STV in the Tron
In some paper somewhere in the last week (sorry, can’t recall where) I read a letter to the editor that started off with the usual letters page rant attacking MMP because it allows MPs who have been booted out of an electorate back in on the Party List. But it ended unusually by advocating STV, rather than a return to FPP, as the solution.
The Hamilton City Council has also recognised that the delays in returning some STV results last year were a failing on the part of the companies running the elections rather than the system itself. Despite the nearby Matamata-Piako District Council returning to FPP after last year’s poll, the HCC is pressing on with introducing STV for their 2007 elections, holding a workshop last night to facilitate the process . As Mayor Michael Redman says:
“Council has decided to move to STV because it is a voting system that potentially offers fairer representation.”
As one of the main supporters of STV, Rod was pained by the bad name that it received last year. His response STV: healthy baby, difficult birth, published in The Press just over a year ago, is worth a read.
November 29th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
With Rod, et al’s success at introducing STV at council level, I hope the Greens get behind a campaign for STV at the national level elections. Keep voting simple for the punters; one voting system to rule them all!
November 29th, 2005 at 7:37 pm
While I support STV at the local level, I would not support it for national elections. It does not gaurentee proportional results. Furthermore STV can, in some circumstances, have perverse incentives whereby it is helpful to not rank the candiate you wish to win. (this is mainly hypothetical)
November 29th, 2005 at 8:28 pm
Currently there are moves afoot to get STV up & running for more of the local government elections - currently, the Wgtn council, the Mayor and the District Health Boards are elected using STV, but not the Greater Wgtn Council, or some of the further Hutt councils.
The usefulness of STV relies on voters understanding statistics at about a 6th form maths level; it’s not truly arduous to understand and it works much more swiftly and transparently than MMP, which is why Wgtn City Council elections are shown to produce results very early after the polls close, compared to the MMP hangover seen on Sept 18th 2005.
It supports “2 Party” politics even less than MMP does, however, so it is not going to be popular at National Election level any time soon…..
November 29th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
STV??? Nooooo! (in the voice of James Earl Jones). It’s nuts. 6th form maths? Can most people really remember calculus and probability theory? It’s too complicated. Local elections are farcical anyway, without making us rank the candidates. Hell I knew almost none of the people I was voting for in it any way. So it all ended up just being ‘now, which one was the labour candidate?’. Might as well have been one tick and be done with it.
November 29th, 2005 at 9:06 pm
frog, sorry for being dim, but what does “in the Tron” refer to?
GregStephens, that’s an interesting couple of angles on STV, I’d be interested to hear more of your reasoning, or a reference to a webpage that explains this theory.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, STV elections are great for political junkies because you get the results of all the different rounds to examine and theorise about why that vote went from that candidate to that candidate and so on. Lots of insights into voters to be drawn.
November 29th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
There is no way that voting in an STV election requires sixth form maths, it is as easy as 1 2 3 to vote in an STV election. Who is your favourite candidate. OK, whose your second favourite. etc. etc.
I also disagree that it is difficult to count the results in an STV election either. Get a group of friends together and have an STV election about which pizza(s) to get - I guarentee you’d be able to count the results.
Ben Wilson, if you only want to rank one candidate, you can. You just enter a single 1 into the box beside your fave candidate. Easy.
November 29th, 2005 at 11:28 pm
Stuey: “The Tron” is Hamspeak for Hamtown, as in “Hamiltron”, although it’s a bit plebian :).
November 30th, 2005 at 12:21 am
STV makes sense when you’re choosing individuals. Ideal for small-town or ward-level elections, where you’re close enough to judge. No good on a national level because you get a beauty contest where the biggest budget is liable to win.
It doesn’t suit political parties, of course, because the individual is liable to be more important than the ticket : people might rank a competent, hard-working, decent C&R over a Labour placeholder, and good on them.
November 30th, 2005 at 5:53 am
so…frog’s a tron…..mmmmm….it all comes clearer..somehow…
phil(whoar.co.nz)
November 30th, 2005 at 11:33 am
MMP + STV please. Let me vote for parties by STV.
1. Green
2. Labour
3. Winston Peters (Oh wait, he ISN’T a party of one? Oh dear)
4 .
5
respectfully
BJ
November 30th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
I thought Tron was a low budget 80s scifi movie. Glad to hear different. I can see STV is good for people who like politics. That’s just not the majority of people.
