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Political Science Fisticuffs: Jab, Jab, Left Hook! | Sep 29, 2005 23:23

I think the main thing I need Keith to clarify is how he gets the Māori seats providing 150% representation? I know that with tactical voting in the Māori electorates, or what is also called 'split voting', giving your candidate vote to one party and your party vote to another, resulted in two extra MPs, but that isn't sufficient reason to assume that this is because it happened in the Māori electorates.

As his reader pointed out, the overhang can happen in any electorate, the fact that it happened in the Māori electorates just kind of shows, to my mind, that voters either listened to someone who told them how to make their vote count for both the Māori Party and it's allies, or they're just savvier that we're assuming.

After all, this is exactly what did happen in Epsom (Rodney Hide), Ohariu-Belmont (Peter Dunne), and Wigram (Jim Anderton). In every one of these electorates, the voters split their vote in favour of someone other than the candidate. Even more interestingly, the combined Labour/National party votes in these electorates exceeded the candidate vote by at least two thirds in every instance. Even in Tauranga, where Peters garnered 13,131 personal votes, the combined Labour/National party vote is 5.5 times larger than the party vote for NZ First (24,871 vs. 4,481 votes).

Now, despite having recently taken up a salary, in let's say a 'prominent financial institution', my statistics skills are at best imperfect, so Keith (or readers) feel free to correct my number crunching here. That also means you, MGTG.

You see, I'm attempting to give Keith a tap right where it hurts, in the spreadsheet.

What I'm doing is avoiding the argument that the Māori electorates are come kind of 'specially designated' area for Maori, instead illustrating that the four seats are deserved, and that the system is indeed the issue, regardless of who the seats are populated by.

For reference's sake the seven Māori electorates are: Te Tai Tonga, Waiariki, Ikaroa, Te Tai Hauauru, Tainui, Tamaki Makaurau, and Te Tai Tokerau

The assumption I made is this. If vote splitting is the issue, then what would have happened if you couldn't split your vote. If you had no choice but to cast your vote for the same party and candidate that is, but party proportionality is kept.

The next premise is that the Māori Party won all four candidate races in a stand-up fight, as did Hide in Epsom.

This would mean that every vote for the Māori Party candidates in the seven Māori electorates would have gone to the Māori Party proportionality in Parliament, and to clarify matters, the same for Labour, National and NZ First. This assumes of course that the latter two stood candidates in any of the Māori seats, which they did not.

As it is, and ignoring that there are still specials to be counted, 118,308 ballots were cast in the Māori electorates. Of the party votes:
55,137 votes Labour.
40,488 votes Māori Party.
7,051 votes NZ First.
4,234 votes National.
11,398 votes others (Destiny, Legalise Cannabis, Green etc.).

In fact, and as a point of interest, the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party's nationwide party vote is 4,609. Higher than National rated in all seven Māori seats. Likewise, the NZ First Party votes in the seven Māori seats total more than Peters received in Tauranga itself.

Of those 40,488 Māori party votes, 31,657 were actually cast in the Māori electorates, leaving 8,831 elsewhere (which for the purpose of this exercise we will have to assume were cast for Māori Party candidates in non-Māori electorates).

In the Māori electorates, of the total ballots cast, 53,702 recorded votes for Māori Party candidates.

Assuming that every vote for a Māori Party candidate, in a Māori electorate, had not been split, the Party's total vote would have been 62,533 votes (8,831 plus the 53,702 now non-split candidate votes).

Interestingly, 62,533 votes out of a total of 2,052,813 ballots cast equals 3.05% of the raw total vote. Or, 3.65 seats, which rounds up to, you guessed it, 4 seats.

As it is though, vote splitting in the Māori electorates seems to have contributed to the party votes of several other parties. The Māori Party itself didn't actually benefit, unless you consider that it provided votes for it's 'allies'.

Of the total ballots cast in the seven Māori electorates, parties ended up with the following percentages of their nationwide party votes:
71.2% Māori Party.
6.6% Labour Party.
5.9% NZ First Party.
0.005% National Party.

On the other hand though, of the total ballots cast in Wigram, Ohariu-Belmont and Epsom, of their nationwide party votes the same parties secured:
5.2% National Party.
3.7% Labour Party.
2.5% NZ First Party.
0.008% Māori Party.

What this means is that seven electorates have MPs not of the Labour or National Parties. But, they contributed the following amounts to the totals of other parties:
10.3% Labour Party.
8.4% NZ First Party.
5.205% National Party.

As it is, vote splitting increased the raw totals of all three of these parties.

But just taking into account the vote splitting in the three non-Māori Party 'other' electorates, NZ First would have dropped to 5.66% of the raw total ballot were these three electorates not to split votes (the raw total is the amount before 'wasted' votes on minor parties that don't reach 5% are discarded)
Labour? Drop to 39.05% of raw total (currently at 40.74%).
National? Drop to 37.39% of raw total (currently at 39.63%).

