g. voting for a Mayor or Pope). There is no example that I can find on how you might take the votes from an approval voting system and assign seats in a parliament from those results.
Ok, let’s step away from my example where I’m trying to show abuse, and instead look at a normal looking vote.
100 voters. 5 political parties: Greens, Labour, NZ First, National, Act.
This means there are:
There are 137 votes total cast by 100 voters.
Let’s say there are 120 seats like in our parliament. How do you allocate the seats to the parties based on the above votes?
I explained that to you.
Right now we apportion the seats according to percentage of the vote. We would do the same thing.
you take the total number of votes and the votes each party got and you apportion seats according to what percent of the total they got.
Same as we do now.