Nice analogy, stuey, picking politicians is like picking pizzas. You can say you want peperoni first, vegie next, and put anchovies right at the bottom. Then take as many slices of what you like. But I think MMP gives the same result in half the time. Vote for one pizza of choice, and then allocate slices in proportion to the result. Feel free to help yourself to pieces other people chose, and let them take your choice - but you probably won’t need to, since everyone picked what they actually like already.
And I suppose STV does have the advantage that the lazy man, like me, can just just choose hawaiian instead of ranking all 70 pizzas on the menu. Hmmm which is really yuckier? Anchovies or sour cream? I guess it depends how many anchovies…
November 30th, 2005 at 4:32 pm
Ben
No No No - It was actually a pretty neat Disney Sc-Fi with a pretty decent budget, and for the time, pretty decent effects. Juvenile plot but that doesn’t matter in Hollywood for any picture… respectfully BJ
November 30th, 2005 at 4:49 pm
Aha! I never did see it, and made the low budget assumption from the super cheezy costumes. But true, no sillier than Spiderman’s. How does he see through those opaque eyeholes?
November 30th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Ben: At the risk of sounding Hamilphobic, which I’m not, Hamilton’s a low budget 80s sort of city, so Tron is probably appropriate on that count as well.
bjchip: Ham’s also pretty neat, well budgeted, Disneyesque in places and a bit juvenile, so Tron is doubly appropriate.
The tag was put on the place by a local faux student radio station, now defunct I believe. It was most widely spread by John Campbell on that nationwide tour TV show he did last year.
November 30th, 2005 at 5:03 pm
It’s in the style of Melbournites calling the Botanical Gardens ‘The Tan’? Given that I got sunburned walking around there it should probably ‘The English Tan’
November 30th, 2005 at 7:38 pm
Ben, you seem to have misinterpreted the STV pizza example. It is not about choosing multiple toppings for a single pizza, (although it could be, but that may end up with a pizza that is designed by committee!).
It is about a group of people choosing a type of pizza (or 2 or 3 different types) in a way that means that everyone gets a choice they like, rather than a minority dictating the choice for everyone else because of the majority splitting their votes among different possibilities.
P.S. The STV pizza example is also NOT an analogy for politics, it is a practical exercise to explain how STV works in a user-friendly way that people can relate to.
November 30th, 2005 at 9:20 pm
Stuey, I read u loud & clear. And so long as there are more pizzas than choices, under MMP there’s a good chance of there being a pizza for everyone, the one they asked for.
I think thresholds are the real evil of MMP, which lead to all the tactical voting. For instance I tactically voted Green out of fear that they’d not make the threshold, and I like Nachos and the push for alternate energies and waste management, and Fitzsimmons made it patently clear they’d support Labour. I would have probably voted Labour if it wasn’t for that damned threshold, just because this time I also thought it was going to be a close race and I’m terrified of Brash getting his hands on our necks.
If it wasn’t for the darned threshold I’d probably vote for the legalize cannabis party sometimes, Labour sometimes, Green sometimes, entirely on who seemed to be the most rational, but all my choices this time were about fear of the alternative.
December 1st, 2005 at 12:23 am
You lefties don’t understand anything. It’s not about dividing up the pizza, it’s about growing the pizza so there’s more for everyone.
…Sorry, what was it we were talking about?
December 1st, 2005 at 12:55 am
Aha, Ben, then STV is the perfect voting system for you because you can vote for all 3 of them at once
December 1st, 2005 at 7:55 am
BJchip, the only reason parties would even NEED to work off the STV system would be the case of not meeting the (rather silly) 5% threshhold needed to enter parliament. MMP -already- works to the same purpose as STV does in this respect, as it allows most people in the country to have their vote count for either first or second choice of party in parliament. The risk in forming and voting for a party that can’t even win a single seat in a proportional election should really be there is a disincentive to parties that are TOO small.
