The Lesotho Option

How TPM's electorate vote gambit could bring down the Māori seats

All electoral systems can be gamed to a greater or lesser extent. First Past the Post invites gerrymandering, for example, where electorate boundaries are drawn to concentrate the supporters of one party in a single district, to minimise the number of seats that party’s candidates win. The manipulation of MMP is more complicated, but we’ve seen degrees of gaming from the very start.

An obvious early example is Jeanette Fitzsimons in the Coromandel electorate back in 1999. Because the Greens were right on the edge of the 5% threshold, it was uncertain coming into the final stretch whether they would make the cut. And so Helen Clark let it be known that she would not object to Labour voters giving their electorate vote to Fitzsimons instead of Margaret Hawkeswood.

Fitzsimons narrowly won the seat, beating National’s Murray McLean by just 250 votes on the final count. And if there is any doubt as to the impact of Clark’s endorsement, consider that she received 13,682 electorate votes against just 2,640 recorded for her party. In the end, it did not really matter, because the Greens crossed the 5% threshold when special votes were counted. Still, it was a useful insurance policy and an early example of overt tactical voting.

Then we have Epsom, which is the point that tactical voting was considered to no longer be fair because it wasn’t benefiting the left anymore.

People forget that in 2005, Rodney Hide genuinely wrested the electorate from Richard Worth. It was not gifted to him and National did not want to help ACT survive. But Epsom voters were canny enough to work out the choice before them and Hide prevailed.

Over subsequent elections, National made its peace with the arrangement and became less and less coy about it with every cycle. By 2011, John Key was doing the “cup of tea” thing with John Banks. By the next cycle it was really just an overt endorsement, even if National continued running Paul Goldsmith as a candidate.

People complained, but there was nothing particularly constitutionally outrageous about it.

What Te Pāti Māori wants to do now, however, is a serious escalation. At its own campaign launch, the party has asked supporters not to give it their party vote. It is campaigning for electorate votes only. [The obvious potential effect is to create an overhang that could give it disproportionate influence in the next Parliament.[

As a refresher, the party vote is meant to be the primary manner in which a party’s seat entitlement is calculated. However, if a party wins more electorates than its share of the party vote allows, it keeps the extra electorate seats and Parliament simply becomes larger and less proportionate. For example, if a party would be entitled to six seats through the party vote and wins seven electorates, it gets seven seats and Parliament increases from 120 members to 121.

This happens all the time, but they’re meant to be in the nature of a safety valve to deal with the occasional awkward result thrown up by voters. They were not envisaged as a deliberate mechanism to skew election results in ways that defeat the purpose of proportional representation. Previous maneuvers could affect who governed, but it’s worth noting that neither the Greens nor ACT have ever had the benefit of overhang seats.

And neither case involved a political party saying, in effect: please do not give us the vote that determines our proportional entitlement because we may get more MPs if you give that vote to our friends instead. So, as I said earlier, this is a real stepping up of the electoral system being gamed. And if TPM can pull it off, they will enjoy a temporary advantage at the cost of poisoning the well for everyone, including themselves.

We’ve seen the scenario taken to its logical conclusion in another country. It did not end well.