The permutations go on, and on.

But, it's getting very late, I've had a drink or two, and math isn't my strong point.

Regardless! What these numbers seem to indicate is that race doesn't appear to have been the primary issue in the Māori electorates. Even the National Party's vote was only 300 votes less than 2002 (4,554 party votes), despite the 'mainstream' campaign. Instead, it was simple MMP cunning that influenced the way voters in the Māori electorates behaved.

In other words, playing by the rules.

So, yes, the Māori electorates allowed the Māori Party to focus their campaign in seven of the electorate seats. But, the end result is exactly the same, and it was vote splitting across the entire country that contributed to the two extra seat-warmers in Parliament.

If anything, it merely reinforces the impression that some electorates have 'natural' constituencies. This red-blue kerfuffle is just a return to normality for example. The provinces have always been National Party stalwarts, and 2002 was actually an exception.

Keith, don't you sit up too late taking this to pieces.

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Māori Seats Not Bad | Sep 27, 2005 19:13

It's not often you'll get to see a spat between PA bloggers. So keep waiting. I'd merely like to provide a few clarifications for Keith about the Māori seats, and how they are not fundamentally anti-democratic.

How our system works is pretty complicated, and it's taken me a big chunk of lunch and afterwork time, and the elections.org website, to get the details straight, but basically it goes like this.

The biggest gerrymander in our system is the guarantee that the South Island automatically receives 16 electorate seats in the House of Representatives, 15 general and 1 Māori. To work out how many seats the North Island gets, including any specifically Māori seats, the South Island electoral population is divided by 16, and a number arrived at. The electoral population is the total number of people registered on the General roll.

[thanks to Brent up at the Salient office at Salient Design for pointing out the above mistake. also, as the population of the North Island grows, the number of Electorate seats, both Māori and General, increases, with a corresponding decline in List seats]

That number, currently approximately 54,000, is used to measure how many seats the North Island gets. This means that the electoral populations of the both the Māori and General rolls are divided to make sure that approximately 54,000 people are in each electorate. For a reason I couldn't work out, Māori seats currently only have 53,000 people each though. Still, no big.

What this means is that every electorate in the country, including the Māori electorates have essentially the same number of voters each. But, and there's always a but, for reasons unknown, Māori do not turn out to vote in large numbers despite enrolling. Consequently, MPs from Māori electorates often get into the House on fewer numbers. This can't be blamed on electoral boundaries though, it's purely a product of low turn-out. And that can happen in any electorate in the country.

And, it doesn't effect the Party vote, because votes in Māori electorates carry exactly the same weight as votes in General electorates when determining the proportion of List MPs. Less turn out just means less party votes in those electorates.

So to turn to Keith's blog. The tactical splitting of votes between local candidates and non-local Parties isn't a product of the Māori electorates. Conceivably, any electorate can deliver exactly the same result. If four seats, any four seats, returned a Green MP for example, but the persons returning that MP tactically voted for Labour, then we would also get an overhang.

If anything, because of the low turn out in the Māori electorates, there are possibly fewer MPs than there could have been in the overhang.

The next point is that the Māori electorates do not represent a racial gerrymander. Although the requirement for enrolment is that a person claim at least some Māori ancestry, it isn't policed. If Keith wanted to enrol as a Māori, he could.

Also, 'Māori electorate' doesn't equate to 'ethnically Māori candidate'. The convention is that they do, but this is no-where written in stone. Māori of a number of different political persuasions stand in the Māori seats, but it wouldn't stop me from doing so, big cracker that I am.

I think I know what's really getting Keith's goat. The fundamental assertion I disagree with is that New Zealand is a unitary political community. Māori have acted as a distinct political community, a subaltern counterpublic as Nancy Fraser would term it, for generations. Michael King, James Belich, Kayleen Hazlehurst, David Pearson and others have argued that, and the Māori seats partially reflect it.

But, paradoxically, Māori are also an integral part of the majority political community!

It's a very tricky one.

The mistake he's made is to assume that a separate Māori political community, one that's been around since pre-1840, doesn't also engage with broader New Zealand society. Which it does. Furthermore, although the Māori seats preference the election of Māori, these persons then head to Wellington, and conduct business with all the other MPs, from both Electorates and List.

In other words, there is no separatism. The Māori Party MPs have absolutely no option but to engage and transact with the remainder of New Zealand. And that process in itself means that Māori electorate MPs, who have been Labour, NZ First and Māori Party, then interact with like-minded MPs in our MMP environment.

Having said that though, the Māori electorates are traditionally left-leaning. But that hasn't Māori seats returning non-Labour candidates under MMP. What this in itself indicates is that the Māori seats do not represent a voting bloc, but instead concentrate Māori voters somewhere of their own choosing (again, enrolment is voluntary, if a person wants be on the General roll, they can be), and which you have to assume are more likely to return someone who shares their values.

It was good to see him getting fired up about something though. He's normally so damned calm and collected...

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