Also, in a sense, you need to keep in mind we still actually HAVE FPP in a sense- our for electorates are counted in the same way, it’s merely that our parliament’s proportionality is no longer determined by electorates alone. (This is a good thing. People like Winston thrive on electorates, which is why I’d like to see the electorate-winning stipulation removed from MMP and just have parliament proportional in general, without a 1-seat minimum for representation
)
STV is an excellent system for voting for electorate candidates, however, and it would work quite well instead of the legacy “one tick” system we inherited from FPP. The good thing about STV is that you you get to register your genuine first choice, but in the event that candidate is not going to be elected, you can have your vote revert to any other candidates you support to a lesser degree. It removes “wasted” votes for candidates in much the same way as MMP removes wasted support for parties- although that said, STV still registers your vote for your last remaining choice if none of your candidates is elected, so there’s no screwy systems where wasted votes are eliminated
As for the negative press in the papers… it’s all coming from people who have no idea how group dynamics work. Hello? When you vote for a party, you’re saying you TRUST their management to work for you in selecting effective MPs for their cause. If you DON’T like the decisions to pull electorate MPs back in through the list, then write to your party, or vote for someone who is more principled. Same goes for people who get a high position in the list that you think are ineffective. If you’re not telling the party what will win and lose your vote, then why the hell should they do what you want? ;D
Honestly, I think that kicking list MPs out of parliament because their parties couldn’t work with them properly is actually a step in the wrong direction, and a step away from MMP. It’s a party’s responsibility to work together with its MPs, and if it can’t keep the group together, it isn’t an effective party and deserves to have lost a vote on key issues. This should also help incentivise people not to just vote for the biggest contender, as well, as those parties are the ones most likely to have problems with losing MPs.
Ben: STV doesn’t REALLY require sixth-form mathematics. It requires you to be honest with your preferences, and only list people you actually WANT governing, not people you want governing more than someone else. That’s where the bad side of STV comes in- if people list backup choices they aren’t really enthusiastic about, then we get a result that nobody really wanted at all. And I hear ya on the threshhold buddy, I’d rather have it straight out removed and just do a runoff with the party vote until all remaining parties had at least a single seat, even though the threshhold might play into our (Green supporter’s) hands at times by cannibilising Labour and ALCP support
And alistair: I would’ve made the same comment to the Right in regards to their untargetted tax cuts ;D
To those who do not know how STV works, here’s what I recall from reading about it:
First, we consider everyone’s first preference. We rank all the candidates based on this.Then we eliminate the person with the fewest first preferences. Then we go through electronically and check if the people who voted for the person we eliminated had a next choice. If they do, we reassign all the votes that haven’t hit their last choice, and then rank the remaining candidates again. Then we keep eliminating candidates and transferring votes and eliminating and transferring until the number of candidates ranked is equal to the number of available positions in the contest. (In local elections, this isn’t always one) I believe this is called a “runoff” vote, as the losers drip off kinda like honey on a plank
The brilliant thing about this too, is that by the time you get to the final round, the person who wins in a single-seat race usually ends up having majority support to some degree anyway, assuming you have a big enough sample. So it really does deliver a result that people prefer
December 1st, 2005 at 8:57 am
“..You lefties don’t understand anything. It’s not about dividing up the pizza, it’s about growing the pizza so there’s more for everyone..”
but alister..you righties still don’t seem to have faced up to the reality that we are fast running out of pizza ingredients…….
if we don’t source some more ingredients.. and/or change our rates of consumption… soon it won’t be bigger pizzas for all…it’ll just be those ghastly looking (from a vegan point of view..:) cheese-dip-thingies for all……:)
(i feel like i’ve just had an attack of the ‘forrest gumps’….)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
December 1st, 2005 at 10:15 am
BJchip, the only reason parties would even NEED to work off the STV system would be the case of not meeting the (rather silly) 5% threshhold needed to enter parliament.
There are two issues here, the 5% rule puts smaller minority parties at a disadvantage but it also encourages a certain amount of maturity in them. It also encourages more stable government, which is (I think) something not being considered as an advantage. It IS an advantage however, if you wish to ever accomplish anything, either as a businessman OR as a socialist.
Taking the threshold to that of the individual seat leads to many many smaller voices and larger (longer to negotiate) coalitions. This is untenable for stable government. 5% is arbitrary and could be perhaps adjusted slightly, but STV does away with the problem in its own way. Is there something difficult about STV for the party vote that I missed? I was under the impression that there was no fairer method of handling any given election… (no method more likely to return a result agreeable to the majority of those voting) but that was one analysis 20 years ago, my information may be out of date.
respectfully
BJ
December 1st, 2005 at 10:43 am
Seems to me that STV for parties at the national level (actually its preferential voting as you are only choosing one party but minor point) is a good idea as it provides an alternative to lowering the 5% threshold.
