The election results this year are bad. Even if you voted for the national coalition, I think you should be angry about this year's results because they go against the point of MMP. I have two ideas of how to fix overhangs and make sure the government is always proportional, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
Idea 1, the simpler solution: Just add more list seats. Fill up all the electorate seats, then add list MPs until there are at least the base number of seats, and adding another seat would make it less proportional. Pros: It's simple, intuitive, and makes more sense than allowing overhangs. Cons: There could be a lot of MPs in the house.
Idea 2, STV + MMP: This idea uses STV or some other ranked system to elect the electorate MPs, which would be better than the FPTP we use for them now. But in this case, if an overhang happens, the overhang seat with the thinnest majority would be recalculated with the previous winner's votes transferred. Pros: it works in a better system for the electorates, and it makes for a consistent size of parliament. Cons: It's slightly more confusing for the voters, and calculating the seats could take much longer.
Germany have NOT solved the problem. In 2024 they simply did away with overhang seats entirely, which I'm not keen on. I feel like if you win an electorate, you should get a seat.
Pre 2024, they added extra seats... Applying that formula to the current election would add a whopping 650 seats, for a 770 seat parliament... (This is why Germany did away with that system, incidentally)
This is what parliament would look like under that system:
Whatever the solution is, it ain't that!
The article is essentially describing STV with extra steps, if I understand it correctly, which might be a solution. I'm not certain how I feel about STV. Changing the number of electorates or switching to wards is neither here nor there imo.
ETClarify: In the context of switching to STV, I thinking switching up electorates is neither here nor there. It would obviously be quite impactful in the current system
Thanks - the solution may well be to reduce the number of electorate seats so that we still have someone nearby to areas but not so many. We could do the same to list seats. Maybe our parliament size is reduced so it's not so unreasonable to keep proportions?
I'm just spouting things now. Any suggestions on other ways to solve the problem? I think I ultimately believe the parliament share should be approximately proportional to party vote, but I don't have a good idea of how to achieve that.
I have no idea to be honest.
I had a friend suggest treating the Māori roll separately. For this election that does make the numbers a little more sane (still quite a large parliament, but we potentially wouldn't need a new building lol) but that has all sorts of potential to screw over Māori voters, and I wouldn't trust any solution that tried to separate the two rolls for scaling.
I'm busy reading about STV, and that has problems too. It's better than FPTP but it does still have a tendency to favour larger parties, and isn't great in terms of proportional representation. I'm not sure how Op's idea of MMP+STV would work, but it would probably be better than what we have now? I think?
The more I think about it, the more I realise why Germany just said fuck it. Win enough of the party vote to get your electorate seats, or lose em. It's definitely simpler.
I'm honestly just glad this isn't going to fall to me to figure out.
It kinda sounds like the candidate with the most votes may not be elected for the electorate based on something outside of their control?
Yeah it's not a bad idea. I think maybe we could have a threshold. Like your first overhang seat is free but after that you need the votes. That would make it much harder to manipulate, and the effects of manipulation would be capped.
Yeah, maybe when we do reviews that produce recommendations perhaps we enact those recommendations? 😂 who am I kidding
Interesting, why did they choose that system over any other?
Are you from Germany?
It would be gods to hear the opinion of a German.
Nah, I've just been speaking to one online ha ha ha! I would be interested to know that too
ETA: It does seem to be what they did though