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.
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I am all about reducing the number of local councils. In most areas of the country the regional council manages less people than a decent sized city.
Ranked voting is already used in many places, it looks like the recommendation is to make this the standard everywhere.
The local councils/authorities thing is a bit weird. Not the recommendation, that’s on point, but the way the different councils are set up. You have all these little ones and no one wants to change it because you have your own mayor and you get to chat with him at the pub and tell him your issues and you feel like you have input. The mayor doesn’t want to change things because he’s the mayor, it’s a status symbol. The same for the other councilors.
There are so many! No way it’s efficient.
I couldn’t believe there were 80. It’s crazy.
And I’m in favour of STV at the national level too. It seems far more democratic, especially given the 5% threshold. We should be able to vote for a party that might not reach 5% without worrying that our vote will get wasted. It puts an unfair and artificial disadvantage on new or minor parties. STV is the solution.
The Wellington mayor seemed pretty positive about splitting up the councils, but that’s probably because she’s likely to increase her power. She did say she wanted metro Wellington to stay separate from Wairarapa, which I can understand.
But it’s hard to know whether it makes sense keeping the rural and metro councils separate. Policies of the city councils affect residents of the surrounding rural areas, and vice-versa. On the other hand, they need very different kinds of services.
And I’m in favour of STV at the national level too. It seems far more democratic, especially given the 5% threshold. We should be able to vote for a party that might not reach 5% without worrying that our vote will get wasted. It puts an unfair and artificial disadvantage on new or minor parties. STV is the solution.
I would love to vote STV in national elections! But I do have a concern about it. Currently the voting process is so incredibly simple. Show up, tell someone your name. Tick the box for the group you want to run the country, and another for the person you want to represent your area. Done.
With STV, you need to explain the concept. I guarantee there would be endless complaints about how complicated it is and how the old way was fine. There are also likely process problems, but I would hope the regional areas would be mostly working those out (I’m thinking of things like what do you do when someone ticks their three preferred candidates instead of listing them? Probably it’s an invalid vote but if you get a significant number of invalid votes then you risk getting challenged on voter fraud type complaints).
Yeah, that’s the counter-argument. I’m sure there would be complaints but inclined to think the public would be OK with it. As you said, it already happens with some local elections and we did it for the flag referendum, so people have some experience with it. And I think MMP is much more complex to understand, but we managed. If they do end up making all local elections STV, that won’t really be an issue at the national level anyway.
MMP might be more complex, but you don’t really have to understand it to vote for what you want. I’d argue the same for STV. I think you’re right, having STV at a local level everywhere is a good introduction for people.
I think ranked choice is too confusing for the voters. I prefer simpler systems like star voting or approval voting.
Yeah, the problem is that to get into government, you need 5% of the vote. One seat is worth less than 1% (120 seats), so you need to get a bunch of seats worth to be allowed in.
This is a problem because people don’t vote for the party they want because they might only get 2 seats worth of votes - and therefore end up with zero seats. This perception means a party might be likely to hit the 5% threshold, but they only get 1% of the votes because no one thinks they will get in so they vote for someone else.
I fully believe that we need a system that measures the actual parties people want in, not the parties they voted for because they thought a vote for the party they wanted was wasted. This will encourage more smaller parties, which gives options when forming government. It reduces the chances of a “Winnie as king maker” situation.
No one has to understand STV, they just need to understand that they need to write 1 next to their top option, 2 next to the second, etc.
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.
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.
Yeah I think you’re right, though in my experience local elections have more options because you’re voting in a whole council by name, rather than just a party and one person to represent you…
I still feel compelled to make sure I research and correctly rank all the other candidates in relation to each other
I started to take this more seriously when I found out about some crazy people in the running, like one that owed the council large amounts of money and I guess thought if he got on the council he wouldn’t have to pay? Or he thought it was a silly rule so he’d get it changed so he wouldn’t have to pay?
Anyway, he didn’t make it in by it was closer than I would have liked, and his blurb was very general and non-crazy sounding (there were words, but they didn’t really say much in terms of actually deciding who to vote for).
I ended up tracking a lot of them down on facebook, they often had campaign pages with 5 or 10 followers and if you read back through some posts you could get a feel for a lot of them.
I’m not sure how I feel about compulsory voting. I’m a big supported of compulsory voter registration, but to actually make people vote… I feel like you’ll just get a bunch of people who don’t care so will tick the one they’ve seen the most ads for rather than going on policies.
I think simply checking all candidates you support would achieve the ends we want. It’s super simple to understand, it doesn’t bias the listing order like STV does (people are likely to rank candidates in order of appearance), it’s easier to explain the counting and counting can be done manually without a fuss without performing complex algorithms.
Just count the ticks. The person with the most ticks wins. Simple as that. In the case of party votes they get seats according to the number of ticks they got.
Candidates are ordered randomly to try to prevent to bias of selecting the candidates at the top.
I’m not sure your system works. If like 3 parties, I get 3 votes. If you only like 1 party, you get 1 vote? Why can’t I assign my three votes to the one party Iike? It seems like some people get more votes than others, which most people would say isn’t fair.
Candidates are ordered randomly to try to prevent to bias of selecting the candidates at the top.
I understand that but humans will always bias from top to bottom when ranking and whoever gets the lucky draw to be near the top will get a higher ranking.
I’m not sure your system works. If like 3 parties, I get 3 votes. If you only like 1 party, you get 1 vote?
yes. All candidates (or parties) are listed. You check as many as you want. If you are indifferent you can check none or all. At the end of the day all the checkmarks are counted and whoever gets the most wins. In the case of party votes all votes for all parties are tallied and their seats are apportioned accordingly.
It seems like some people get more votes than others, which most people would say isn’t fair.
No everybody gets the same number of votes. You can use all or none or some of your votes. Just tick the candidates you like. Tick all the ones you like. Don’t tick the ones you don’t like. Super simple.
I understand that but humans will always bias from top to bottom when ranking and whoever gets the lucky draw to be near the top will get a higher ranking.
Print them randomly per voting paper. Not as hard as it sounds in this day and age.
No everybody gets the same number of votes. You can use all or none or some of your votes. Just tick the candidates you like. Tick all the ones you like. Don’t tick the ones you don’t like. Super simple.
There is no way this would be accepted by the general public.
Print them randomly per voting paper. Not as hard as it sounds in this day and age.
No I think that would be very hard even in this day and age. It’s not like these are printed on a printer or anything, they come off of a printing press.
There is no way this would be accepted by the general public.
Why not?