So you can safely vote for the tiny party of your first choice in the knowledge that, if it doesn’t kick 5%, your vote will go to your next choice, and so on, until it reaches a party which has over 5% (or you run out of ranked parties).
Looking at NZ’s voting record, the main effect of this would probably be to bring fundamentalist Christian parties into our parliament. I do see some irony in advocating greater democracy so those who oppose democracy can have a voice….
Interestingly in Australia you are forced to rank all candidates to have your vote counted. I can see no logical reason for this and would hate to see it applied here - far better to be able to say “I’d rather my vote didn’t count than contributed in any way to electing this person”.
December 1st, 2005 at 10:59 am
Personally if I had to choose a system I would go for one in which referenda figure far more highly. We don’t need representatives making moral choices for us, although I can see having them works for practical things like budgeting and running an education department.
Nice idea to have STV for the electorate votes. Will still give a FPP result, as it does in ozzie, but we’ll get a lot more information about why. Mandates will be clearer.
December 1st, 2005 at 11:01 am
It may also be a way of keeping the fundies out of the drivers seat of the major parties however, the stealth tactics and other abuses of the system (in the USA in particular, but also the EB here), would be far less handy. They could get a voice, and seats and they would have their own party and not prop up (or subvert) others. I do believe that the end result would be far clearer and probably fairer to them as well as to us.
In the USA the fundies have their hands on the controls of the Republican party. The system gives them control of the most powerful military machinery on the planet… yet almost nobody knows who is actually calling the shots.
I am a firm believer that “Fundamentalism stops a thinking mind”, but I also like the idea of a participatory democracy that allows them a voice and exposes their ideas and ideals in pure form. It’s hard to argue with them the way its set up now, but in any actual argument I have never failed to send them back behind the wall of their belief, and I have no doubt that the parliamentarians currently occupying the beehive are even more capable of dealing with them in debate.
respectfully
BJ
December 1st, 2005 at 12:39 pm
Yes, give them their one seat and see who wants to be their allies. I think that kind of inclusion actually serves the purpose of taking the edge of disempowered fundies - they have to negotiate to be part of a coalition and all that, instead of just wielding hidden influence. Makes them more moderate. And if not, who cares? No one will ally with them, except in dire need.
It would be a wierd government though - probably a lot more tiddler parties. You could call them extremists, but I don’t think just because a party is small means it’s extreme - I wouldn’t call either Anderton or Dunne extreme.
December 1st, 2005 at 1:30 pm
The beauty of the STV solution is that they’d have to get a preference from enough people to poll over 5%, in other words that many people would have to vote for the fundie party ahead of every larger party…. and that would mean that they’d HAVE to withdraw their tentacles from the other moderate - right parties… or get nothing at all.
respectfully
BJ
December 1st, 2005 at 1:42 pm
I’m not really bitter on extremists anyways. I think they should be tolerated, given a voice. People can make up their own minds if it’s crap. Plenty of perfectly sound ideas have come straight from ‘extremists’. It was once considered extremist to think the world was not the centre of the universe. Democracy itself was an idea of extremists once.
December 2nd, 2005 at 2:08 am
Jgg: that’s not entirely correct. You can stop numbering any time you want. You can also vote “above the line” which means it goes with the parties predecided preferences.
The differculty comes if you’re anal retentive and want to allocate all preferences and mess up (miss a number, double up, etc) then you’re entire vote is informal.
I think stv is better for regional stuff, but quite like mmp for national.
December 2nd, 2005 at 8:34 am
That’s funny, I like MMP for getting rid of national. But they’ll be back, and they’re talking these days about bringing back the glorious old FPP which served them wonderfully. Remembering such glorious triumphs as securing government with less total votes than Labour, and Values party always getting zip.
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:35 am
A slight side-debate with Tom S about Australia:
Tom S: “You can stop numbering any time you want. You can also vote “above the lineâ€? which means it goes with the parties predecided preferences. ”
As you say voting above the line means you allow the parties to allocate preferences. However those parties preference lists do rank ALL candidates.
Similarly if you look at the ballot paper for the Federal Senate - and I concede this ballot may vary between states; I only know Victoria for sure - it says you MUST rank all candidates or vote above the line for your vote to be counted at all.
If you go below the line and you stop numbering before all candidates are ranked, your vote is discarded as invalid. As you say ranking all candidates yourself is pretty tedious but it is that or vote above the line. Stopping part way is an invalid vote. I am sure that is one of the key reasons why voting above the line is so popular!