Explainer - Radical overhaul is needed - that is the conclusion reached by a panel which spent two years reviewing the state of local government. RNZ has all you need to know.

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.

  • @DaveMAEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    You threw me off by telling me in my other example that rhere would need to be a tie breaker for third. Why? Lets assume there are 190 seats. If we apportion by votes, doesn’t this mean National get 50 seats, Labour gets 40 seats, and the 10 Legalise Marijuana parties get 10 seats each?

    Let’s say there are 10 voters, and the election is only for parties. National has a list of potential MPs.

    National:

    • Steve
    • Fred
    • Jim
    • Bob
    • Frank

    Labour has put forward their candidates:

    • Susan
    • Mia
    • Tama
    • Oliver
    • Stevie

    And then the Legalise Marijuana party saw a loophole, and so has registered a bunch of extra parties. Theirs looks like this:

    LM1:

    • Jonathan

    LM2:

    • Katie

    LM3:

    • Sally

    LM4:

    • Jimmy

    LM5:

    • PJ

    LM6:

    • Bobby

    LM7:

    • Kelly

    LM8:

    • Mary

    LM9:

    • Jane

    LM10:

    • Watson

    Now our 10 voters come into the voting booth, and they see the list of options:

    • National
    • Labour
    • LM1
    • LM2
    • LM3
    • LM4
    • LM5
    • LM6
    • LM7
    • LM8
    • LM9
    • LM10

    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

    • @BalpeenHammerEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      Honestly at this point there is no sense in continuing this conversation because you just willfully misunderstand what is being said. Party votes are decided on a percentage of the votes basis and that will not change. There will be threshold and that will not change. It’s just that you don’t “waste” your vote because you can give your vote to more than one party and they will get a percentage of that vote. It’s as simple as that.

      You continually, willfully, dishonestly, and maliciously present ten parties as somehow consolidating or trading their votes to combine them and that’s just dishonest. Each party will get a percentage of the total votes. They are not allowed to add them up and say “see we now have enough votes to get more seats”.

      • @DaveMAEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Honestly at this point there is no sense in continuing this conversation because you just willfully misunderstand what is being said.

        I’m sorry, you seemed willing to explain and I genuinely do not understand why my concerns aren’t valid (though you have certainly done your best to try to explain it so thank you for that). I suspect I may just not really get it, but the approval voting wikipedia page just assumes it’s only used for picking a top candidate so doesn’t help at all. I even tried getting chatGPT to explain it to me but it told me:

        Seat allocation in parliamentary systems is usually determined by a variety of methods, including party-list proportional representation, mixed-member proportional representation, or single-member districts. These systems take into account the overall share of votes a party receives and aim to allocate seats in a way that reflects the proportionality of the vote.

        Approval voting, on the other hand, does not directly account for the proportionality of votes. It focuses on identifying the candidate with the most approvals without considering the order of preferences or the relative strength of support for different parties. As a result, using approval voting for seat allocation in a Parliament may not adequately reflect the diversity of voter preferences or the proportionality of votes received by different parties.

        I apologise if you got the impression I was faking stupidity, I assure you it’s genuine.

        • @BalpeenHammerEnglish
          0•1 year ago

          We apportion seats according to percentage of votes casts. We would use the exact same method. Why is this so confusing to you? Count the votes cast, count votes for the party, take a percentage. You continually keep saying that the “sub parties” will be able to transfer their votes to the “parent party” and allow the parent party to get more seats. That’s not allowed now and it won’t be allowed under this system.

          So yea I don’t believe that you are genuine at all. I think you are wilfully and disingenuously misunderstanding something I keep repeating over and over again.