Discussion of political reform focuses on a few topics: tightening up donations, lowering the MMP threshold, and abolishing the Māori seats. These are interesting and important. Corruption should not be legal or significant. I’ve talked before about the value of eliminating the threshold entirely. The Māori seats are geographically vast and merit outside-the-box solutions to remain viable - what about each electorate getting multiple MPs who share one consensus vote for electorate in Parliament? However, there is one classic reform that we simply don’t discuss in New Zealand, and that is ranked choice in electorates.
The change to MMP from FPTP is often presented as complete. Before MMP, elections were all-or-nothing affairs that heavily overrepresented the major parties. After MMP, elections are proportional and, aside from that pesky threshold, everybody gets counted. The desire for electoral reform in response to frustrations was exhausted, whereas that day has not yet come in many other countries like the UK. However, we have succumbed to a common misconception. MMP doesn’t actually replace FPTP. Instead, MMP just bolts a proportionality mechanism onto the FPTP foundation, which remains exactly the same.
Under FPTP, we all voted for an MP in our electorate, the candidate with the most votes won, and then all the MPs formed a Parliament. We still do that! All MMP does is add a party vote. If your party doesn’t have “enough” MPs after the electorate results are in, with “enough” determined according to the party vote, list MPs are added to top up your numbers. We’ve still been dealing with FPTP this entire time. We just don’t talk about it anymore, because we won a big victory for proportionality and assumed that was the ballgame. (Indeed, this is a lot of why MMP was such an attractive replacement for FPTP - the system preserved electorates to marry change with continuity, unlike pure PR countries like South Africa and Israel.)
In terms of which parties form the government, we are in a great place electorally. Yes, we should deal with the MMP threshold, but the government basically represents a majority of the public. In terms of who represents you in your electorate, though, you're all but out of luck. The logic of FPTP weighs heavy here. Voters gravitate to one major party candidate because they’d rather they win than the other major party candidate. Going with a minor party candidate who can’t win can only weaken your preferred major party candidate.
This is why in 2023 there were 40 MPs to represent minor parties, but only 11 electorates enjoyed minor party representation - about 4 to 1. In 2020, it was 22 to 3 - about 7 to 1. In 2017, 18 to 1. And so on. It’s a huge mismatch. In the same period, the ratios for the major parties was 82:60, 98:69, and 102:70, all of which clock in well under 2 to 1. The major parties get far more of the benefits of having electorate MPs with their additional resources, continuing the cycle of major party dominance. Voters are far less likely to live in an electorate with a real choice and far more likely to be forced into a major-party and sometimes “lesser evil” binary.
Granted, if we had a perfect system for electorate representation, there still wouldn’t be that many minor party electorate wins. They have less electorates than the major parties and must concentrate where they compete. Voters for minor parties are spread throughout the country, rather than being concentrated in specific areas. That being said, they do tend towards certain regions with a high percentage of their favoured demographic.
Envisage a world where the minor parties get their best chance to plausibly take some more electorates and make the most of this. The Greens hold the seats they currently do and perhaps two or three other lefty seats like Ōhāriu or Mount Albert. ACT holds the seats they currently do and a bunch of rural ones like Rangitīkei, Southland and Selwyn (i.e sweeps of the South Island and a couple from the North Island too). The Māori Party sweeps the Māori electorates. NZ First takes Northland. A random independent or minnow like Raf Manji or Mark Ball sneaks in. Add up 3+6+3+1+1 on the back of a napkin, and while it’s not a given, it is entirely possible that 10-15 electorates would prefer to be represented by a minor party in a perfectly competitive landscape. Many tens of thousands of voters are held back from their preferred electorate MPs by current barriers.
What we can do to dismantle a barrier is enact ranked choice voting in our electorates. You may have already experienced this if your local elections have ranked choice voting: instead of ticking one candidate and they get your vote, you rank as many as you want as 1, 2, 3…If your #1 got the least votes, they get eliminated and your vote goes to your #2. #2 eliminated? No problem! #3 gets it? And so on and so on they go, removing the candidate with the least votes and redistributing the next choices to the other candidates until somebody has an outright majority instead of just a plurality. This is the difference between winning because your opponents split the vote enough that you had the most of anybody, versus winning because most people actually wanted you.
Studies overseas suggest this isn’t an incredible salve that transforms democracy - we’re talking about a significant but not overwhelming impact. Still, we’re already starting to see a change: Tory Whanau swept Wellington in a landslide in large part because she was able to unite votes from less inspiring candidates who might have prevailed under FPTP because their voters feared an opponent winning. Indeed, candidates like Whanau or Ray Chung might not even have entered the race if they worried that their candidacy would hand a victory to the other side of the aisle.
What’s more, the system may change candidate behaviours. When you can win by plurality you only have to unite your side of the aisle; you don’t have to offer anything to people who disagree with you. When you must win by getting the most votes, you’ll probably need some #2 votes, and that means you have a reason to offer more things to different groups looking for their own interests to be represented.
Ranked choice voting isn’t the revolutionary shift that some people dream it is, and as always you can come up with arguments against; for instance, voting needs to be as simple and accessible as possible, and any complexity risks confusing some voters into accidentally spoiling their ballots or just turning away. We also have a pretty healthy, respectable culture in most of our electorate races and don’t need to worry much about lowering tensions like in some other countries.
Nonetheless, I think this should be a go-to priority for political reform in New Zealand. It's not as though there's any conflict with keeping MMP - voters can still tick one party and one electorate candidate if they like, and unlike voting with runoff rounds, there's no time cost that messes with coalition formation. Right now, ~95% of voters end up with a National or Labour MP after every single election and will do so for decades to come. A sizeable chunk of those don’t see their party representation change at all. We deserve a system that gives candidates who can unite the electorate and change the outcome a fighting chance.
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